INTERVIEW : Brooklyn District Attorney Holds Reins on Beirut of the East : In a place where more than 800 people were killed last year, he says lessons of tolerance and goodwill are vital, even if some must learn the hard way.

Q: You have said being district attorney in Brooklyn is like being public safety director of Beirut.

A: We had 821 men, women and children killed last year in Kings County (Brooklyn). We had 129 of our children shot down, 47 died, so you know, it’s not unlike the violence in Beirut. . . . I like to tell people in 1975 you could leave a set of keys in your mailbox. You wouldn’t dare do that now. . . . Before I got the job, a lot of things changed. My house was burglarized four times in five years, several of my children have been assaulted. One was held up at knifepoint. My oldest daughter, who is now 18 years of age, was accosted coming from the library four blocks from my house. It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon. She had a little necklace snatched from her neck. She had marks on her neck for two days, and . . . I guess the worst part of the experience is, she described her assailant as a 10-year-old child.

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Q: What were the lessons of the Howard Beach case?

A: I guess the overriding lesson . . . is that we have got to learn as a society, in all of our diverse segments, that we have to learn to live with one another without hate. And we’ve got to stamp out those things that caused Michael Griffith to be chased across the Belt Parkway. . . . We have a tremendous rise in anti-Semitism, we have a tremendous rise in gay bashing, and I don’t know who is making it fashionable. We can’t make people love each other or respect each other. But one thing’s for certain: I can sure make the message very clear that if you hurt someone because you don’t like their sex, religion, gender or color, I’m going to make sure that you suffer for it to the extent that I can.

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Q: Do you think the climate in New York City is more racially charged these days?

A: I don’t know if it is. . . . What happened during the Reagan-Bush years is that it became such competition at the lower middle class and just above the poverty line for jobs, that the whites and blacks were forced together, and the anger and fury that resulted out of that, which I think translated to the table conversation that kids heard. You know, father not getting a promotion because a black man got it, and he got it only because he’s black, and that these people are moving in and ruining our property values. . . . Those things . . . have to be addressed very directly.

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Q: Is there a great deal of suspicion about the criminal justice system among newer immigrants?

A: Absolutely. I think the answer to that is a very aggressive outreach into the various communities. I have advisory councils that reflect a very wide spectrum of the people in the county, which includes Jewish, gay and lesbian, African-American, Latino and the like. I told them . . . this is not going to be an organization where you’re going to meet once a year for a picture-taking for a yearbook. . . . We’re going to have a monthly meeting, and we’re going to have a very defined agenda, and from time to time I’m going to call on you to try and resolve disputes in your community.

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Q: To what degree are juries more skeptical of police officers these days?

A: They are pretty skeptical. We lose more than 60% of our gun-possession cases at trial when the testimony is limited to a police officer. So it’s a real problem. . . . Interestingly enough, we get a much higher conviction rate among undercover drug sales cases, again where the sole testimony is the police officer, but I think two things are a factor. One, (although) people hate the thought of drugs in their neighborhood, they can almost tolerate guns. . . . In the gun cases, a large number of (the officers) are white. It’s sad to say, their testimony is rejected by a large representation of African-Americans and Latinos, who real or imagined, do not have a good experience with police.

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Q: Are there other factors?

A: Well, it may very well be to younger jurors an intolerance for any kind of authority. I think for the most part, speaking to nonwhite people, the impression is that they do not have a good relationship with their local police, and it is something that has to be attended to dramatically. I think community policing . . . was a very, very good first step.

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Q: If you had input into President-elect Bill Clinton’s first crime message, what would you suggest he say?

A: Drugs have overwhelmed us. Drugs have just taken this system and basically brought it to a standstill.

What are ways of changing? Obviously one way to begin is to prioritize different types of crime. So instead of looking at a system of processing thousands and thousands of cases a month, you begin to prioritize. What we did was we said we would not plea bargain in cases of certain violent crimes and in any drug sale case where the person could not prove that he or she was an addict.

We’ll decide what the charge is, what the punishment should be, you don’t like it you go to trial, and if you’re convicted we’ll give you an even more substantial jail term, or we’ll try and get it for you. . . .

We discovered there are three significant failure rates in drug rehab. . . . We went to the drug substance abuse state agency, and we asked for slots for 100 nonviolent drug offenders. So we began to take people out of the criminal justice system.

” . . . The other prong of our program is committed to education. We have a program called Project Legal Lives. . . . It’s a law-related education program (in) which we send staff members, particularly assistant D.A.’s, into elementary schools--10 hours a month, for the entire school year, teaching children the horrors of hating someone because of differences in gender or sex or sexual orientation or race and religion. We also teach them the horrors of drugs.

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Q: Is probation--the sentencing of convicted criminals into communities instead of prison--a growing notion, compared to jails?

A: . . . When you tell (people) it takes the total tax revenue of 17 taxpayers just to keep one inmate in the system for a year, it’s mind-boggling. So yes, I think that people are beginning to understand that jails should be limited for the most part to people who are hard-core criminals, to people who commit crimes of violence and terrorize us. And that is why we ought to try and save people who don’t fit in that category, particularly young kids.

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Q: Daniel J. Travanti played you in the movie about Howard Beach. Is his business a tougher business than yours?

A: I don’t think anyone has a tougher job than this job, other than the mayor or the President. This job as the Brooklyn D.A. has got to be the toughest thing that I’ve ever had to do, and it’s all consuming, it really is.

Times researcher Audrey Britton contributed to this story.