The cushy seat became uncomfortable, though. When he saw Coatesville's "police chief wanted" ad, he was intrigued. He realized he wanted to get back in the game, and prove his ideas could make a difference.

The town's economic troubles didn't scare him. The Baltimore Housing Authority had five times the population of Coatesville, and nearly everyone was poor.

Friends warned him to stay away. Small-town policing is often too insular, they said, too cut off from modern ideas in policing.

The man trying to recruit him, Harry G. Walker 3d, Coatesville's Harvard-educated, African American city manager, warned Matthews that the job would be "very difficult," and not everybody would welcome him.

Plus, taking the Coatesville job would have meant a big pay cut.

The way Matthews saw it, how could he refuse? He and his wife sold their home near Washington and rented a place in Coatesville.

Hitting the streets

All over the city, people said the same things: They wanted police protection. At the same time, residents of tough neighborhoods stressed: "You can't look at all of us as being bad guys."

"You don't want your friends and family stopped when they come down the block looking for a parking place just because they happened to cruise around the corner," he said.

To be sure, Matthews has not disavowed all confrontational tactics. "We got to take care of business and not apologize for it, because there are some people you have to separate from the community," he said.

Curfew enforcement is an example. Coatesville once stopped more teenagers out after curfew than nearly any town its size in America.

In one typical case from last year, 16-year-olds Darius Vaughn and Douglas Gray were on their way to a girl's house an hour after curfew, when an officer ordered them to put their hands on his car. He searched them and let them go. Later, both got citations in the mail, with fines of $100 each.

"It's not right. These are not bad kids," said Darius Vaughn's mother, Yolanda, complaining that African American teenagers were stopped far more frequently than whites.

Matthews says police should continue to enforce the curfew, and do it smarter: He wants to see community centers that offer kids an alternative to the streets.

But he says he doesn't want his officers detaining people under thin pretexts, such as stopping motorists for a broken taillight in order to search the car for drugs. That approach, he says, causes more problems than it solves.

"There are consequences for everything we do," he said. "And if you use that philosophy, you're going to get diminishing returns, a backlash, and the problems won't be solved. In fact, they will be exacerbated."

Another thing he absorbed during those conversations, he said, was the weight of Coatesville's past.

"If only we can leave behind our history," he said, "we can make it."

Troubled history