The city's new head of police is replacing 'tough cop' tactics with community policing, reports Ian Kilroy in Boston

We're all familiar with the figure of the Irish-American cop. We've seen him in a hundred movies. He's a tough guy, called O'Malley or O'Shaughnessy, an honest man, but quick to anger and ready to use his fists.

But this macho world of US policing is a stereotype. If anything proves that it's the appointment of Kathleen O'Toole as the first female Police Commissioner of Boston. An Irish-American, as if you needed to ask.

"I actually have more relations in Ireland than I have here," she says, on a break from her hectic schedule. "Most of them are in the Athlone area, Roscommon and Westmeath. I guess you could say I'm seven-eighths Irish."

In the job only since February, O'Toole has already made her mark as an innovator. She has promoted a number of women in the Boston Police Department (BPD) and set up a Family Justice Division, which incorporates domestic and sexual assault investigations under one roof. She has promoted minorities within the BPD and instigated a new approach to curb the recent spike in gang violence in Boston. It's all part of her community policing approach - a way of policing that has proved highly effective in Boston, and that has earned the city a reputation in policing throughout the world.

"Policing was very different when I started my training in the late 1970s," she says. "We were trained in a very military way, to go and fight the war on crime. It was the police versus the community. We worked hard, chased all the 911 calls and did all that. But we failed miserably," she says candidly.

"Finally we realised that we had to break down the barriers and work with the community," she says. "When I started as a police officer we used to just respond to calls for service. Now we try to get ahead of the curve and prevent tragedies from happening in the first place."

Because of her expertise in community policing, O'Toole was invited to participate in the Patten Commission, to design a new community policing service to replace the RUC in Northern Ireland. This was well before she was Police Commissioner, but her reputation as an expert in the area was already well-known. She made many friends in her time in Northern Ireland and is very proud of the 175 recommendations of the commission's report.

"Only some of those recommendations were unique to Northern Ireland," she says. "The report is really a roadmap for policing in a democratic society."

The report gave her a chance to put forward some of the lessons she'd learned as a police officer over 20 years, "to promote new and progressive ideas", she says. Many of those lessons were learned on the streets of Boston, where she began her career as an officer in the field, the part of the job she says she enjoyed most.

"I remember I spent a year as a decoy on the subways, waiting to be robbed. It was my job to stand in deserted subways and act vulnerable: so that people would rob me and we'd arrest them, before they robbed someone else."

The problem was she was acting too tough for the first few weeks, and couldn't get robbed. On the advice of another officer, she softened up her demeanour, looked more vulnerable. Only then did the bag-snatchers appear. But there was the uglier side to the job as well.

"The most difficult thing was to see children abused," she says. "That was the most heart-wrenching part of the job in the field." Seeing violence and abuse up close has made her determined to tackle those problems as Police Commissioner. Hence the new Family Justice Division.

"We used to get little or no training as police officers in domestic violence or abuse. We'd go to a domestic violence call, split up the parties and send the husband out for a walk, tell him to cool down. Then we left. Night after night we'd have to go back to the same location. Often the end result was tragic," she says.

"Now we train our police officers; we give them the tools they need to problem-solve. We get intervention, we get social services involved, we try to bring the necessary resources to the victims, so that the problems are solved and we're not called back night after night."

All the necessary services are now in one place, and at one location. A kind of "one-stop shopping" for victims, as she puts it.

Such changes are big considering she's only been in the job three months. Added to that is the fact that she's coming to the commissioner's job at a time of unprecedented pressure for the Boston police. The terror alert is high and the Democratic National Convention is coming to Boston this summer - the first nominating convention since September 11th.

"We're concerned that it could be a potential target," she says. "But we've worked for 17 months now with the United States secret service and the FBI and State Police to put together a very comprehensive plan for it. I'm optimistic that we're prepared," she says.

With that to think about - and the recent sharp rise in homicides in Boston ( still low for a city of its size at 40 last year) - O'Toole has a lot in her portfolio.

"But my number one priority remains the quality of life in our neighbourhoods," she says. "Now I want to particularly focus on youth violence." In that area she's applying the same holistic approach she's employed with the Family Justice Division.

"I brought together our drug unit and our youth violence strike force, which is our gang unit, with our school police. They were three separate units, but it made no sense having them operate like that," she says.

It's clear O'Toole has made some sweeping changes in the BDP in quite a short space of time. Does it help that she's a woman, and although born in Massachusetts, does her Irish background help? "This is the type of work that someone has to establish credibility in whether a man or a woman," she says. "I didn't meet with the resistance I expected, however."

As for her Irishness, she adds: "It doesn't hurt to be an Irish police commissioner in a town like Boston".