Vigilante The Backlash Against Crime in America <i> by William Tucker (Stein & Day: $14.95; 371 pp.) </i>

Bernard Goetz, the New York subway rider who shot some punks who tried to intimidate him out of $5, is more than an angry man who fought back. To author William Tucker he is a hero whose actions we might emulate.

When the state fails to create a safe environment for the innocent, as it so obviously has in our urban centers, citizens can only be expected to take the law into their own hands, Tucker contends. True, and troubling as that is, Tucker thinks it does not go far enough. “In America in 1984,” Tucker writes, “it wasn’t a question of whether you should carry a gun to protect yourself from crime. The only ethical question was when you should use it.”

Americans haven’t been told the truth about crime, Tucker contends, until now. Tucker’s truth is frightening, not because of the well-known facts he cites, but because of his willingness to destroy the Constitution in order to save it.

Crime, Tucker writes, is largely a problem created by Freudian notions, superannuated New Deal Democrats, soft-headed judges and mothers, especially black mothers.

“Unfortunately, it seems very clear that a great deal of what we call the ‘criminal personality’ is the result of men being raised exclusively, or under the predominating influence, of women,” Tucker writes.

He also argues that “as the perverse incentives of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) have taken hold of black culture, the average black family has turned into a woman, her assorted children and a welfare check.” The facts don’t support this. Only 20.2% of black families got AFDC or other public assistance at any time during 1984, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while four of five black families had earned incomes. But then Tucker, whose ideas have gained currency in such prestigious magazines as Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly, seldom lets facts get in the way of his opinions.

Tucker offers severe solutions to crime, ones that would surely offend the Founding Fathers and, one hopes, even Ed Meese. He would, in effect, do away with the Fifth Amendment by making the defense give all its evidence to the prosecution. Out, too, with the exclusionary rule (the rule barring illegally gathered evidence at trial) on the spurious grounds that it violates the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the laws by bestowing its benefits only on guilty criminals.

Most crime victims are poor and working class. Tucker’s writing shows he knows this, but his solution to the victim’s plight suggests that he studied sociology under Marie Antoinette: Let the poor victims hire private prosecutors.

Tucker draws many of his notions from Harvard’s James Q. Wilson, but in Tucker’s typewriter the subtlety and finesse of Wilson’s controversial ideas become simplistic black-and-white matters.

He loves to create straw men which he can blow over and pick apart one thin reed at a time. He bitterly complains, for example, that of 31,000 felony arrests in Manhattan in 1973 only 4,100 resulted in felony convictions. That sounds terrible, unless one realizes that the police routinely “overcharge” when they book suspects, holding many people for higher bail felonies instead of what they know is the appropriate misdemeanor. Overall, Tucker’s citations of police crime statistics show his failure to grasp even the simple, but crucial, fact that in the FBI’s crime index one cold-blooded murder counts exactly the same as one tricycle theft.

Tucker has done a thorough job of collecting news clips about courtroom outrages, such as the judge who let a suspect off because of an inconsequential typing error on a search warrant. And Tucker’s attack on the abuses of voir dire , the jury interrogation process which makes sure most criminals do not get tried by a jury of their peers, is excellent, bringing an important and too often ignored issue into focus.

But once Tucker moves beyond his clippings, including citations from such eminent sources as Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Good Housekeeping magazine, he runs into serious problems.

Perhaps worst of all, Tucker fills his work with hyperbole. He suggests that the typical prosecutor could quit and make three times as much defending guilty criminals. He rests this unqualified assertion, as he does many others, on a single example, in this case the remarks of an attorney who won fame for serving as a Watergate special prosecutor.

Despite major flaws, Tucker provides a provocative read here, just as he has in previous works, such as his writings describing the environmental movement as the product of an affluent leisure class pursuing its narrow self-interest. His ideas come off the wall, but at least he picks interesting walls.