By Bill Forry
Managing Editor

In a few weeks, the greatest single test of Kathleen O'Toole's 25-year law enforcement career will unfold beneath the klieg lights of international scrutiny at the Democratic National Convention. Just four months after taking command as Boston's police commissioner, O'Toole is in charge of securing not only the Fleet Center and environs- but the roughly 1000 convention-related events across the city.

And, yet, to hear O'Toole tell it, the "four days" of DNC mania still takes a backseat to the day-to-day bustle of policing the city's neighborhoods.

"A lot of people keep saying that the DNC must be your number one priority," O'Toole told the Reporter during an interview last month. "And I say, 'No way. The DNC will come and go.' My hope is that it will be a great chance to showcase the city and all of its neighborhoods... But my number one priority is the kids of the city and their future."

For many of those kids, that future has become increasingly cloudy. Since the year began, more than 30 people have been slain on Boston streets, an uptick in homicides that has the attention of this beat-cop turned brass. Several young teenagers are among the dead and maimed. Two men have been shot dead by police. The all-time crime lows of the late 1990s- in which whole calendar years passed without a teenage murder victim- are over, at least for now.

Dorchester's Tina Chery, who lost her own 15 year-old son Louis in a 1993 homicide and today counsels other survivors of violence in the city, says that O'Toole's pledge to focus on youth violence has given her reason to "hope". O'Toole sent the message loud and clear at her swearing-in ceremony back in February, a relatively modest affair staged at the newly-opened Boston Pilot Middle School on Columbia Road.

"It's not a one-size fits all kind of job," says Chery, who worked closely with and admired O'Toole's predecessor, Paul Evans. "Both are listening to the community. Again, as a woman, we will go above and beyond and think out of the box. Those of us who are survivors, we're looking forward to sitting down with her."

And it's almost a certainty that Chery will get that chance. O'Toole's schedule brings her to at least one evening meeting- somewhere in the city's 23 neighborhoods- every day of the week. It's a pace that O'Toole says she'll keep up, even after the shine on her new gold badge loses a bit of its gleam.

"I think some people assume, 'She's done that and now she'll retreat to her office at headquarters and be a manager for the next several years.' That's just not my style. My style is to be out there.

"The best ideas come from those who are out there on the front lines," she says.

The opportunity to come back to her "roots" at the Boston Police Department, O'Toole says, is her "dream job." O'Toole came on the force in 1979, after waging a court battle to earn a place at the Academy. She worked as a beat cop, an MBTA decoy- "my job was to get mugged"- and an advisor to mentor Bill Bratton, now of the LAPD, before later moving up to head the state's Department of Public Safety under Gov. Bill Weld.

There have been major changes at the department since she left the BPD in the mid-80s, including what O'Toole says is a "paradigm shift" in the way officers and their commanders view their role in the community.

"When I first came on the job... we were trained in a very military-type academy...We were really trained as soldiers to go fight the war on crime. It was the police versus the community. And we rarely partnered with other law enforcement or social service agencies. And we never reached out to the community for their input."

Some things do not change, however. The BPD that O'Toole inherited this year is as cash-strapped as any since Proposition two-and-a-half crippled the department and crushed morale 20 years ago. At full deployment, the force is still short as many as 300 officers, largely due to the popularity of early retirement packages offered last year as an alternative to mass lay-offs. And, in Washington, talk of cutting much-needed policing grants that have funded juvenile crime initiatives- some to the tune of 40 percent reductions- have O'Toole very concerned. She says that the money is being inappropriately channeled to homeland security, without compensating for the hit at the local level.

"It's not that there's more money available. The pie is being allocated differently. And we can't abandon our commitment to community policing in favor of homeland security. Because I really believe if we continue to put great emphasis on good community policing, that leads to good homeland security. They shouldn't be perceived as mutually exclusive."

All of this is happening, of course, in the context of a bitter feud between O'Toole's boss, Tom Menino, and the police patrolmen's union, a still unresolved money beef that threatens to boil over in an ugly way over the convention week. O'Toole, a former union member herself, enjoys good relations with both sides, says Sam Tyler, president of the watchdog Boston Municipal Research Bureau. Still, he notes, she has not been able to broker the hoped-for settlement. In reality, it's not her job.

"I'd say we're past the honeymoon, now," says Tyler, who says O'Toole's gesture to meet face-to-face at the bargaining table earlier this year sent the right message.

"I'm not sure there's much more that a commissioner can do," says Tyler. "But the fact that she was willing to step in and be a participant is a strong indication of her hands-on approach to the job."

O'Toole's greatest long-term challenge, Tyler believes, is a clearly a management one: juggling the demands of a post-9/11, urban police force in a time of few resources.

"I think the (greatest) challenge is having to do that with fairly strong unions that can at times be resistant to the change," says Tyler. "Paul Evans, in the end, got frustrated with that. I think Kathy O'Toole has learned from that and will try to approach it differently to make a difference and try to keep a good working relationship with the unions."