PERSPECTIVE ON CRIME : Bring in the Army to End the Fear : Order in Mogadishu is no less important than safe streets--and supermarket parking lots--in Los Angeles.

Last weekend’s murderous attack on the two Japanese students in Los Angeles is a stark and tragic reminder that the police have lost the ability to control crime on our streets. Car-jackings will take place whether or not the police go on strike.

We need the police. They are heroes and heroines. We do not pay them enough to risk their lives and health the way those on patrol do every day. And we do not put enough of them on the streets to really reduce crime.

Yes, we need those 3,000 new police officers that Mayor Richard Riordan made the linchpin of his campaign. But even if the mayor has the political courage to offer a realistic plan to pay their salaries and get them on the streets, they won’t be enough. Too many of our neighborhoods are out of control. The young, the crazy, the drunk and the drugged are armed. Fear stalks us.

We have grown too comfortable expecting police officers to lose their lives confronting menaces to society. Police officers, restaurant patrons, bystanders and babies are gunned down. We mourn for a few moments when we see their photos in the paper or on television. But it passes. They are buried, and what remains is more fear for us. The police continue taking life-threatening risks, without any real promise of an intervention that will change the situation for the better.

We can’t stop car-jackings and all the other urban horrors with a local police force. “Three strikes and you’re out” will send third-time felons to jail for life while subjecting the rest of us to three felonies before they are put away. It has gotten so that the police and small-market owners, armed and in flak jackets, are the front lines of the battle to reclaim our city. Without drastic intervention, it is a losing battle.

It’s time to send the Army into our cities to restore order, to disarm dangerous populations and to detain those who are causing their neighbors to live in fear. Why should we be sending thousands of troops to restore order in Mogadishu when on most days, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington experience worse gunfire? Why should we be deploying troops to face up to North Korea? It is surrounded by some of the richest, lowest-crime societies in the world. Let them face down North Korea, if it truly is a risk. Use our soldiers, for which we all pay so much, in defense of our troubled cities.

We seem to have accepted the premise that our army is to be used only abroad and our soldiers’ lives should almost never be at risk. We have shown a willingness to pay for the world’s most expensive and best-equipped military forces, but we have not thought creatively about how we might use them as an interim force to back up our police. Our police departments are understaffed and underequipped to do the job that most of us put as our highest public priority. They lack modern communications and logistics equipment--supplies that we lavish on our military.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke more than 60 years ago about his dream of an America free from fear, he could not have envisioned the sad, violent face of America today. Millions of people, old and young, sit imprisoned in their homes or anxious in their cars. They are afraid to venture out for fear that they will face the barrel of a gun or never know what hit them.

We talk of human rights. In the United States, our emphasis has been on protecting the political rights of the individual. We have not emphasized the right of the community to live in an ordered society, where it is reasonable to expect civil behavior from the young men you meet on the street.

We avoid the streets and if possible the young men who are most likely to kill or rob us. We send the police out to confront them--knowing they have neither the tools nor the numbers to get the situation under control. We have become callous about violence and unwilling to pay to get it under control. As Erica Stenta, a friend of the murdered student Takuma Ito, said, “We have to stop accepting this as a normal, everyday part of life. . . . It can’t go on like this.”

Help the police. Bring in the army to get control of our neighborhoods. Create a society free from pervasive fear. That, too, should be a human right worth working for.