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NEW ORLEANS - The question worries even staunch law enforcement supporters: How can exhausted police in a city notorious for corruption and violent crime reassure citizens that it is safe to return and rebuild after Hurricane Katrina?

"Any city's foundation has to be built on public safety," said Rafael Goyeneche, executive director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of Greater New Orleans. "This morning, one of my first phone calls was from Houston - someone wanting to know if it was safe to come back to town with their kids. ... Every mother and every father out there is wondering the same thing."

Their concern has grown as images of unruly police have been broadcast worldwide in the weeks since the hurricane, when some officers were accused of deserting the city and others of looting it.

Police officers were filmed pulling guns on TV crews investigating complaints of stockpiled stolen goods in a hotel. The hotel's employees said they felt besieged by rogue cops. The state attorney general's office has opened an investigation of police officers' unauthorized use of hundreds of Cadillacs from a Dallas-based car dealership after the storm.

Superintendent Eddie Compass, a career New Orleans officer and one of the most visible city officials immediately after the hurricane, quit last month after The Times-Picayune of New Orleans questioned his accounts of post-storm mayhem.

The former superintendent said last week that he was mistreated by the media, but he declined to respond to reports from police officials and friends that he broke down under the strain of post-hurricane chaos and resigned to avoid being forced out.

"I'm taking it to my grave," he told The Dallas Morning News when asked about his reasons for leaving. "I was trying to be helpful, and they tried to make it look like I was embellishing."

In the most recent incident, on Oct. 8, three cops beat a retired six-grade teacher in the French Quarter while a fourth manhandled a television producer covering the melee.

"You can't put lipstick on this," John Casbon, chairman of the New Orleans Police Foundation, said last week after the three officers were arrested and suspended from the force. "We can't say everything's going to be fine. We don't know."

Police commanders say such incidents are being dealt with properly and shouldn't overshadow officers' heroism in the face of losing almost all radio communications, a quarter of the department's 1,200 patrol cars, three of eight district offices, police headquarters and every jail cell in the city to post-storm flooding.

Police officials estimate that 80 percent of the department's officers also lost their homes in the floods. Officers spent days unable to contact relatives and without food, clean clothing, showers or places to sleep (at least a thousand are now housed temporarily on a cruise ship moored on the downtown riverfront). Some staved off armed thugs who might have otherwise swarmed the French Quarter, and others used their own boats to rescue thousands of residents stranded by rising water.

"If you haven't put your boots on the ground in this city, you can't appreciate what we've been through," said acting police superintendent Warren Riley.

He adds that those suspected of wrongdoing represent a fraction of the 1,700-officer force and will be harshly disciplined if found to have violated the law or departmental regulations.

A tribunal of department commanders and representatives from police agencies outside New Orleans soon will begin hearing cases involving officers suspected of deserting their posts.

The acting superintendent predicted that many would be cleared because they were stranded or couldn't communicate with commanders after the city's emergency radio networks failed. At least 80 officers were rescued from rooftops, he said.

"For every one of those negative issues, there are a hundred good stories," he said.

But there is little doubt that, despite those good stories, Katrina exposed festering problems in the criminal justice system. The city's police department has a troubling history, and, despite recent reforms, many critics and even some supporters say the department has an entrenched resistance to change.

"The culture, it's deep. And the police are not isolated from the world they inhabit. They inhabit a world in New Orleans that has a hard-earned legacy of violence, brutality and corruption," said Mary Howell, a civil rights lawyer who has won repeated lawsuits against the department. "For all the fabulous parts of the culture - the music, the food, the people - there's also this dark side."

The city had 192 homicides by mid-August - a rate nine times higher than New York City's and an increase of almost 20 percent above what had been the country's highest murder rate in 2004. That led many in the city to fear a return to the middle 1990s, when New Orleans's murder rate led the country and police problems made national headlines.

A rise in complaints of excessive force in the months before the storm hit New Orleans on Aug. 29 also worried watchdog groups and local advocates.

Mr. Goyeneche, whose organization serves as a watchdog against corruption across the region, said the department's public integrity division had recently had "a much lower rate" of sustaining what appeared to be legitimate complaints about misconduct. "In many instances, they were being declined for investigation," he said.

In March, police and the city's Mardi Gras Indians - African-Americans who traditionally parade in elaborate costume on Mardi Gras and again on St. Joseph's Day each March - confronted one another in a well-publicized incident.

After police halted the festivities on St. Joseph's Night, parade-goers complained of excessive force and harassment. At a City Council hearing in late June, the 82-year-old "chief of chiefs," revered Mardi Gras Indian leader Tootie Montana, dropped dead of a heart attack while imploring the council to do something.

"All the other chiefs formed a semicircle around him, and he started talking about the police history of abuse of the Indians. He had just finished saying this has got to stop, and he died on the spot, while the most powerful people in the city looked on," said Ms. Howell, the civil rights lawyer. "It was one of the more dramatic, astonishing things I've ever seen."

Peter Scharf, a University of New Orleans criminologist who has consulted with the department, said the resurgence in public-integrity complaints before the storm was "very disturbing."

"There was a drip-drip every day," he said. "The public's perception of the department before the hurricane was that they were pretty much out of control."

There were also growing indications of systemic problems across the criminal justice system, he and others say.

At the start of 2004, a survey of police found that officers were fleeing the department in alarming numbers because of low morale, poor pay, a problematic promotion system and frustration over a residency requirement that made officers stay in the city to keep jobs even as housing costs soared and the public school system foundered.

A crime commission study released in August showed that the same people were getting arrested over and over and serious criminals rarely went to prison. The study found that only 16 percent of repeat offenders arrested in 2003 and 2004 actually were convicted in criminal courts.

Only 12 percent of people arrested in slayings in that period were convicted on homicide charges, the study found in a sampling of more than 1,700 cases. More than half of all murder arrests were declined for prosecution by the district attorney's office.

Prosecutors said they were hamstrung because witnesses often were too scared to testify, and juries frequently doubted police.

Mr. Casbon, chairman of the New Orleans Police Foundation, said police and the district attorney's office had begun taking steps to address those problems. Foundation-funded consultants began to try to improve communications, coordinate intelligence and monitor handling of cases as they moved through the system.

But the government's post-Katrina financial crisis has brought a halt to those efforts, said a spokeswoman for Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan. The city funds a third of the district attorney's budget, and the mayor told parish officials earlier this month that the city is broke and can't provide any money for the district attorney's office or the parish jail through the end of last year.

The city already has laid off 3,000 workers, about half its work force, and can't possibly come up with any money to help other beleaguered government agencies, Mayor Ray Nagin says.

Mr. Jordan's spokeswoman said the prosecutor had to lay off 37 support staffers and would close down by month's end if the city failed to meet its obligations.

The mayor's press office did not return calls for comment.

Meanwhile, officials with other urban police departments say they've seen a surge in applications from New Orleans officers, who are working 12-hour shifts.

"No police department has been called upon to respond to anything like this before," Mr. Goyeneche said. "They're emotionally and physically drained."

Although officers now have 100 new patrol cars and trailers to replace three flood-ravaged district offices, police headquarters remains unusable and department leaders are operating from a French Quarter hotel.

Mr. Scharf, the criminologist, said it will be tough to get the department all the help it needs. He said he worked with Louisiana's congressional delegation on a recently rejected statewide relief bill and was grilled by out-of-state congressional staffers disturbed by post-storm images of New Orleans police.

"How do you restore public confidence so that people will bank on New Orleans and reinvest in New Orleans police?" he said. "Right now the confidence is so low."

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