Police leaders are still trying to determine how many officers can report for work and how many police stations are still operational.

Looting is widespread in this city struggling to recover from the powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake, but police say they have yet to see a wider rise in violent crime.

This hiatus is likely to be short-lived: the quake shattered the walls of the city's main prison, granting freedom to some 4,000 convicted criminals.

Police have doubled night patrols in Cite Soleil, a squalid Port-au-Prince slum with a population of one million people located next to the airport.

"They came back here, we know, but they are hiding in the alleys," said Chief Inspector Rosemond Aristide, referring to gang leaders.

"There is no way to trap them -- right now," said Aristide, the top official at the Cite Soleil police station.

In 2006 UN peacekeepers supported police in cracking down on the Cite Soleil crime lords, and spent bullet from the fierce gun battles between the two sides are still embedded in neighborhood walls.

Cite Soleil police say they captured at least one escaped prisoner.

"I fled the day of the earthquake. I was serving a six-month sentence in Arcahaie," said Richmon Benedict, naming a prison in western Haiti.

"I surrendered because I did not want to be on the lam right now," Benedict said, speaking from the Cite Soleil police station jail.

An officer guarding him smiled and said the police version of the events was different, but gave no further details.

Looting, an ongoing activity in downtown Port-au-Prince, picked up Sunday as excavators removed large chunks of debris, exposing both rotting cadavers and valuables.

In one downtown street, the Avenue of Miracles, police detained three looters who were raiding a pharmacy and forced them to the ground. Four other looters fled with police in hot pursuit, pistols drawn.

"Come quickly, the situation is degenerating," a police officer barked into his radio, calling for backup.

"We're not here to kill people," said an officer who declined to give his name. "The looters are everywhere."

Police eventually released the detained looters.

"What can I do? We have no jail," the officer said.

"We patrol for 24 hours but we can't be everywhere," said another police officer. "With what little we have we aim to do the best possible."

Most people milling around on the street "are looters, they're waiting for us to go. I try to understand, they're desperate," the officer said.

"Looters accuse other looters, to get rid of them -- thieves calling other thieves thieves," he said, overwhelmed by the situation.

Just down the street police stood aside as looters descended upon a wooden house like locusts, unable to contain the crowd.

A store manager thought they had lost everything in the quake. She returned to find that the damaged building could be accessed -- but looters had been there first.

"It's a whole life gone," said Fernande Derenoncourt. "My mother is the owner, she's 93 -- 70 years of work gone. Of course we have no insurance."

Nevertheless police say that crime has not dramatically increased.

"We have not received an increase in crime reports at this time," said the police commissioner from the Delmas sector, Carl Henry Boucher. "But I'm afraid that will change."

Whole families have camped out across the city with no more protection than a blanket. Women wash clothes in the middle of the street when water is available.

Even going to the Delmas police station to file a complaint is a challenge, because the three-story building housing the stationed collapsed. Eleven days later they finished picking through the rubble for anything useful.

The quake killed 11 officers of the Delmas force of 138, and three have not reported for duty. Eight jailed prisoners escaped, Boucher said.

"We will not rest until we're up and running again," he said.

Two agents sitting at a table amid the rubble are accepting complaints.

When a crime is reported they will go look for a judge, like they used to do before the quake -- even though judges are now much harder to find.

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