But now, as city police chief, Gatchell has sat in neighborhood meetings and listened to residents. Motorists speeding past their homes, loud car stereos and litter are concerns he hears all across the city, he said.

And, city police are responding.

Last week, during a special detail in southwest Lancaster, where West King Street meets Columbia Avenue, police issued 18 citations during a two-hour period to motorists driving faster than the posted 25 mph speed limit and violating the city’s noise ordinance.

The detail was only the most recent — and most public — of several moves the county’s largest police force has made in recent months to address nuisance or “quality of life” issues.

Those initiatives include:

· Setting up speed checkpoints near schools where traffic is a constant problem. Message boards alerting motorists to slow down in school zones haven’t always succeeded, and drivers often don’t take their foot off the gas pedal, Gatchell said.

“We’ve issued at least two times as many speeding violations in the past year than in the past five years,” Gatchell said.

· Reinstituting the use of parking “boots” locked to the wheels of cars whose owners have three or more citations for unpaid parking tickets.

The city recently added four additional boots, doubling the number in use.

· Reinstituting commercial vehicle inspections, including the use of portable scales, to ensure the safety of trucks on city streets.

· Purchasing five Tracker time/distance computers with funds from the Lancaster City Police Foundation.

Those computers, similar to VASCAR devices, will allow a single officer in a cruiser to calculate the speed of a vehicle and to issue speeding citations.

The Trackers will be installed in cars next week. Officers could begin writing speeding tickets with them next month.

· Assigning an officer to track thefts from vehicles. Gatchell said only a few theieves may be responsible for many car break-ins.

These crimes are a quality of life issue for residents because the damage done during such a theft — typically $300-$400 to replace a broken window and repair a car’s dashboard — often falls below an owner’s insurance deductible. Yet, that damage gets the thief only a $100 stereo.

Gatchell said there are also several police initiatives in place which will not be as obvious to the public.

One of those is the better organization of outstanding warrants. Increased community policing beginning in 1998 resulted in a greater number of citations for summary offenses, such as loud music and littering, Gatchell said.

But the administrative side of the justice system could not keep up, the police chief said. Warrants stacked up in the police station where they were a low priority.

And, Gatchell said, lawbreakers came to know that minor crimes would not be prosecuted.

“It’s just a vicious cycle now. For the habitual offenders, they know how to play the system,” he said.

Adding to the problem is the mobility of many city residents, who sometimes change addresses every few months.

Yet, Gatchell said, it is worth the effort to track those people and serve warrants even for minor offenses, because they are habitual lawbreakers.

“The person playing that loud stereo — that isn’t an isolated incident. I bet that person plays that loud stereo every day,” the police chief said.

But there are obstacles to effective law enforcement for the city and county, Gatchell said. One of them is the problem of interlinking computer systems across the 34 county police departments, he said.

He does see hope, however, specifically in greater departmental cooperation, mergers that create regional departments, and closer magisterial district justice office cooperation.

And, law enforcement is getting help from outside groups. He pointed to the Lancaster Public Safety Coalition, which operates a growing network of closed-circuit surveillance cameras in Lancaster. The coalition alerts police to crimes and suspicious behavior in public places as seen by its monitors.

“I think it’s a wave of the future,” Gatchell said of the video surveillance.

Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray said the city is trying to implement the “fixing broken windows” philosophy of addressing crime and disorder that was advocated by the former Lancaster Crime Commission.

The philosophy holds that if minor crimes such as noise making, littering and graffiti are not addressed, they invite more noise, litter, graffiti and larger crimes, such as burglary and robbery.

Gray pointed out improvements made in New York City after former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani adopted the “fixing broken windows” approach.

Crime prevention, Gray said, is the other half of law enforcement, and it’s an approach that is already starting to take hold. People are now coming into the city treasurer’s office to pay off old parking tickets, he said.

“The boot has already started to change attitudes,” he said.