"HERO tolerance" is one of those marvellously flexible terms, of the sort normally seen only in policy statements by new coalition governments, or in official documents about Northern Ireland.

It is something to which everyone can subscribe, not only because they need not agree on what it means, but because what it means to me today can be quite different from my understanding of it tomorrow.

Thus, if I am a Dail deputy seeking re election on a strong "anticrime" platform, I can call for zero tolerance policing expecting my constituents will applaud.

They probably believe that zero tolerance wouldn't stop them getting served in a pub at midnight.

They undoubtedly are happy that if a garda should catch them doing 65 m.p.h. in a 60 m.p.h. zone, he/she will not deliver anything more severe than the usual warning to "take it handy".

They certainly know I won't stop petitioning the Minister for Justice on their behalf, clogging the local Garda station with unwelcome paperwork as I work to get their court fines reduced.

No, my constituents understand that zero tolerance is about rigid enforcement of every law, except the ones they themselves break.

Fianna Fail's John O'Donoghue appears to have struck a chord with the public when he called for zero tolerance policing. Other politicians rushed to agree that it was their policy, too. But the Garda - not Just the Garda Commissioner, but members at every rank of the force - appears strongly opposed.

The Commissioner, Mr Pat Byrne, said it was important to define the concept before arguing about it, but went on to say that it could mean rounding up buskers and busfare dodgers.

This was probably appropriate behaviour for the manager of one of the State's main organisations. In making his intervention, the Commissioner risked criticism for involving himself ill politics. But from his viewpoint there was a greater danger: if the debate was allowed to take off on its own, without any steering from the Garda, it could result in the Dail requiring the force to implement an unworkable policy.

In that respect, the Commissioner made the right move, from the Garda's viewpoint. But he may have missed a bigger picture.

WHAT is zero tolerance? Over the last four years the term has come to encompass a wide range of policing initiatives, from the simple and tough no nonsense approach of the New York police, to the more complex "zero tolerance with a human face" adopted in other US cities and in Britain.

In New York, under the then police commissioner, Bill Bratton, the popular view of zero tolerance was that it was aimed principally at making the streets seem safer. This meant clearing the streets of "squeegee pests" (a species now emerging in Dublin, who demand cash from motorists for "cleaning" windscreens at traffic lights), beggars, small time drug dealers, muggers, drunks, homeless people, anyone who presented a danger or even a nuisance to the lawabiding taxpayer.

It did not take the New York Police Department long to fill the city's jails when the policy was introduced in early 1994. When the city hired an extra 7,000 police officers, boosting the force to 38,000, there were certainly more officers available to chase drunks. But other crime, and more serious crime, was also tackled. The overall crime rate has fallen by 37 per cent over the past three years, and the murder rate is down by half.

The NYPD has been criticised for focusing on figures. But a recent survey across the US, based on victim interviews rather than police reports, found the New York experience fitted a pattern. The survey of 100,000 people questioned to see if they had been victims of crime found a 12 per cent reduction in violent offences in 1995, the steepest decline since the Justice Department began the survey 24 years ago.

Experts attributed the decline to factors including the ageing of the babyboom generation (past the prime years for committing crimes), and longer prison sentences. But they also acknowledged better police strategies.

There are three essential strands to zero tolerance, New Yorkstyle:

1. The police can make a difference;

2. Concentrate on small crimes, and the public will feel safer;

3. The level of more serious crime will also fall.

In New York, precinct commanders were required to set themselves targets for crime reduction, and then to explain how they would achieve them. This was a new approach to reacting to crime: they now had to anticipate criminal actions rather than simply react to crimes.

When The Irish Times was invited to view the process in action in one Brooklyn precinct last year, the most lasting impression was the nervousness of those officers called to explain their activities. If persistent drugdealing was reported from one area, the local officers had to explain their plans to combat it. This could range from the dramatic, such as a "sting" operation to catch the drug dealers, to the relatively mundane, such as ensuring that the local authority erects new lighting in a public place.

Any initiative was considered worth trying. The only officers who would be bawled out were those who either didn't have a plan or said they had written memos about their plan without ensuring implementation.

Bratton insisted zero tolerance in New York was about "assertive" rather than "aggressive"policing, and told The Irish Times it was a concept which could be exported anywhere, including Ireland. But he is wrong.

THERE are dangers in assuming that a policy which worked in New York would have the same results elsewhere. As Charles Pollard, chief constable of Thames Valley Police in Britain, points out, not everyone is starting off from the same base.

In an Institute of Economic Affairs book on zerotolerance policing published earlier this month, he notes that when Bratton took over at the NYPD, he was faced with a force "in a state of inefficiency and confusion", which was "riddled with lazy, ineffective and, in some cases, corrupt staff, who for far too long had been unaccountable and demotivated".

A history of small scale bribery by drug dealers under previous regimes had led to orders discouraging the officer on the beat from making drug arrests. This was to be left to specialist units, which sometimes showed up to nab the dealers, and sometimes did not.

Lack of trust meant detectives had also been denied access to computer information which might have helped to solve crimes.

In scrapping these rules, Pollard argues, Bratton was simply making basic management reforms which brought the NYPD into line with practices in other forces.

It is also true that the New York police deal with a limited range of offences. They have agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) to deal with the gravest offences, so police forces tended to deal more with "street level" crime. Irish and British police forces deal with the lot.

Pollard also points to the differences in policing tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. Asked to summarise their job, US police officers say they are in "law enforcement". Pollard's officers describe their role as "keeping the peace", and the same goes, by definition, for An Garda Siochana.

Pollard argues that if confrontational policing takes root, an essential trust between the police and the community breaks down. Policing becomes "dictatorial, repressive and inflexible", and innercity disorder follows.

Gardai broadly agree. But are the police the right people to ask about policing?