PERSPECTIVE ON CRIME : New York According to Charles Dickens : Implicit in our cries for greater repression is a permanent, unredeem- able underclass. But it was not always thus.

It’s ironic how warm and golden were the days here this autumn, so much Woody Allen’s Manhattan, for the city’s current mood reflects little of Allen’s lyrical vision. Instead there is the stench of “Death Wish;” an omnipresent fear of crime fills the air, accompanied always by the smoldering class resentment and racial hatred that is its subtext. The social fabric of New York, a fragile thing for decades, seems now stretched to the breaking point.

The kinds of crimes feared most, and committed most frequently by young blacks and Hispanics, are rising sharply in the city, and rising over what already seemed intolerable levels.

In the first three months of this year, robberies--usually random crimes of opportunity--were up 11%, rapes 6%; and for the first six months, homicides rose a staggering 25%, to more than 1,000. Police project a total of more than 2,000 by the end of the year, a historic high.

In a city where many crimes go unreported by a public aware that little will be done by an overworked, uninspired police department, 712,419 serious crimes were still recorded in 1989--”about one for every 10 New Yorkers,” as New York magazine pointed out in a September issue devoted almost entirely to crime in the city. Entitled “All About Crime,” the cover featured a shiny black handgun. Not to be outdone, Time magazine also ran a September cover titled “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” At the same time, the New York Post, addressing Mayor David Dinkins, ran a banner headline pleading, “Dave, Do Something.”

What prompted much of the media blitz, in addition to the burgeoning crime statistics, was the killing of a young man named Brian Watkins early in the month. By now his name has been added to others that accompany the places that also serve as code words for a city’s agony: Bernie Goetz, Tawana Brawley, Al Sharpton, Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, boycotted Korean grocers, Central Park joggers, wolf packs, wilding--all symbols of the two New Yorks, of the Other America. Watkins, just 22 and visiting from Provo, Utah, was stabbed to death while trying to protect his mother from a wolf-pack mugging on a subway platform in an affluent Manhattan neighborhood. Afterwards the killers went dancing at Roseland with their blood money.

Murders happen every day, of course, in other cities like Detroit or Los Angeles (on a recent weekend, for example, 17 people, including a four-year-old girl, were killed in Los Angles County.) But for most middle-class Americans those killings--like the shootings of 22 minority children in New York in a span of just one recent month--are tolerable. It is, after all, only them killing them. What was so chilling about the murder of Brian Watkins, and (like the Central Park jogger) made it a media event, was the brutal, senseless, random, it-could-have-been-me nature of his death. For it took place in a “safe,” that is, white middle-class, neighborhood, and therefore could happen again to anyone at any time.

New York may share the residential segregation of other cities, but it is also far more compact. Rich and poor, working class and underclass, daily bump into each other; a public transportation system speeds muggers from Bronx and Queens slums to the heart of the Silk Stocking District in 20 minutes.

The outraged talk in the wake of Watkins’ killing was rightly of more cops, more judges, more probation officers, more jails, a reemphasis on “community policing” and the modernization of the police communications system--all of which New York desperately needs, and all of which can only improve a cynical, calcified police force.

All but absent in any public discussion, however, was talk of what goes hand in glove with any private conversation about street crime in New York: the undeniable link between class, race and crime in our cities--a link we now seem willing to face only with more and stronger quick-fix measures of repression.

Twenty-five years ago we at least acknowledged that link with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But a conspiracy of circumstances aborted that war before it was ever really born: the burden of Vietnam; 400 years of racism; the deep conservatism that lies at the heart of America; the angry militancy of some blacks; and the smugness of fashionable liberals who condescendingly dismissed the legitimate fears of crime felt by the white working class.

In place of the War on Poverty we substituted nothing. Nothing, while manufacturing jobs, union wages and the black and Hispanic middle class moved out of our inner cities. The Willie Hortons and Roseland dancers were left behind.

Now the bitter fruits of America’s decade-old decision to become Brazil have ripened. Our acceptance of a Dickensian, two-tiered society is all but complete; our reliance on more cops and tougher laws to deal with the problems of our cities, total.

The permission given by the fatherly Ronald Reagan and his kinder, gentler successor to mock the notion of a shared societal responsibility, to disparage cause and effect, to dismiss any link between poverty and crime and ignore words like “the commonweal” are etched in stone. And the byproduct of our choice is a deepening, permanent cancer on the streets of this nation.

The black and Hispanic teen-agers who comprise the the mugging wolf packs that have so terrorized New York have now been augmented by the men one sees hustling or begging aggressively almost everywhere in this city. The day-to day reality of the wolf packs’ Harlem and the South Bronx turf has been brought home, as it periodically is in New York, by the senseless stabbing to death of Brian Watkins.

The citizens of America’s premier city again wonder every time they step into a subway station if they’ll emerge alive, while the President and Congress argue about taxing the rich and slashing social programs, while the children of the underclass wage their bitter, hate-filled war against us.