NONFICTION - Sept. 27, 1992

CRIME SCENE: On the Streets With a Rookie Police Reporter by Mitch Gelman (Times Books: $21; 277 pp.). Bang! Beep! Hello. Goodbye. Such were the sounds that governed Mitch Gelman’s life in the 3 1/2 years he covered the police beat for New York Newsday: After a police dispatcher reported a homicide, Gelman’s editor would page him to confer about whether it was grisly enough to merit covering in a city where someone is murdered every five hours.

“Crime Scene” so often succeeds in emulating the urban reportage of Pete Hamill (as in Gelman’s apocalyptic portraits of the six-square mile Brooklyn neighborhood that detectives call the Wild, Wild East), Edna Buchanan’s precise description (“A blue flash sparked from the gun with each shot. Two of the 71-grain, 7.65 millimeter-diameter bullets ripped through Hawkins’s white Windbreaker at a speed of 950 feet per second”) and the engaging mystery of David Simon (as when Gelman pieces together a life from a stack of sopping-wet personal papers left over from the scene of a self-immolation) that we seldom get to thinking about the ghoulishness of Gelman’s profession.

Still, there remain awkward moments when we cannot help but feel like unwelcome voyeurs. Gelman visits the mother of a 13-year-old boy, for instance, shortly after he has been shot to death in cross-fire, and reports that “She could only wail. The anguished belts of her wounded heart sounded from behind the bedroom wall. She thrashed her arms and kicked her legs in the bed. And screamed . . . “ Similarly, when Gelman expresses satisfaction at his cover- age of a particularly gruesome crime (“I had every lick and splatter”), he even begins to sound uncomfortably like Bret Easton Ellis.

Gelman doesn’t tell us how he feels about this work. Common in these pages are sentences like “I never had much time to dwell on what happened yesterday, because tomorrow came too fast” and “The initial contact with grieving relatives was like jumping into a cold pool of water; it was best to just do it and not think about it too much.” But Gelman’s lack of reflection is not only quite deliberate, it is the secret of this book’s success. The stated aim of true-crime reportage--the one to which Gelman says he subscribes--is to shock us into caring about the sorry state of our cities. More commonly, though, true-crime journalism is read as an unending morality play, one inherently satisfying for the way it shows Good undone by Evil and then restored again, thanks to the cops.

Intuitively Gelman seems to realize this, for his stories are uncluttered by real-life details (e.g., frightened criminals, pathological communities) that might detract from the essential drama of the morality play. It’s little surprise, then, that Gelman seems genuinely puzzled when the staff on a radio talk show asks him for ideas about how to stop the carnage (“They wanted solutions!”) or when a cop criticizes him for only “hyping the death toll” rather than exploring its underlying causes.