COLUMN ONE : A Search for Crime Suspects : ‘Law and order’ talk is giving way to concerns about a failed social system. Americans speak of a breakdown in societal ethics and family values.

Joyce Stevens knows all there is to know about the origins of the crime and despair that afflict America’s inner cities. Joblessness. Welfare dependency. Absent fathers. Overcrowded public housing. Latchkey kids. Racism. Peer pressure. Delinquency. Gangs. Drugs. Guns.

She and her three kids have lived them all.

Despite her best intentions, this 40-ish African-American woman lived for almost a decade as a welfare mother in the squalid public housing projects of South Omaha. She has seen one son, 19-year-old Eric, descend into the dangers of street life and fears that her 15-year-old, Thaddeus, may be succumbing to the same temptations. She suspects, although she doesn’t know--and doesn’t want to know--that both have fallen in with a bad crowd and are stealing, or worse.

Viewed from the perspective of modern American politics, Joyce Stevens and her headed-for-trouble sons are the kind of people that politicians have pointed to in recent years when they wanted to fix blame for urban violence or exploit public fears of crime.

From the “law and order” campaigns of Richard M. Nixon and George C. Wallace to George Bush’s manipulation of Massachusetts murderer Willie Horton, politicians have mined quick electoral capital by exploiting public anxiety--more than a little of it with racial overtones.

But this year, some voters appear to be changing their attitudes about the crime problem in dramatic and unexpected ways. The Los Angeles riots dramatized for many Americans how desperate the plight of the urban poor has become, even as they condemn those who used the Rodney G. King beating case verdicts as an excuse to loot and burn.

Many Americans have come to see Joyce Stevens and millions like her as victims of a failed social system, not the root cause of crime or a scapegoat. They listen with sympathy when Stevens says that for inescapable reasons of class and race, she can never fully share the American dream.

“The riots just showed there is a black world and there’s a white world. White people protest; black people riot. That’s the only way they can be heard,” Stevens said. “None of us must ever forget that.”

Two dozen interviews with a cross section of residents of Omaha, where crime patterns closely mirror those of the country as a whole, revealed an evolution in voters’ views on crime and its resonance as a campaign issue.

Far from demanding more cops, more courts and more jail cells, these Omahans shared a conviction that crime is not so much a crisis in itself as it is an outgrowth of a broad complex of crises confronting families like Stevens’.

What has broken down, these people believe, is not the criminal justice system, but the entire ethical underpinning of American society. And the answer, they say, lies not in tougher enforcement of harsher laws, but in strengthening the nation’s values--and the social and community structures that teach and support those values.

The interviews were conducted both before and after the riots--and before Vice President Dan Quayle began his latest crusade for what he calls “family values.” What Omahans had to say indicates that Quayle could strike a responsive chord.

“The family unit is falling apart. The family core is lacking. These kids come home to empty houses and leave empty houses in the morning,” said Cheri Cavanagh, 42, the wife of a successful attorney who left her full-time job as an emergency room nurse when her youngest child was born five years ago. She is fiercely protective of her three children; just recently she began to let her oldest, 9-year-old Matthew, leave the block they live on by himself to play with friends.

“What happened? Somebody tell me,” pleaded Cavanagh. “What happened to the family? What happened to the work ethic? What happened to people feeling responsible for other human beings? What happened to caring? Why do we have people sleeping in cardboard boxes?

“This is America?”

Families in Need

Cavanagh acknowledges that her family’s financial security allowed her to scale back her working hours and knows that many working mothers aren’t as fortunate. She spends her free time raising money for her kids’ school, participating in the PTA and arranging after-school activities with other neighborhood parents.

Despite what sounds like a harsh judgment on those who commit crimes and those who reared them, Cavanagh said she understands the rage of the inner-city poor that erupted into riots. “I was angry (at the verdicts) and I sit here in the middle of Nebraska,” she said. “These people need help. They’re desperate. They need child care, they need housing, they need jobs.”

Stevens needs those, too. “I worked my way off welfare, but now the kids come home to an empty house,” she said. “There are no activities in the neighborhood. The Boys’ Club is two miles from here. The other center is more than a mile away. There’s nobody out there pulling these kids into better activities.”

This dilemma is not unique to Omaha. Like every large and mid-size American city, it is riven by deep chasms of race and income. In the past, it has endured racial conflicts, police beatings, even urban unrest.

In statistical terms, this is a typical city, widely used by marketing firms to test new products from puppy food to pantyhose. It approximates the national average in most categories of criminal behavior as well, falling smack in the middle of the FBI’s crime tables for serious offenses--homicide, rape, robbery, assault and theft.

Omaha has gangs and crack cocaine and drive-by shootings, too many guns and too few police officers. And, like its sister cities large and small, Omaha’s crime problems are concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly poor and predominantly minority.

But concern about moral decay crosses party lines, generational and gender lines, class and racial lines. It was the one constant in extensive conversations about crime and the other ills afflicting America in 1992--foreshadowing Quayle’s recent campaign.

Crime itself has not emerged as a major topic in this year’s elections, although the problems of the nation’s cities have certainly moved to center stage in the aftermath of the Los Angeles inferno.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, has urged that urban pain be alleviated to stanch outbreaks of violence. He has classified the riots primarily as urban problems--not as police problems.

Roots of Problem

President Bush’s initial response was to have White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater blame the violence on the anti-poverty programs of the 1960s and ‘70s. The White House divided among those who wanted to call the riots purely a police problem and those who wanted Bush to push through new initiatives for the cities. But after Fitzwater’s initial comment and the outcry that followed, the Administration seemed to switch to the urban-policy side.

Quayle, however, has sought to pacify the Republican right. On CBS’ “Face the Nation” shortly after the violence, he declared that law and order would have top priority in Bush’s urban agenda. And in late May, he kicked up the “family values” controversy by condemning television character Murphy Brown for having a baby out of wedlock.

Far in advance of the riots, Bush’s pollsters and consultants had identified public worries about crime, drugs and family values as a potent campaign issue and intended to use it extensively--confident that it could be exploited. A Bush political adviser said that city dwellers are altering their lives to protect themselves against crime, and that suburbanites and rural residents--who are less affected by crime--are even more frightened.

In an evaluation chillingly prophetic of Los Angeles’ televised beatings and looting, he said the GOP won’t have to dramatize the threat of crime--as it did in 1988 with the controversial Willie Horton ad--because the local television news does the job every night.

From the vantage point of Omaha, however, America’s problems seem far more complex. Symptoms of rot are many and obvious, people here say--ranging from overpaid corporate executives to rampant drug use in the schools.

Solutions are not as evident, but suggestions ranged from changing the welfare system to rewarding families for staying intact to lengthening the school year. All agreed that parents have to supervise their children more closely and become more involved in the community.

Joyce Stevens knows that her absence has contributed to her kids’ problems, but she needs her job for income and self-esteem.

A series of hard choices forced Stevens to this point. She lived for 10 years in the housing projects, most of the time on welfare.

She finally found a good job, as a $23,000-a-year transportation supervisor for the state of Nebraska, which allowed her to move into a small, city-subsidized, single-family home a few blocks away. But the job forces her to leave her teen-agers unsupervised from the time classes end in midafternoon until she gets home at 6 p.m. Stevens’ 12-year-old daughter, Joy, sticks to her schoolwork and so far has given her no problems. But her sons--they drift and they hang, and trouble finds them.

Stevens had to temporarily place her oldest, Eric, in foster care when he was 17 because she couldn’t handle him. Now, Thaddeus is driving her to distraction by staying out all night without calling and running with a crowd she thinks is dealing dope.

“I don’t know whether to run, shout, abuse this kid or put him on a plane to his dad,” she said. “Sometimes I just want to get him out of my life.”

For his part, Eric says that his mother imposes too many rules and that whenever he gets a chance to get out of the house he takes it--sometimes for days at a time. He said his friends don’t rob or sell drugs, but there are plenty of kids in the neighborhood who do. Earlier this year, he said, some gang members stole his purple and gold Los Angeles Lakers jacket because he wandered into the wrong gang-dominated neighborhood.

“It’s a tough area, but no worse than where we live,” Eric said. “We were over there to meet a couple friends and these two guys stopped me, said, ‘Take off the jacket,’ and pointed a gun at me, and I gave it to them.”

He said the situation on the street has worsened in the last few years; he blamed an influx of gangs from Los Angeles and other cities.

His mother sometimes sounds discouraged. “You just have to bear with the child and stick with them until they mature enough to see they’re doing wrong things,” she said. “I’m just trying to raise a decent human being.”

She’s afraid it may be too late.

Crime and Fear

In neighborhoods like Stevens’, people have long since adjusted their everyday behavior to reflect the threat on the streets. Doors are locked, shades are drawn, children and the elderly disappear from the streets at nightfall.

But although the crime problem is most acute in the inner city, fear of crime is far greater in other parts of the Omaha metropolitan area, where crime is rare to nonexistent--just as the Bush adviser said.

According to an in-depth survey of public opinion conducted by the Center for Public Affairs Research of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, concern about crime is highest in Washington County to the north of the city, an area of small towns and farms where violent crime is virtually unknown.

Professor Vincent Webb, chairman of the university’s criminal justice department, refers to the discrepancy as the “crime fear/crime risk paradox.”

“Those least at risk are sometimes the most fearful,” he said. He attributed the phenomenon to a tendency by the media to hype crime coverage, a strong word-of-mouth network in tightly knit neighborhoods that amplifies reports of incidents and a latent racism about “those people down there” in the inner city.

“In the extremely rural areas north of the city, there’s a widespread belief that Omaha is a hotbed of criminal activity and vice,” Webb said.

Webb’s research also revealed that although the crime rate in Omaha has been relatively flat over the last five years, the public believes it is growing markedly worse. In a survey last year, 68% said crime in the area had worsened. At the same time, 90% of Omaha residents said they were very or somewhat worried about crime.

Although anxiety about crime is broadly shared, the majority do not consider it the most pressing issue facing Omaha--or the nation. In the university’s survey, “street conditions”--potholes and construction-related traffic jams--were cited as the worst thing about the Omaha area. Gangs, drugs and crime ranked second, fourth and fifth. High taxes was third.

A nationwide poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times earlier this year asked a large random sample of adults to rank the issues they thought the presidential candidates should address. The economy and unemployment topped the list by a large margin; crime ranked sixth, after health care, education, poverty and “other.”

‘American Ethics’

Several of the people interviewed in Omaha said the crime problem goes deeper than simple violations of law.

Ferdinand Gagne, 73, a retired natural gas company executive who lives in the upper-middle-class Happy Hollow section of Omaha, said that all the nation’s social and economic ills can be traced to “self-interest, greed and a lack of concern for others.”

“These problems are real; they need to be talked about,” Gagne said. “The economy, education, homelessness--all come from and can be solved by a shift in attitudes that can be called American ethics.”

Gagne and his wife, Virginia, feel their neighborhood is not as safe as it used to be--the house next door was broken into--but they don’t fear for their lives or their property. They fear for their country, which, they believe, has created an economic caste system.

“I think that a lot of crime is caused by a feeling of us versus them, those who have versus those who don’t,” Gagne said. “Those in the have-not situation . . . will pick up on the street what they can.” He called the Los Angeles looting “opportunism at its worst.”

Gagne said that the relatively ordered world in which they reared their three grown children has disappeared, replaced by a society obsessed with violence, materialism and sex. The couple blame the mass media and the entertainment industry for pandering to these tastes--as Quayle has been complaining for the last month.

“It has gotten ridiculous,” Virginia Gagne said. “We’re not Puritanical, but we’re beginning to feel we don’t belong in this world any more.”

Like the Gagnes, many people agree that law enforcement can’t provide the answers. Asked in a recent survey sponsored by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People whether the government should spend more money to send criminals to jail and keep them there a long time, or spend the same amount to attack the causes of crime, 81% of the 3,123 randomly selected respondents said that the money should be spent to alleviate the conditions that breed crime.

And 43% of the respondents in another poll said that a breakdown of the family is one of the most important causes of crime.

Omaha Police Chief James N. Skinner would agree with all that. He needs more officers and more judges and more prisons to deal with the city’s crime problems, he says. But more than anything, he needs help from the community.

Skinner said he speaks often to groups in Omaha and his message is always the same:

“Don’t look to the police to solve social issues over which they have no control--the high rate of unemployment, the high rate of illiteracy, the high rate of illegitimacy and single-parent families, the high rate of alcohol and drug abuse, the high rate of substandard housing.

“How many of these social factors do the police have control over? None,” Skinner said.

He pleads with the mayor and the voters to provide more money for law enforcement, but he said those are only blunt tools for dealing with an immediate crisis. “Where are the resources for the schools?” Skinner asked. “What are we doing privately to provide opportunities for people to find meaningful jobs and decent housing?”

Skinner said: “I tell them, ‘This is one community. If there are people hurting in one part of the community, the whole community is hurting.’ ”

The American Future

To help define what issues Americans want to hear addressed by the presidential candidates, Times reporters are talking with people in various communities about the most basic aspects of life in the nation and their expectations for the future.