COLUMN ONE : A Nation With Peril on Its Mind : Crime has become the top concern of many people. Much of the anxiety is fueled by a perception of violence, not the statistics.

After a long, harrowing season of death, Americans are preoccupied more than ever by violent crime, an obsession as old as the highwayman and as newly minted as a carjacking.

Common wisdom holds that the sudden trajectory of anxiety burst, fully formed, from last year’s rush of high-profile killings--the Long Island commuter-train massacre, mass murders at family restaurants and fatal abductions of suburban children.

But high levels of personal fear--the quickening panic that leads people to bolt doors and glance backward on city streets--have been inescapable facts of life for three decades. That pervasive alarm has been fueled by the long-term growth of juvenile violence, the emergence of new offenses such as holdups at automated teller machines, and the decade-long spread of drug and gang deaths.

What has changed dramatically is the percentage of Americans who now put crime issues at the top of the country’s most important problems. The upsurge--from 21% last June to 43% last month in a new Los Angeles Times Poll--marks a watershed in public concern about crime, said Tom W. Smith, a polling expert with the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.

Fear flows with its own infernal logic. The upsurge is not driven by a sudden rising tide of crime; the rate of violent episodes, although much higher than three decades ago, is down slightly from peaks in the 1980s. The difference is in the perception of crime’s pattern.

Many Americans appear threatened by examples of mayhem they read and hear about in their own communities, heightening the belief that the world beyond is becoming less safe and that crime requires urgent national attention. Sensing that these new signals come largely from middle-class America, politicians who had for years rarely addressed the horrendous crime levels of poor city neighborhoods now feel compelled to offer solutions.

The Times Poll found that while 41% of those who said they felt safe in their neighborhoods cite crime as a most pressing national issue, the percentage jumps to 51% among those who said they felt unsafe. The poll, which surveyed 1,516 respondents across the country from Jan. 15 to Jan. 19, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 points.

“What concerns me is what’s close to home,” said Jerry Westwood, a regional parks supervisor who said he hears gunfire almost every night near his home in Aurora, Ill., a city of 100,000 people west of Chicago.

The numbers are both real and contradictory. Violent crime actually dropped by 3% nationally in the first six months of 1993, according to the FBI, after similar reductions over the last two years.

Violence waned slightly in the suburbs, and overall Americans say they don’t feel any less safe in their homes or neighborhoods than they did in 1981. But murder rates ratcheted upward in small towns, medium-sized cities and urban centers with populations between 500,000 and 1 million. Homicide records were demolished in 22 cities, from Baltimore to Phoenix, Brockton, Mass., to Jackson, Miss., even in the two capitals President Clinton calls home: Little Rock, Ark., and Washington, D.C.

From Trudy Sundberg, who rallied 800 residents of Oak Harbor, Wash., after a school fistfight, to the President, who was restrained by aides from rushing to a Washington city pool where six children were shot last year, Americans seize upon nearby instances as certain evidence that crime threatens to overwhelm us all.

In the midst of a get-acquainted chat with Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar last September, Bob Haisman, the new president of the Illinois Education Assn., broke down, weeping, as he recounted the slaying a week earlier of a popular athlete in Hinsdale, a Chicago suburb.

“No one feels safe anymore. Parents are just petrified,” Haisman said. “My God! What a society!”

Hinsdale South High School, where Haisman has taught social studies for 25 years, is a placid campus where 85% of the students go on to college. When 17-year-old Barrett Modisette was slain, allegedly by another student as he walked home from a football game, the school’s sense of safety was instantly dispelled.

Haisman’s impassioned, awkward display set the governor to thinking.

“They might have shootings on the South Side of Chicago--it doesn’t get the attention,” Edgar said later in an interview. “In Hinsdale, they’re shocked.”

Last month, Edgar, a longtime proponent of traditional tough-on-crime strategies, endorsed a ban on assault weapons. This was an unexpected tack for a Republican leader who has depended on support from the National Rifle Assn.

Edgar’s new approach could also be ascribed to more overt political reasons--for one, he is up for reelection this fall--but the grim stories that he and other leaders have heard from citizens in recent months convinced many that a defining moment is at hand.

There is no shortage of explanations for the public’s mood swing: Times Poll Director John Brennan and other public-opinion experts see the crime issue simply slipping into prominence and into the vacuum left by an improving economy; some political leaders say the public’s mood shifted as suburban America realized city terrors can also afflict them; a few criminologists cite “fear fatigue,” the refusal to live in fear any longer.

As late as mid-1991, only a miniscule number of Americans cited crime as a major national concern. And though that number rose to 17% by January, 1993, it was still eclipsed by the economy and unemployment.

When 17 police executives sat down for a two-day crime conference that month, they concluded that violence was sweeping their cities and that policy-makers had to respond.

Their 30-page report, issued last April, brimmed with sobering figures: Violent crime in the United States increased 371% since 1960, a rate nine times faster than the increase in the nation’s population. Homicides tripled; rapes burgeoned by 500%.

The document tumbled into a void. The police officials sent a copy to the White House, but all they got in reply was a three-sentence acknowledgment.

“We didn’t exactly take the nation by storm,” said Daniel Rosenblatt, director of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, which sponsored the conference.

Even though Clinton had been “champing at the bit to speak” on the subject during his campaign against George Bush, pollster and adviser Stanley B. Greenberg said aides damped down his fervor, worried that too much crime talk might hand a natural advantage to Republicans, who had exploited the law-and-order issue since Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968.

After he was elected, Clinton often stressed his support for a national police corps and the omnibus crime bill. But crime remained a secondary issue, submerged by health care reform and the federal budget deficit.

Then, last June 22, a gunman raked a southeast Washington municipal swimming pool with gunfire, wounding six children. The next day, an agitated Clinton told his staff he wanted to go to the pool to console the youths’ families and make a forceful point about the pervasive damage violence does to American communities.

But a crucial budget vote was scheduled the next week. Staffers “convinced him it was more important at the time to keep his focus on the economic package,” said domestic policy aide Bruce Reed.

The Administration’s reluctance to speak out forcefully on crime in early 1993, despite Clinton’s own inclinations, shows how cautious many opinion-makers were in acknowledging its importance. The crime rate has not changed appreciably since then--despite their newfound eagerness to attend to it.

According to Ted Gurr, a University of Maryland researcher, Americans’ fears have been most pronounced after turbulent periods of street crime and urban unrest. The 1850s, the 1920s and the 1960s were all decades, Gurr said, when the marked rise of real crime and its perception were closely tied.

That is why the public’s current obsession is unusual. Although overall violent-crime rates rose in the late 1980s, the trends have tailed off during the last few years.

“Looking at the numbers, the general population doesn’t appear to be more at risk than a few years ago,” said Michael R. Rand, an analyst taking part in the Justice Department’s annual survey of crime victims.

The closest available indicator of random violence, Rand said, is stranger-on-stranger violence, which shows little increase from 1992 to 1993--from 3.4 million reported incidents to 3.5 million.

Even mass murders, one of the most inexplicable of crimes, have occurred at a predictable pace in recent years. Northeastern University crime expert James Alan Fox, who has researched recorded mass murders back to the mid-1960s, says slayings of four or more people in one location are rare, occurring in the United States about twice a month.

“We have nothing to go on that would make us worry that it’s getting worse,” Fox said.

But all through the fall, television and print reports linked each new crime in the national spotlight with the public’s growing preoccupation with violence.

The week after Colin Ferguson is alleged to have killed six people on a Long Island commuter train, Time magazine responded with a cover showing a 9-millimeter semiautomatic Ruger superimposed over Ferguson’s brooding face. Beside it was the word “Enough!”

The impression that Americans were fed up came from “talk over the barbecue,” said Time Managing Editor James R. Gaines. “It is a gut thing, a sense that, though maybe it’s from a middle-class commuter’s perspective, this craziness has even invaded the sacred precinct of a 5:33 p.m. commuter train.”

Despite ample evidence of crime’s omnipresence for more than a decade, the press has, for the most part, covered crime “schizophrenically” because it is entwined with “such a web of class and race,” said Jon Katz, media critic for Rolling Stone magazine.

The fusing of last year’s high-profile killings with the growing legislative debate on guns and crime made the overall issue of violence appear as “a sudden crisis,” Katz said.

The most intense reactions to press coverage of crime comes from small towns and suburban Americans. The poll found 72% of small town residents and 69% of suburbanites say their feelings about crime are stirred most by what they see, hear and read in the media. Overall, 65% cite news coverage as the main influence on their attitudes; by contrast, 21% say they are most affected by their own and acquaintances’ experiences.

The poll also found that 32% of respondents said their fear of crime was heightened by specific incidents reported by the press. Of those, 19% cited instances that received widespread publicity, among them the kidnaping and slaying of 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her Petaluma, Calif., home, the shooting spree on the Long Island train and the murders of tourists in Florida.

Another 17%, however, named approximately 150 other crimes that made news in their own communities but drew little notice elsewhere. The list is a national police blotter: shootings at junior highs in Wyoming and Jefferson City, Mo.; carjackings in New Mexico and Colorado; a yogurt shop slaying in Austin, Tex. Gunfire, abduction, rape and murders are described in a succession of mundane locales, from malls to automated teller machines to a Connecticut police station.

“People can identify with these victims,” Smith said. “They could have been where these victims were.”

For years, Sundberg read stories in Seattle newspapers and national magazines about brutality in the poorest sectors of America’s cities. Abstract concern percolated in the back of her mind, she said, but she felt comfortably distanced in Oak Harbor, a Navy town of 20,000 people on Whidbey Island, 70 miles from Seattle.

That began changing last year. As a gang subculture emerged among town youths, police confiscated two handguns and seven toy guns from juveniles. There had been no such incidents in 1992. In November, a brawl at Oak Harbor High School left a victim so bloodied that he was airlifted to a Seattle trauma center.

Normally, these incidents would be the stuff of anxious gossip for a spell, then shrugged off as aberrations. Not now.

“When you pick up the paper and you see all the crime, when the first five programs on the TV news are crime, that’s the background,” Sundberg said. “When it happens close to home, then you think: ‘Oh no. It’s beginning.’ ”

Days after the high school fight, she met in her dining room with the town’s police chief and the county sheriff. She wanted to launch a crusade. The officials pledged their help.

Oak Harbor’s violent crime rate had decreased by 2.4% the previous year, and the school incidents had only the faint aroma of urban-style violence. But Sundberg struck a nerve. About 800 residents showed up last month for the first “Save Our Kids” rally, applauding as a prosecutor, a judge, the high school pep band and the honor society pledged to keep Oak Harbor safe.

In Atlanta, where two carjackings within three days last month left two residents dead, the horror seemed fresh--even though DeKalb County police had recorded 119 such incidents, two fatal, in 1993.

Police responded with their biggest show of force since the notorious serial murders of children 13 years ago. Squad cars and helicopters swarmed over the southern part of the county until six men were arrested and charged in the two deaths.

No matter that the Justice Department says the number of carjackings is not rising. The deaths left toughened city people even more jittery.

In their wake, sales manager Ronald Witherspoon, 42, now makes full use of his license to carry a gun. Hurrying through a downtown parking garage, he explained his strategy.

“I’ll give them my car,” he said, “but then when they drive away, I’ll shoot their tires out.”

Debbie Stevens ticked off the ominous events of the last two years around her six-street tract in Florissant, Mo., near the St. Louis airport: A driver almost coaxed a little boy into his car. Neighborhood kids blithely showed her 13-year-old daughter a gun. Two girls in nearby suburbs were abducted and killed--local crimes that stirred national interest in the wake of the Polly Klaas case.

“I think about it constantly,” Stevens said. “I keep thinking: ‘God, is it just me? Or is it the average American family?’ ” She suspects she knows the answer.

In this climate, the Times Poll found that 41% of respondents have taken steps to protect themselves from crime. For most, their choice has been the same as Witherspoon’s--to carry a concealed weapon, whether it be a gun, knife or Chemical Mace. One of four Americans now arms himself outside the home, nearly double the 13% of a 1981 Times survey. And almost 20% of those who moved last year said they did so at least in part to get away from crime.

Only last summer did politicians began picking up these hints of the nation’s edgy mood.

Gov. Pete Wilson’s reelection campaign manager, George Gorton, tells of trying in vain to herd 20 San Fernando Valley voters in a focus group back to the topic at hand: the state budget. But they kept turning the discussion to crime, Gorton said.

Even though California hasn’t shaken its recession, even though the state’s crime rate is not rising, “the level of intensity, the frequency of questions have pretty steadily escalated in the past year,” Wilson said recently.

There were other indicators. Among them: The Chatsworth, Calif., founders of Mad About Rising Crime, an activist group, saw a spurt in membership. So did both the National Rifle Assn. and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh says he saw a new demographic group, with votes and influence, lending voices to the chorus against crime. “For a long time, citizens in the inner city have dealt with this problem,” he said. “Now (concern) is prevalent (throughout) the middle of Middle America.”

It didn’t really matter why the public was so upset; it was clear the voters wanted something done. By the fall of 1993, politicians across the spectrum served up all manner of proposals.

Twenty-six governors spotlighted crime in their January State of the State addresses. In California, Minnesota, North Carolina and Oklahoma, governors sponsored crime “summits”--bringing citizens and officials together to discuss solutions. New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. called special legislative sessions to consider anti-crime laws, and Wilson called a special crime session running concurrently with the regular legislative session.

Officials in 17 states began considering boot camps for nonviolent offenders to clear prison space for the most brutal felons. Lawmakers in more than 23 states are considering gun-control measures. Officials in 16 states are mulling “three strikes and you’re out” laws that mandate life in prison on a third felony conviction.

Kansas House Speaker Bob Miller stated the obvious theme for the next legislative session in a newsletter sent to his colleagues. “It’s Crime, Stupid,” the headline read.

The crime bill that sat stalled in Congress for five years passed the Senate last November. It is under debate in the House, swollen with amendments that Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, puts in three categories: helpful, neutral and “just wacky.”

One would federalize every gang crime. “We’d end up adding 6,000 cases to the federal docket,” Biden said. Another would require the death penalty for killing a federal poultry inspector.

By November, the President was speaking out, hammering at crime and its ravages on inner-city families during a speech at a Memphis, Tenn., church.

Greenberg said he had noticed a change in the public’s mood, a linking of crime with the disintegration of the family.

Crime is now one of Clinton’s three top agenda items for this year, and has become the show-stopper of his recent speeches, including the State of the Union Address.

All of this--the flood of federal bills, the posturing, the speeches--is old news to veteran Washington hands like Donald Santarelli, who served in the Richard Nixon Administration as head of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration at the height of the “law-and-order” era.

“It’s like a steam engine,” he said. “A head of steam builds up until someone opens the valve, then the superheated steam vents out. Any astute pol recognizes that.”

The question is what to do with the steam.

“You reach a critical mass when people say: ‘I’ve had it,”’ said Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), a supporter of tough anti-crime measures. “We have an opportunity to do something real.”

Scholars of the nation’s attitudes on crime are skeptical. Much of the work is “pure symbolism,” said Roger Conner, executive director of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, a public-interest law firm. Politicians, he said, are “responding to their white, middle-class constituents” by “providing palliative measures that they hope will defuse their anger by election time.”

The new frenzy of anti-crime activity leaves many minority-group leaders, particularly African Americans, feeling a mixture of bemused appreciation and bitterness. They perceive the quailing of suburbanites, mostly whites, finally seizing the nation’s attention after city dwellers, mostly blacks, went unheard for so long.

While 64% of white respondents said they still feel safe walking in their own communities at night, the Times Poll found that only 36% of blacks and 41% of Latinos would say the same.

In Gary, Ind., the latest city to earn the despised sobriquet of U.S. “murder capital,” both coats and guns are checked by a glowering bouncer at the roadhouse where George Henley plays tenor sax with his jazz group, the Groovepacers. At the Nation of Islam mosque where he prays, four guards stand outside where two once sufficed. “Use your head,” Henley advises, “and you’ll be all right.”

But the new surge in concern about crime, urban leaders say, does not reflect concern about the George Henleys who confront violence each day. “I don’t get the sense that there is a great deal of altruism,” said Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke.

Most Americans, Schmoke said, are “saying they don’t want to see this spreading beyond the borders of the inner city.”

Although Christal Burnett of Hazelwood, Mo., said she does not consider herself a racist, when she pictures a criminal “in my mind I think ‘young black punk.’ I hate that that’s in my mind because I know there are a lot of bad white people.”

The Rev. Otis Moss, an influential African American preacher at Cleveland’s Olivet Baptist Church, said the heightened interest in crime is “30 years late.” Nevertheless, he is glad that attention is finally being paid. “It can no longer be looked upon as ‘those people.’ It can no longer be placed in the ‘over there’ category,” he said.

According to The Times Poll, most black Americans share his sentiments. Blacks are divided about whether tougher crime laws will increase prejudice, with 43% of Times Poll respondents agreeing they would and 44% disputing that contention. (Whites reject that idea, 71% to 18%; so do Latinos, 60% to 26%.) But even a wide majority of those who say they think that increased bias will result are in favor of the three-strikes approach.

And despite the growing focus on punishment, most of the respondents don’t see it as the only answer. In the poll, support for the Senate version of the crime bill drops from 64% to 37% if it drains money from social programs. Support for three-strikes laws also drops, from 79% to 58%, if such money is diverted or if taxes are increased. And 52% said they still feel that more money should go into education and job training.

Such signs of convergence of liberal and conservative, white and black views on crime leave Moss “not without hope.”

He compares the atmosphere to that of Montgomery, Ala., in December, 1955, when black housekeeper Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man.

“It is the moment,” Moss said, “when people’s cup of endurance runs over.”

Times librarian Mary Edwards in Los Angeles and researchers Doug Conner in Seattle, Lianne Hart in Houston, Ann Rovin in Denver, Tracy Shryer in Chicago, Edith Stanley in Atlanta and Anna Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.

THE TIMES POLL: As Concern Over Economy Drops, Crime Becomes a Top Issue

While most poll respondents say they fell safe in their communities, the issue of crime has soared as a national concern. Most say what they read in publications and view on TV has more influence on their feelings than personal experience.

CRIME CONCERNS HAVE SURGED . . .

What are the most important problems facing the country today? JAN ’94 Economy: 43% Crime: 40% *

. . . AND INTEREST IS WIDESPREAD

Those who say they believe that crime is a top problem facing the country, by race and locality: Whites: 38% Blacks: 70% Latinos: 47% City residents: 50% Suburban residents: 43% Rural residents: 38% Small town: 40% *

MOST CITE MEDIA REPORTS FOR THEIR CRIME VIEWS

Are your feelings about crime based more on what you read, see in the media or more on what you, your family and your acquaintances experience personally in the community? Media: 65% Personal experience: 21% Both equally: 13% Neither: 1% *

THERE’S LITTLE CHANGE IN NEIGHBORHOOD SAFETY SINCE EARLY ‘80s . . .

How safe do you feel out alone at night walking in your neighborhood?

1994 1981 Safe 58% 57% Unsafe 28% 29% Never walk at night 14% 12% Don’t know - 2%

*

. . . AND MOST FEEL SECURE IN THEIR COMMUNITIES

When it comes to the threat of crime, how safe do you feel in your community? Safe: 83% Unsafe: 17% *

PARENTS THINK THEIR CHILDREN ARE SAFE AS WELL

Do you think your children are safe in your neighborhood? Safe: 85% Unsafe: 14% Don’t know: 1% *

MOST FAVOR “THREE STRIKES” LEGISLATION NO MATTER THE TRADEOFFS

The “three strikes and you’re out” law would swell the number of prisoners and many states would have to build new prisons. New taxes might have to be raised and other funding may have to be cut or transferred to corrections. Favor “three strikes” despite the costs: 58% Favor it depending on the costs: 21% Oppose: 17% Don’t know: 4% Source: Los Angeles Times Poll national surveys

Is Anywhere Safe?

While violent crime is actually down overall, medium-sized cities and small towns are seeing increases, fueling fears that nowhere in America is safe. A look at the percentage of reported crimes for the first half of 1993 over the same period the previous year:

PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN REPORTED CRIME

Crime index Violent Forcible Aggravated total crime Murder rape assault Total -5% -3% 0% -4% -1% Cities: Over 1 million -7% -7% -6% -7% -5% 500,000 to 999,999 -2% -1% +7% -4% +2% 250,000 to 499,999 -4% -3% 0% -7% -1% 100,000 to 249,000 -3% +2% +6% -4% +5% 50,000 to 99,999 -5% -3% -1% -8% -2% 25,000 to 49,999 -5% 0% +13% -8% -2% 10,000 to 24,999 -6% -2% +1 +4% -2% Under 10,000 -4% +3% +1% 0% +4% Cities outside metropolitan areas -3% +2% +9% +1% +4%

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports for January-June, 1993, the latest available reporting period. The Crime Index is a compilation of offenses reported to law enforcement authorities. In addition to the individual categories listed above, it includes property crime, robbery, burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft.

States Go On the Offensive

Among the methods considered or undertaken on the state level to fight crime:

‘THREE STRIKES’

States considering some form of life imprisonment or elimination of parole for persons convicted of three serious or violent felonies (“three strikes and you’re out.”) Washington state enacted such a law last year.

Alaska

California*

Connecticut

Delaware

Georgia*

Massachusetts

Missouri

New Jersey

New York

North Carolina

Ohio

Oklahoma

Rhode Island

Tennessee*

Virginia

Wisconsin

* considering “two strikes and you’re out” for some felonies.

SENTENCING

States considering more stringent sentencing guidelines:

Arizona

California

Connecticut

Georgia

Idaho

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Missouri

Nebraska

New Jersey

New York

North Carolina

Oregon

S. Carolina

Virginia

W. Virginia

Wisconsin

JUVENILES

States considering trying juveniles as adults for serious crimes:

Alabama

Alaska

California

Colorado

Georgia

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

Massachusetts

Minnesota

New Jersey

North Carolina

Oklahoma

Utah

Washington

Source: Los Angeles Times