LAW AND ORDER

By Richard Lacayo

WANT TO SEE A CIVIC MONUMENT THAT NO CITY would ever want? Go to New Orleans and proceed to the intersection of Congress and Law streets, just a few blocks from the tourists' Latin Quarter. Walk anywhere in that neighborhood of trashed storefronts and blunt-shouldered housing projects. It won't take long to find walls that are spattered with grimy little craters. Those are bullet holes. Every one of them is an unofficial memorial to the mayhem that was daily life around there until not so long ago.

Starting in the late 1980s, drug dealers had claimed the place as their own, part sales ground, part killing ground, where they seized market share the hard way, with drive-by shootings and turf wars. At the nearby St. Philip Social Service Center, preschoolers learned to dive for the floor in "shooting drills,'' then stay there until their teachers sounded the all clear. By 1994 there were three or more killings each month on the streets outside. Standing now where the unthinkable used to be the unremarkable, police lieutenant Edwin Compass III looks around with a shudder. "I'd bet it was the most dangerous block in the U.S."

The good thing about monuments is they commemorate the past. Last year the city inaugurated a Community Oriented Policing Squad (COPS), now headed by Compass, a name so foursquare no novelist would dare invent it. With secondhand furniture and federal money, police set up round-the-clock substations in vacant apartments at three of the city's most deadly projects. The 45 cops assigned to them work foot patrol, get to know the law-abiding residents and sweep out the street dealers. They also help pick up trash, combat graffiti and round up kids who play hooky.

That mix of shoe leather and social work has made a difference. By the end of last year killings around the three projects had dropped 74%. A dozen dead bodies per annum is still no small problem. But if you don't happen to be one of them, it is cause enough for celebration. Lately, the neighborhood even sees its share of those spontaneous street parades that are defining outbreaks of civic life in New Orleans. What are people celebrating? Maybe just the return of their freedom to move around.

New Orleans is not alone. After years of depressing and implacable upswing, serious crime is retreating all around the U.S. In the nine cities with a population of more than 1 million, the decrease in violent crimes was 8% in 1994. Nationally, murders fell 12% in the first six months of 1995, and serious crimes of all kinds dropped 1% to 2%. The suburbs, long a growth area for felonies, posted declines between 4% and 5% last year in violent crime.

What makes these numbers important, not just encouraging, is that they extend what is plainly a sustained retreat from the crack-fueled crime wave of the late 1980s. According to the FBI, violent crimes started to decline in 1993. As always with crime, an area of famously wiggly trend lines, the downward curve is not to be found everywhere. Minneapolis, Minnesota, for instance, is still puzzling over why in 1995 homicides climbed more than 56% over the preceding year. Even with the downward trend, crime rates remain bloodcurdlingly high, especially when compared to the relatively peaceable kingdom of, say, 1965. (Murder victims per 100,000 then: 5.1. In 1994: 9.) And there are widespread predictions that another tidal wave will break as soon as the milk-toothed children of the '90s crowd into their saw-toothed teens. Whoever called economics the dismal science must not have heard about criminology.

For all that, even the experts in bad behavior are intrigued. Something is happening here. The question is, Why? The lineup of contributing factors includes most of the usual suspects: a decline in the proportion of young males in the general population, the leveling off of crack cocaine use, a moderate unemployment rate and tougher sentencing that gets more felons off the street and keeps them off longer.

Certainly demographics is part of it. Very simply, there are fewer people in the most crime-prone category, which is males from the ages of 15 to 29. The crime spree that began in the 1960s was largely the work of baby boomers as they moved into those years. The same boomers are tipping into their 50s, an age when you're just right for fly fishing but not much good with a semiautomatic. The bad news, however, is that today's smaller cohort of teenagers is more prone to crime than its elders were at the same age. Among 14- to 17-year-olds, for instance, murder rates skyrocketed over the past decade.

The trade in crack cocaine also appears to have changed. Perhaps it has lost its cachet. "As with any drug epidemic, the attractiveness of the drug begins to wear off, partly because users see so many of their friends dead," says James Q. Wilson, the UCLA professor who is one of the nation's most prominent thinkers on crime. That's important, because crack was the great impetus to crime in the late 1980s as brash new dealers muscled in. Another theory is that the trade has simply stabilized into a "mature market," as they say in the business schools, with surviving distributors less likely to clash over territory.

As for prison populations, those have more than doubled in the past 15 years. Most criminologists believe that a relatively small population of repeat felons is responsible for a disproportionate share of crime. Lock away the most energetic thieves and killers, and you make a serious dent in their business. "Most prisoners are violent or repeat offenders," says William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education and drug czar. "Prisons do cut crime." Last week Bennett's Council on Crime in America, a commission he co-heads with Griffin Bell, who was Attorney General under Jimmy Carter, issued a report warning that violent crime is still higher than police records indicate because so much of it goes unreported. They urged even more aggressive jailings.

But time and again, the experts are also returning to an explanation they would have played down in the past: more effective policing strategies. It is respectable once again to believe that cops can have a real impact on crime rates, an opinion that has been seriously out of fashion among professional students of crime. For decades they held that crime was too deeply connected to underlying social causes, meaning everything from the state of the economy to the breakdown of the family. Such things are still assumed to play their part in producing crime. What has changed is the view that police are useful only to chase down bad guys after they strike.

All over the U.S., the decade of the '90s has seen a rapid reinvention of how the police do their jobs, especially in major cities. A change from squad cars to foot patrolling, a shift to "proactive'' policing that seeks to dissolve problems such as open-air drug marts rather than just rack up arrests, the more frequent establishment of cross-agency task forces to target specific problems such as car theft or drug crime--all are now commonplace. "This decline in crime rates is more than a demographic phenomenon,'' says Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department. "Public policy can make a difference. Police can make a difference."

Exhibit A for supporters of the new policing is New York City, where major crime--murder, rape, robbery, auto theft, grand larceny, assault and burglary--is in something like statistical free fall, dropping 17.5% last year. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton, both insist that the reason is their devotion to new ways of doing police business. John DiIulio Jr., a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, says that since the mid-'80s top brass who embrace a similar shift in philosophy have risen to key positions in cities all around the country. "So now you're seeing better policing. Not miracles or panaceas, but better policing."

To the extent that is true, police have had to pull themselves in two disparate directions--tougher and softer, as the COPS program in New Orleans illustrates. Tougher means more aggressive intervention. "If we see somebody we don't know, we ask them what they're doing there," says Compass. "If the story doesn't check out, we arrest them for trespassing. Now we don't see as many drug dealers around here." But at the same time, it has meant more neighborhood-friendly tactics, the foot patrolling and problem solving that form the loosely defined strategy called community policing. "We do neighborhood cleanups, counseling on child abuse, you name it," says Officer Djuana Adams. "We help the children with their homework, and they show up for treats when they get good grades."

New Orleans is also learning what other cities have discovered when they moved more officers away from the patrol-car policing that limited them to 911 emergency-response calls. The lesson: face-to-face contact between cops and the people they work among, with no windshield in between, helps to restore trust. For a city like New Orleans, which has recently seen some spectacular instances of police corruption, that is an invaluable side benefit. "I felt better almost as soon as the police moved in," says Brenda Holmes, who lives at Desire, the New Orleans housing project with the most poignant name. "They've given us our lives back."

The potential synergy between cops and residents works not only in big cities: Taylor, Texas, about 28 miles northeast of Austin, has just 13,300 people. But no place is too small for the drug trade. Five years ago, crack moved in among the cotton gins and railroad tracks, bringing with it assault, rape, car theft and murder. Crime got so bad that Mae Willie Turner, 79, and her sister, Gladys Hubbard, 73, could no longer sit at night on their front porch. "The place was infested," says Turner.

So they got off the porch and joined Turn Around Taylor, a community-action group designed to help locals take back their town. It was conceived by Herman Wrice, a Philadelphia management consultant who organizes citizen-led anti-crime groups as part of a federal program. And the man who brought in Wrice and his ideas was Fred Stansbury, the police chief who arrived in Taylor in 1993, on an April day when a local teenager was killed in a gang fight. "We wanted a program where the community felt it had a proprietary interest," he says.

That's what they got. Most weeks Turner and Hubbard put on jackets with slogans such as UP WITH HOPE, DOWN WITH DOPE and joined other demonstrators on streets where the heaviest dealing happened. Stansbury got the town council to designate "downtown" Taylor as a historic district, which meant a ban on the public consumption of alcohol. The group even persuaded the Texas National Guard to bulldoze 48 worn-out buildings near the railroad tracks that had become weekend squats for drug dealers and their customers, who used to come in by car and train. Taylor these days is more like it used to be. "I can sit on my porch anytime now,'' says Mae Willie Turner.

The single greatest imponderable in the crime debate is the role of gun control. Or decontrol: last week Texas became the 28th state to allow people to carry concealed weapons. The rationale is to discourage crime--supporters say felons will think twice about assaulting people who may be armed. Florida became the first state to pass such a law in 1987. Since then, more than 150,000 people there have applied for permits to pack a gun. But two recent studies suggest loopholes in the law have also allowed felons, ordinarily forbidden to carry a gun, to do so legally. On the other hand, gun homicides in Florida have declined 29% since the law was introduced. Michael McHargue of the Florida department of law enforcement shrugs, saying, "If you look at the overall statistical picture, we don't believe the law made any impression."

The effectiveness of gun laws that are stricter is no easier to compute. In the three cities with the most dramatic recent declines in homicide--New York, Kansas City and Houston--police have very aggressive strategies for separating felons from their firearms and stemming the flow of cheap, illegal handguns. Chicago is currently celebrating a decline in homicides from 930 in 1994 to 823 last year. Police think part of the reason might be that Illinois' new, stricter penalties for felonies involving a firearm have persuaded many gang members and drug dealers to leave the guns at home. "We'll arrest a whole crew and still find no guns," says Paul Jenkins, the Chicago police department's director of news affairs. But while the anecdotal evidence is suggestive, it is nothing like firm. "If we knew the reason for success, we'd do a lot more of it," says Jenkins. "We'd bottle it."

For now, keep the bottles uncorked. Talk to most experts in law enforcement, and they soon complain about the paucity of solid research to identify what works against crime. Norval Morris, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, compares the state of knowledge in his field to that in medicine earlier in the century, when doctors were commonly in the dark as to whether their treatments worked, or why. "Testing the consequences [for crime] of different drug policies, different housing practices, different police practices--it's very, very rarely done," he says.

In the 1988 presidential election, when rising crime was an issue, Willie Horton became the wanted-poster child who helped elect George Bush. In 1992 Bill Clinton neutralized the Republican advantage by positioning himself as a tough-on-crime Democrat who favored the death penalty and would put 100,000 new police officers on the streets. In an interview with Time, Clinton said last week that the country has embarked on a historic change: "What's happening now across America essentially closes the door on an era that began with the murder of Kitty Genovese 30 years ago." In that milestone episode of public indifference, Genovese, a young New Yorker, was murdered while dozens of people ignored her screams for help. "I think now we have ended both the isolation of the police from the community and the idea that the community doesn't have a responsibility to work with the police or with its neighbors."

Clinton's tough talk on crime helped him win back some of the Reagan Democrats who had fled the party. But with crime rates falling, the issue may lose some of the importance it had for voters two years ago. Though Americans still tell pollsters that crime is at the top of their concerns, that may change as lagging perceptions catch up to new realities. Meanwhile, the President sees the political advantage as his. Though crime has hardly been mentioned in the Republican primaries, the Clinton-Gore Re-Election Committee spent a surprising $2.4 million last summer on TV spots that ran in 24 states, touting the President's record on crime.

As the year goes on, expect Clinton to attack congressional Republicans for their attempt to rescind the 100,000-new-cops provision in his 1994 crime bill. In the White House version, municipalities get the money only if they use it to hire new officers and use them in community-policing programs. Republicans want to send that money instead in bloc grants to states to use as they see fit. Last month the President vetoed the appropriations bill that would have distributed his police money that way. "I don't tell all these folks how to deploy the police," said Clinton, "or what they should do all day. All I say is there has to be a community-policing strategy because that's by definition grass-roots reform, and we know that it works."

Or at least that it is part of what works. There may be a conjunction of half a dozen lucky developments that are holding crime in check right now. The trick will be to find the way to keep it all working. But for once, it is possible to suppose the trick is one we can manage.

--Reported by Jyl Benson/New Orleans, James Carney and Elaine Shannon/Washington, Hilary Hylton/Taylor and Ratu Kamlani/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by JYL BENSON/NEW ORLEANS, JAMES CARNEY AND ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON, HILARY HYLTON/TAYLOR AND RATU KAMLANI/NEW YORK, WITH OTHER BUREAUS