WASHINGTON—Lee Brown first made a name for himself when, as Atlanta’s chief of police, he oversaw the 1979 investigation of the killing of 28 black children and young men. He later took his “community policing” concepts to Houston, where he was so successful that a candidate seeking to unseat the mayor who had brought him there pledged that he would “keep Lee Brown.” New York, impressed, enticed him to become that city’s police commissioner.

Lee Brown knows law enforcement.

The question is: Does Lee Brown know—does he have any particular feel for—drug policy?

I’ve just left his first session with reporters since he took on the post as President Clinton’s drug control policy director, and I wonder.

Most of the questions at this session (which he handled with grace, humor and aplomb) had to do with the $231 million the House recently voted—apparently with White House acquiescence—to chop out of his budget. He said he would fight to have the funds restored and also to be included in “the loop” on matters relating to drugs.

But on questions dealing with his plans as so-called drug “czar,” this thoughtful man was disturbingly vague.

He said he will shortly get cracking on an “interim drug control policy” (as mandated by Congress in the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act.) He will develop a “comprehensive and balanced” strategy encompassing enforcement, prevention, education, treatment and interdiction. And he’ll “look at what works—take advantage of the experience we already have.”

And, frankly, there wasn’t much more.

I know it’s too soon to expect Brown to have a complete strategy for assaulting the massive interrelated problems of drug abuse, drug trafficking and drug-spawned violence. He’s been on the job only a couple of weeks.

But everything about Brown suggests that he wouldn’t have taken the job unless he had a new thing or two to bring to the fight—some drug war equivalent of community policing.

What does he know, or think he knows, that could make a difference?

“I think we can make a difference,” he said, “but not by what we do at the federal level alone. We have to deal with other issues. For example, prior to coming here, I was at Texas Southern University, where I directed a black male initiative … That’s part of what we have to deal with—the problem of African American males, the collapse of the family, the educational system, the economy. …”

All the right words, but no tune. Even questions as to whether the overcrowded prison system (overcrowded mostly as a result of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders) is evidence of misguided policy elicited little thoughtfulness from this man who’s been called the “philosopher cop.”

The closest he came to philosophy was in his assertion that drug “legalization is the moral equivalent of genocide” and his contention that we ought to treat drugs as “much a public health problem as a criminal justice problem.”

Maybe he’s just too busy thinking about other things—for instance the slashing of his staff from 146 to a mere 25, a consequence of the Clinton pledge to reduce the White House staff by 25 percent. The fact that so many of the cuts have fallen on this tiny agency (despite Clinton’s elevation of the director’s job to Cabinet status) makes you wonder how important the drug fight is in the Clinton scheme of things. So does the fact that his top budget man, OMB chief Leon Panetta, seems not to have resisted the House-passed chopping of Brown’s budget, taking away money that the “czar” had hoped to use to make treatment available for an addict requesting it.

Maybe Brown’s stymied over whether to appoint the two deputies he’s authorized—and having them and their secretaries and aides count against the 25-meter ceiling on his staff—or to make it a priority to raise the ceiling.

All I know is that on this day (July 7), Brown, for all his personal charm, didn’t seem particularly engaged with drug policy. I found myself wondering whether his heart is really in it—whether he really thinks he can make a difference, from his present perch, in the catastrophe that has engulfed America’s inner cities.

Brown is a cop, and Clinton ought to find him a job more in keeping with his skills. Hint: As soon as they can get William Sessions to step down, there’s going to be a vacancy at the FBI. Can you think of a better candidate to fill it?