Changing Lifestyles : Eastern German Police Face Arresting Obstacles : The ex-Communists find it hard to serve a public they once bullied. They operate with little experience in Western crime or law.

On the night that neo-Nazi gangs firebombed a refugee hostel here, the chief of police suddenly disappeared mid-riot, later explaining somewhat guilelessly that his shirt was dirty and he had gone home to change it.

In Cottbus, along the Polish border, a policeman summoned to a disco where patrons were brawling one Saturday night adamantly refused to venture inside; he had no protective gear and was afraid he might get hurt. Calling for backup wasn’t feasible, either, since the radio in his patrol car only functioned within a 100-yard radius.

And in yet another eastern city, officers are routinely urged by their supervisor to watch crime shows like “Rescue 911” on television. Not for pleasure, of course. For practice.

“It gives us an idea of what to expect and how far police can go in different situations,” one detective explained.

Those situations have changed drastically in the three years since German unification. Now 16 million citizens in what used to be the Communist east are facing a not-so-brave new world replete with crimes that were rarely committed and certainly never acknowledged in the Stalinist state--holdups, burglaries, muggings, car theft, drug smuggling and racist assaults.

Bank robberies alone have soared to the point where every seventh bank or savings institution in the east was robbed in 1991 (the most recent statistics available) compared with one in 54 in the far bigger western states.

“There never used to be any bank robbers in East Germany,” recalled Heinz Eggert, interior minister for the state of Saxony. “You would have had to wait 18 years for a getaway car. Besides, what were you going to do with East German marks, and where were you going to go? All the borders were closed.”

But the rules have changed, and the police force now expected to serve a public they once bullied is clearly stymied by a lack of manpower, experience, training, equipment and respect.

“It’s been tough,” said Volker Groschupf, spokesman for the police union in Dresden. “There’s a mood of frustration.”

Learning that they no longer have absolute authority is difficult for officers, he said, and actually being attacked, insulted or threatened by citizens is a stunning concept.

In fact, the police are now openly ridiculed and held in contempt by a populace that suspects many officers were in cahoots with the former Stalinist secret police, the Stasi. Government investigations to purge the force of those with any Stasi links are still under way and have added to the general sense of unease, although western police chiefs have been installed in most major cities.

“When I knocked at a door before, I could arrest anyone inside,” Groschupf recalled. “Now I have to tell them they have the right to remain silent and so forth.

“Gathering evidence is more difficult; we lack technology and we don’t even have enough protective gear, like helmets and shields and shin guards. . . .

“We are in the sorry state where four cops have to share a single helmet. And our fleet isn’t fully westernized yet, either, so if there’s a bank robbery, you still have situations where a measly Trabant ends up trying to catch a big western car like a Mercedes,” he said.

“We have old radios, and the right-wing extremists are better equipped in a riot. They have CBs and also monitor police bands. It can take years before the switchboard can reach an officer by phone, assuming he has one.

“Even our uniforms, made here in Saxony, are inferior,” Groschupf concluded. “The shirts unravel and the collars strangle you.”

Although the west already has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new equipment, technology and training for the east, progress has been piecemeal. Serious crime is still more widespread in the west, and a nationwide shortage of about 50,000 police means fewer experienced officers can be spared to help train and reinforce eastern operations.

Each eastern state has a western partner state, and larger towns have set up exchanges so easterners can work side-by-side with the more experienced westerners.

Besides training officers, the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, which is assigned to help train Brandenburg, sends used equipment, furniture and even clothes to the east to aid the transition.

“There’s no structure,” said Dietmar Zeleny, spokesman for the North-Rhine Westphalia crimes office. “You have to begin at ground zero, and they’ve managed admirably so far.

“The problems at first were with the amount of work and coping with a totally different legal system,” he said. “You have to learn to go to a judge first, that you can’t just barge into someone’s apartment and search whenever you want.”

In addition to such practical training, Zeleny said, eastern officers are offered stress management training and urged to participate in rap sessions to talk about things like how to react when insulted.

The western city of Detmold dispatched 165 officers to Cottbus, an eastern town on the Polish border, for up to six weeks each during the first half of last year. And 150 officers from Cottbus were sent to Detmold.

“Technologically, they’re in really bad shape,” said one of the returning Detmolders, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Their radio system is so poor that patrol cars drive out of the station parking lot and disappear into the Bermuda Triangle. You can’t reach them anymore.”

Many of the easterners never had any practical experience or real training in a former police state where non-jobs were common. Every factory had its own “police” force, for example.

“I was assigned to a team of five officers on traffic detail,” the Detmold officer said. “Of those, one had been a political officer, another had been a fireman and three had been transportation police, which meant they had simply driven official vehicles. We went to an accident scene and no one knew what to do.”

The uncertainty has bred fear.

A survey being conducted for the Federal Crimes Office has found that half of the easterners “no longer feel safe overall” and that trust in police is eroding. By western standards, the fear is disproportionate to the actual crime rate, but to easterners, crime itself is a terrifying novelty.

“Police were a repressive element in East German society,” said Eggert, the Saxon interior minister. “There’s insecurity among the public now, and what you don’t know causes fear.”

But the citizens aren’t the only ones afraid. The police are too.

“It was unimaginable before that a suspect might be armed,” said a homicide detective in Goerlitz. “We’d go around all the time forgetting our guns in coffee shops or leaving them out on our desks or just sticking them in an unlocked file cabinet, and we never gave it a second thought.

“Earlier, you never would have to face a thousand people with Molotov cocktails or stones,” he added. The detective was among officers sent to Hoyerswerda over a year ago when the first major anti-foreigner attacks began in the east.

“There were young cops there who were genuinely shocked,” he recalled. “They had never dreamed of such an escalation, and certainly not against the police. It was a blow to the psyche.”

The biggest challenge to the eastern police so far is learning an entirely new legal system virtually overnight and enforcing unfamiliar laws. Many eastern police still express dismay over the number of cases that prosecutors toss back for insufficient evidence, and a suspect’s right to remain free pending trial often rankles.

“They go right back on the street and do it again,” complained a detective in Goerlitz. “It was easier before because the suspect had fewer rights. Confession was king.”

Added a colleague, “Now you have to say that this person threw this stone at 1:32 p.m. at such and such an angle and it went over my left shoulder and landed here. . . .”

Nobody on either side is willing to estimate how long the modernization and westernization of the eastern police might take, but five years is often mentioned as a starting point.

The east can’t accomplish overnight what it took 40 years to build in the west, Zeleny noted.