More than 17,000 guns are stored at the police department's Southeast property warehouse. (By Brian Smale – The Washington Post)

The hall, filled with more than 1,200 District police officers, echoes with applause as Ramsey finishes showing a preview of the MPD's slick new 10-minute recruiting video, a $44,000 weapon in the battle to change the department.

This September gathering – the first mass meeting in the recent history of the department – was called by Ramsey to announce his reorganization. It also gave him his first chance to talk directly to the assembled rank and file of an organization that not only needs better management, but craves real leadership.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it is our responsibility to create neighborhoods where it is safe to raise a family," Ramsey begins, holding a microphone and venturing out into the front rows of his audience. He is a stocky man with a forceful voice and an imposing presence. He does not usually smile in public, and his face often resembles a sad-eyed bulldog.

"What we are going to do is rebuild the Metropolitan Police Department, and we are not gonna go and hire consultants" to do it, he says, a reference to the more than $6 million the control board has spent studying the MPD.

As he outlines his plan and personal philosophy, applause from the large crowd interrupts him – again and again and again, 20 times in all. The meeting swiftly turns into an unusual 90-minute pep rally for a crowd that has grown cynical after years of promises of change.

"It is not the bottom of the organization that is dysfunctional," Ramsey tells the sea of blue uniforms. "It is the top." The hall erupts with hoots and hollers and laughter.

"Well, I hear the laughter, but let me tell you something," Ramsey adds ominously. "If you look to the left and the right of you, you can probably laugh and say that that person might be dysfunctional, too. That person might be worth no more than two dead flies ... I have commanders who don't do their jobs, and they will be out of here," he says, again to loud applause. "But let me tell you," he adds quickly, "that applies to you, too."

"The vast majority of the people in this organization are good." But, he tells them, he has a plan to make them better.

His reorganization is aimed at beefing up the staffing and investigative power in each of the city's 83 patrol service areas (PSAs), which are the heart of the latest community policing plan created last year. Ramsey tells the crowd he knows the system has not been working well because of inadequate manpower and unclear lines of responsibility. He says his plan will put a lieutenant in command of each PSA and have all sergeants share some management responsibility. Detectives, detached from units such as homicide, will be spread out to work more directly with PSAs.

Ramsey promises to muster the manpower and supplies needed to improve the force, but says he needs everyone's maximum effort. "All I am gonna do is ask you to do your job. But I am gonna ask you to do it better than anybody else in the country. Because that is what it takes to do it. I don't have a long fuse and I don't have a whole lotta patience ... I am from the John Wayne school of management: If I go down, it will be with a bayonet in my mouth and a smoking gun in each hand."

The MPD's public image badly needs improving, Ramsey tells the cops, itemizing the ways he is trying to do it: asking the D.C. Council to prohibit police officers from working second jobs in bars or strip clubs, a move that would affect about 300 officers; starting periodic outdoor roll calls, particularly in high-crime areas, to make cops more visible; creating a new half-hour cable television show called "CrimeWatch," which will highlight D.C. police actions with dramatic footage and music. New striping on police cruisers, a new MPD Web site, and a revamped discipline system that would be fair to cops but also inspire confidence in the public by requiring fast action on alleged misconduct – all actions aimed at restoring pride and professionalism to the force.

"I have been in the profession a very long time and I love being a policeman, I truly do," he tells his audience. "And when the day comes that that fire is no longer burning inside me, that's the day I'm gonna step aside and find something else to do."

He circles back to this point later: "There are some of you out there that just don't have that fire inside you. If you look at this as something that is just a job, not a career, not a profession, not a calling, if you don't even have a spark inside of you, you probably do need to retire. Because I don't need you. I'll take 100 good people and go out and police this city! I need you to be committed. I need to really believe in your best."

The hall erupts in applause and cheers.

Race issues – Ramsey style: Days after the July killing of 24-year-old Officer Thomas Hamlette Jr. – the third accidental shooting since 1995 of a black off-duty MPD officer by a white colleague – black cops put up fliers at police headquarters and the seven district stations urging African American officers to attend a mass protest rally.

The night before the rally, Ramsey, who saw the issue as explosive, asked the protest organizers to cancel it out of respect for the Hamlette family. In return, he offered them an immediate meeting at his office. "We felt that a black male with a gun is immediately considered a suspect" and is more likely than a white plainclothes officer to be mistakenly shot, recalls Lawrence Holland, a nine-year veteran and an organizer of the group calling itself Concerned Black Officers.

The chief met for an hour with Holland, another officer and police union chief Detective Frank Tracy. Ramsey took extensive notes and agreed with their basic contention – and proposed solution: Let off-duty officers take police radios home with them, as they do in some jurisdictions, so they could alert other police to their presence in emergencies. This would save lives and better fight crime.

Extra radios had been proposed to the brass before – and shot down for financial reasons. Ramsey's quick and positive response, says Holland, was "fantastic." And it wasn't just talk. Last month, the department began distributing 865 new radios, at a cost of $2 million. "It makes us feel good," says Holland, "that we were hopefully part of a change that will help officers from ever receiving another bullet."