Crime Scene: On the Streets with a Rookie Police Reporter.

As lawyers trudge their way through law school and clerkships and as doctors are hardened in their residencies, newspaper reporters cut their teeth covering the police beat. These reporters, often the paper's youngest and most naive, will stay out latest, and work cheapest. The beat demands little historical or theoretical knowledge. Particularly in the days when many reporters hadn't gone to college, the police beat offered papers a controlled and demanding area to teach the newest hires.

Mitch Gelman joined Newsday in 1986 as a researcher and politicked his way onto the metro staff a year later. He files this book having spent three and a half years learning journalism by jamming out 1,100 stories on the endless crime that plagues and defines much of New York. Although it's well written, this is a limited and frustrating book--but its shortcomings reveal much about the news business.

Having myself just finished three years of covering similar cop beats at several newspapers, I found the book a believable introduction to the police reporter's world. From the constant battles with police officials to the rivalry between and within staffs for space and attention, Gelman's book is valuably honest. Gelman shows how news judgments are often shaped by insecurities. He describes how, trying to convince the mother of a 10-year-old rape victim to allow him to interview the child, he stopped worrying about doing what is right, and wanted only to get a story the other papers didn't have. "The dirty little secret about ethics in journalism is that at times like this, there are none," he writes.

Gelman concentrates on the tension between reporters seeking drama and police departments seeking order. Machismo and favors count. Police bureaucracies are instinctively protective about everything they know, but reporters are expected to develop sources. Gelman uses some of his best --a doctor at Kings County Hospital, a fed-up transit policeman, the wife of a wounded officer--to show that the crime reporter must know the right people in order to bridge the gap between the department line and the truth.

Unfortunately, Gelman quits as soon as he's explained the task of the reporter, leaving the book essentially a diary. The New York police beat ought to provide some of the best sociological material in the country, but he offers little about collisions of race, politics, and economics.

Like Gelman, many of today's newspaper and television reporters have covered cops, but it is only recently that the police beat has acquired cachet. Traditional press histories like Richard Kluger's The Paper and David Halberstam's The Powers That Be mention police reporting only in passing.

Things changed six years ago when The Miami Herald's Edna Buchanan won a Pulitzer Prize for her wonderfully reported but overwritten police coverage. The memoir that followed, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, became an inspiration for countless reporters who felt themselves stagnating on the same beats. Consider, for instance, Buchanan's lead to a story of a man who was shot during an argument he started at a fast-food restaurant: "Gary Robinson died hungry.

Gelman hasn't decided what tradition he believes in--the formalism of Halberstam or Buchanan's flashbulb postmodernism. Gelman sounds almost old-school as he writes of the guilt he feels as he breaks the bounds of privacy in pursuing a story. Just pages later, however, be lustily returns to taste-be-damned:

Two shots echoed in the hallway.

One blasted off half of Gunn's

head, the other hit him in the

stomach. Gunn and his Inspector

Clouseau hat tumbled down the

staircase. Richardson [the

alleged gunman] escaped in his

pajamas, climbing through a

hatch in the roof.

In Gelman's world, there is no ethical dilemma in this gory overdramatization, in insisting on interviews with families of gunshot and rape victims, or in bringing a cake to bribe his way into a wounded officer's family home. In these situations the reporter's mantra may once have been "I'm just doing my job." In Gelman's world it is "I deserve this information, let me in!"