UPDATE / CRIME IN THE EAST BLOC : Criminals on Rampage in Hungary : The changeover in government has left an ill-trained law enforcement network, distrusted by the public it is paid to protect.

When Sgt. Istvan Csaki and Sgt. Maj. Janos Szabo were charged with killing a 34-year-old office worker by setting him on fire in a remote hay field in August, Hungarian citizens were angered but little surprised.

Csaki and Szabo, allegedly paid $6,500 for the hit, are just two of more than 1,200 Hungarian police officers arrested so far this year on criminal charges.

Corruption in the police ranks and a 40% rise in crime so far this year have spotlighted the new government’s failure to transform the former Communist Party-controlled force into an effective law-enforcement body that citizens can count on. Only the top echelon has been swept of those who put political allegiance over civic duty during the Communist dictatorship, leaving in place an ill-trained network that is distrusted by the public it is paid to protect.

But senior officers say that at least 25% of the nation’s police officers will have to be purged before they can check the growth in theft and organized crime.

Meanwhile, open borders are aiding a startling increase in armed robberies, home burglaries, counterfeiting and drug trafficking. Yet new guidelines designed to protect citizens from police harassment have slowed investigations and reduced the arrest rate.

“A society that is disintegrating is fertile soil for criminals. This is not happening just in Hungary but in Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union as well,” said Gen. Istvan Diczig, deputy chief of Hungary’s 23,000 police officers.

GUN OWNERS DEFY ORDER: Long accustomed to a low crime rate and official silence on such social ills, Hungarians have been frightened by the hordes of thieves penetrating their neighborhoods. Foreigners, restaurant owners and other entrepreneurs have been favorite targets because of their relative prosperity, and personal security is compromised by the average consumer’s need to carry large sums of cash in a society that still lacks such conveniences as checks and credit cards.

Hundreds of Budapest gun owners have openly defied a recent order to turn their weapons in to police for safekeeping, arguing that self-defense is their only protection against intruders.

But there is little hope in the short term for better performance in fighting crime. Wages for police officers have always been low, but the job used to carry privilege and power perquisites that have been stripped away in the era of democracy. In numbers, the police force is the lowest per capita in Europe.

And due to past misuse of citizen patrols--which were often conscripted into repression of anti-Communist demonstrators--Hungarians are unwilling to form the kind of neighborhood watch groups that have proven helpful in American suburbs.

Interior Minister Balazs Horvath announced a major crackdown on crime this week, taking aim at the tens of thousands of illegal aliens bottled up in Hungary because of new visa requirements in neighboring Czechoslovakia and Austria.

Workers fleeing Romania, Turkey and other impoverished areas have converged on Budapest after being turned away from those countries’ borders, and police claim that many of them, simply to survive, have been drawn into organized crime networks of pickpockets, burglars and fences.

PANIC IN BUDAPEST: Exacerbating the impact of a spiraling crime rate has been glasnost (openness) in the media. A recent bestseller by Hungarian journalist Jozsef Bekes, “Copgate,” exposed what it claimed were links between international organized crime figures and senior Hungarian police officers. Newly liberated newspapers have covered the crime wave in gory detail.

The burning death with which Csaki and Szabo have been charged was the subject of numerous front-page stories, which cast the victim as a compromised businessman trying to extricate himself from the Mob.

Reports on a spree of seven robbery-related murders over a period of a few weeks set off a panic in Budapest in late summer, although the murder rate has not risen from its average of about 200 homicides a year.

“Despite all the recent scandals, the incidence of crime in Hungary is still lower than in Austria, Italy, Sweden and a lot of other countries,” deputy chief Diczig said.

“Even in Budapest,” which has a population of 2.5 million, “it is more comparable with a small town in America.”