Chicago Police Seek Warrantless Sweeps to Seize Guns : Crime: Years of raids at tenement complex failed to break grip of gang violence. Court test on heated constitutional issue is expected today.

Like soldiers in an army of occupation, squads of police officers fan out each night through the Robert Taylor Homes, a tombstone row of high-rise tenement buildings that loom for 18 city blocks over the Dan Ryan Expressway in south Chicago. Ignoring taunts from gang members, they poke through bullet-pocked elevator shafts, boiler rooms and laundry commons, searching for automatic weapons.

Today Chicago Housing Authority director Vincent Lane is hoping a court will allow police to do much more--storm through the doors of individual apartments without warrants, and give them free reign to seize guns, drugs and contraband without first obtaining a judge’s consent.

U.S. District Judge Wayne R. Anderson will rule on a request by the American Civil Liberties Union for a preliminary injunction against the raids. Although Anderson issued a restraining order last month against warrantless raids, he indicated last week that in emergency situations he might allow some inspections without warrants.

Lane’s resolve has been bolstered by support from Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who testified before Anderson last week that tenants at the 4,400 Taylor apartments “want the guns out of these buildings.”

Six years of repeated police sweeps in the Taylor homes have failed to break the grip of gang violence. For the last week, Chicago police have been on “vertical patrol,” a building-by-building sweep of the Taylor homes prompted by a flare-up of gunfire that prompted 324 shooting incidents in four days. It was a grim record for a place that is a human shooting range, a 28-building complex where automatic weapons fire is so common that fusillades routinely greet the coming of warm weather every spring.

The promise of drastic measures against crime in return for the suspension of constitutional rights is an alluring trade-off for many Americans at a time when fear of violence has reached a fever pitch. But the push for warrantless raids by Lane has divided Taylor’s 12,300 residents and embroiled civil liberties groups, anti-crime activists and even the Clinton Administration in the dispute.

On Wednesday, Lane said that federal Housing and Urban Development officials have told him they support the concept of warrantless raids and other toughened security measures to protect public housing residents.

Lane said he expected federal officials to “intervene on our behalf” in the lawsuit, backing not only the raids, but the installation of metal detectors in building lobbies and mandatory identity cards for project residents.

HUD spokeswoman Vivian Potter confirmed only that agency officials are examining several options. But several high-ranking Housing, Justice and White House officials said Wednesday that despite their empathy for Lane’s tactics and the plight of Taylor tenants, there are no plans for court intervention.

Lane first ordered police into apartments without permission last summer, after gang members chased off housing workers installing child-proof screens on windows inside one Taylor building. The ACLU sought the restraining order halting the raids.

Ethel Washington, one of Taylor’s two tenant group presidents, says only her “loud mouth” halted a raid on her apartment. “We’re all afraid of guns down here, but we’re fools if we start giving up our rights to get rid of them,” Washington said.

Both the ACLU and the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, a public interest group which filed a motion in support of the raids, are representing Taylor residents, each claiming they have a majority of tenants on their side.

More than 5,000 housing project residents have petitioned the court stating their willingness to give up the right of search and seizure to free their buildings of guns. Among them is Artensa Randolph, who heads all of the city’s public housing tenant councils. Randolph, who lives in a low-rise project across the street from the Taylor homes, still mourns a grandson killed two years ago during a gang shootout.

“My feeling is these ACLU lawyers are forcing us and our children to limit our lives,” Randolph said. “We’re tired of having to run for cover and grab our kids every time we hear gunshots. What kind of life is that?”

For the moment, the so-called vertical patrols are working. The staccato of semiautomatics has given way to silence. Only a few brave children have returned to the project’s battered playgrounds.

“My grand-mama said I could come for 15 minutes,” said Taneesha Wright, 9, stuffed into a puffy Windbreaker. “And it’s almost up,” said her grandmother, who stood sternly watching nearby. “You got two more minutes on the swing.”

Chicago Police Commander Robert Guthrie, who heads a force of 100 officers assigned to patrol all of the city’s public housing units, said 31 guns, mostly automatic weapons, have been recovered from elevator shafts, trash chutes and other public areas. The sweeps have netted 24 arrests on an assortment of weapons charges, criminal trespassing and rock cocaine and marijuana possession.

“We go in each building for six or seven hours, secure it and talk to the residents to reassure them,” Guthrie said. “For the moment, it calms things down.”

The sweeps are only a temporary abatement, police acknowledge.

Even augmented by 400 housing authority police, there are not enough officers to remain on permanent patrol in the Taylor homes--not when violence can erupt anytime at the notorious Cabrini-Green projects downtown, as it did 14 months ago, or in any of the city’s other high-rise projects.

“It’s like squeezing a balloon,” Guthrie said. “We push down hard one place and crime pops up someplace else.”

It was not just the endless volleys of gunfire that proved the potency of competing Black Disciple and Gangster Disciple gangs in the Taylor homes last week. It was also the ease with which gang members cut the lights in several northern buildings and the brazenness with which they evicted one Taylor building manager at gunpoint.

And there has been a deadly spillover effect beyond the Taylor homes’ borders, out into neighboring communities like Englewood, where two youths were shot to death in separate incidents linked to the housing project unrest.

City officials have floated several theories for the violence. Lane says it stems from a South Side bar spat. Chicago Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez blames the gunfire on a dispute over the “turf tax” paid to gang members by outside drug dealers. Guthrie would only say police have detected “fluidity” in relations between the Black Disciple and Gangster Disciple gangs.

The cat-and-mouse game between police and gang members proceeds with wearying regularity.

Many tenants scoff at the police sweeps. “They’re as regular as elevator breakdowns,” snorted Taylor resident Roosevelt Harris the morning after housing security officers stormed through the 16-story residence where he lives at 53rd and State streets.

Housing police are mocked as “Robos” for their uniformed impotence, Harris said. City police officers are more respected. “They mean business,” Harris said.

But most residents know that as soon as the vertical patrols are gone, the drug dealers will be back.

“That’s life in Taylor, baby,” Harris said.

Times staff writer Ronald Brownstein in Washington contributed to this story.