COLUMN ONE : Taming the Mean Streets : Cities are reclaiming besieged areas by erecting traffic barriers and cracking down on panhandlers and loitering. Some fear loss of freedoms.

It was the prostitute loitering in his driveway that tipped the balance for Patrick Donnelly. For Karen DeMasi-Risk, it was the drive-by shooting just a few houses down from her own.

All the residents of the Five Oaks neighborhood can identify the moment when they felt the streets around their homes slipping from their control. In the summer of 1991, this integrated, middle-class area just north of downtown seemed on the brink of collapse.

Suburban commuters dodging a nearby interstate clogged the residential streets at rush hour. Chipped paint and rotting porches testified to sinking home values and absentee landlords. Open-air drug deals, random gunfire and prostitution were snaking from the neighborhood’s scruffy periphery into its heart.

After conventional police crackdowns failed, the city and neighborhood association, almost in desperation, brought in architect Oscar Newman, known for his innovative design responses to urban problems.

Newman surveyed Five Oaks and devised a solution at once simple and radical: With brick and iron gates, he closed off 35 streets and 26 alleys across the neighborhood to all but pedestrians.

His aims: to eliminate commuter traffic, to make the area harder to navigate for people cruising off the interstate for drugs and prostitutes, and to give residents a greater sense of control over the public spaces around their homes.

One year later, the results have been dramatic. Traffic has plummeted, neighborhood watch activities have increased, housing prices are up 15%, violent crime has dropped in half and arrests for burglary, auto theft and vandalism have fallen sharply.

With this aggressive initiative to arrest a cycle of disorder in Five Oaks, Dayton joined a new urban policy movement that has raised complex questions of rights, responsibilities and fairness from coast to coast.

A loose network of law enforcement officials, architects and urban theorists is advancing an agenda to combat threatening behavior in public spaces, particularly city streets and parks. By cracking down on rowdy teen-agers, aggressive panhandlers, low-level drug dealers and prostitutes, they are trying to nip disorder and incivility before they lead to more serious crime.

In its quest to dispel some of the menace clouding urban life, Dayton has not gone as far as some cities, whose emphasis on law enforcement has raised stiff objections from civil libertarians. Even such traditionally liberal bastions as San Francisco and Seattle are pushing ordinances to restrict aggressive panhandling. New efforts to combat truancy are sprouting in Milwaukee and St. Louis.

In New York City, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, have built their law enforcement strategy around a coordinated attack on all of these “quality of life” violations, from graffiti and street prostitution to small-time drug dealing and truancy.

In the spirit of Newman’s work in Dayton, others are redesigning urban parks, including Bryant Park in Manhattan and Pershing Square in Los Angeles, to attract nearby workers and discourage drug-dealing and panhandling. And dozens of cities, including Los Angeles, are moving toward community-based policing--more officers walking a beat and combatting disorder.

These efforts to reclaim public spaces are based on the theory that disorderly conduct, by signaling a breakdown in social and law enforcement controls, leads to more serious law-breaking. In a classic 1982 article in The Atlantic, criminal justice experts George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson concluded that disorder invites more serious crime in the way that broken windows on a car invite vandals to strip the tires.

“We start with the premise of the broken windows theory--it is important to maintain a sense of order, and for people to feel the public spaces are available to them,” says Jeremy Travis, deputy commissioner of police for legal matters in New York City. “Our belief is that if you take care of the little things, the big things will follow.”

Civil libertarians and homeless advocates denounce these attempts to restrict panhandling as authoritarian efforts to shelter the middle class from the problems of destitution. They charge that “defensible space” plans such as Five Oaks’ are really intended to exclude minorities.

Without greater efforts to shelter the homeless and treat those addicted to drugs, they argue, attempts to impose order through law enforcement will only overload police departments and courts that are already groaning under the weight of more serious crimes.

“The trouble with all of these proposals is they just focus on reclaiming public spaces through more punitive measures . . . rather than focusing on the underlying problems and trying to deal with them in a more humane way,” says Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

Advocates of the public spaces agenda counter that disorder is not only a symptom but a cause of urban distress. As much as muggings or burglary, they maintain, threatening street behavior drives the middle class from cities. With arguments that parallel calls for greater personal responsibility from the recipients of government aid, they say that while society is obliged to help the needy, it must also demand minimum standards of personal conduct from everyone.

“These initiatives are coming from the cities regarded as the most progressive, the most enlightened and tolerant,” says Robert Teir, general counsel for the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, a group supporting these new laws. “These cities seem to have concluded that a tolerance for diversity doesn’t have to mean an end to standards of public conduct.”

This nascent movement has caught the attention of senior White House officials. William A. Galston, deputy director of domestic policy for President Clinton, recently hosted a private daylong seminar at the White House with Kelling, Travis, George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni and other advocates of the order agenda.

Beneath the rhetorical volleys, the debate is actually about balancing the enduring American values of order and liberty.

Few Americans would want to live in cities that enforce order as enthusiastically as Singapore, where chewing gum is illegal and graffiti can be cause for caning. And only the purest civil libertarians argue that the First Amendment protects all street behavior short of assault.

“We are trying to strike a balance between individual civil liberties like freedom of speech and freedom of movement against the rights of the community to expect certain minimum standards of behavior that are necessary to preserve a well-ordered community,” says Seattle City Atty. Mark Sidran, who drafted that city’s law against aggressive panhandling.

For law enforcement officials, this renewed focus on order carries a distant echo. Maintaining urban order was the principal mission of police departments when they were formed in the mid-19th Century: “They preserved the public peace; they monitored public spaces,” wrote one historian.

But over time police shifted their focus from maintaining order to responding to crime. In large part the change came because of growing concern that maintaining order was a euphemism for suppressing minorities and others viewed as undesirable.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court accelerated the transformation by invalidating vagrancy laws--the principal legal tool used by law enforcement to regulate street behavior--for being unconstitutionally vague and granting police too much discretion.

Cities then advanced broad anti-loitering laws that, unlike vagrancy statutes, banned particular forms of behavior such as panhandling and soliciting prostitution. But the courts generally also have rejected this approach as too broad. A federal appeals court in 1993 voided a New York state law that amounted to a complete ban on begging, saying that it violated the First Amendment rights of the poor.

Cities have responded by still more precisely identifying prohibited street behavior.

Seattle is typical. It is considered relatively generous in its policies toward the homeless. But as the number of street people has increased, particularly in shopping areas, merchants grew increasingly fearful of lost business and pushed the city to restrict disruptive begging.

Last fall the City Council passed ordinances that bar sitting or lying on the streets during business hours and outlaw aggressive panhandling that could “intimidate” pedestrians. Sidran says the measures were necessary to prevent a “dangerous downward spiral” that would invite more crime.

But to John Fox, coordinator for the Seattle Displacement Coalition, the measures sought only to “drive homeless people out of public places” where they might offend shoppers and tourists.

Homeless advocates quickly filed suit to overturn the new laws. In early March a federal district court upheld the city’s ban on sitting or lying in the streets and trimmed--but did not overturn--the restrictions on panhandling.

Five days after the Seattle decision, another federal district court judge denied a motion from homeless advocates for an injunction against aspects of San Francisco’s coordinated crackdown on public drinking, obstruction of sidewalks and aggressive panhandling.

Teir says those decisions show that courts now appear willing to give cities more freedom to regulate street behavior if they narrowly tailor their restrictions and have a history of providing services to the homeless.

But Beth Andrus, attorney for the Seattle coalition appealing the district court decision, says these initiatives remain vulnerable if they criminalize innocent conduct, such as sitting in the street.

The final boundaries on cities’ ability to regulate panhandling will not be set until the Supreme Court tackles one of these cases, which probably won’t be for at least two years, Teir predicts.

Truancy crackdowns, propelled by the same concerns, have raised a different set of issues.

In some cities, truancy initiatives have been almost entirely non-controversial. Since last November, Milwaukee police have been rounding up 30 to 40 truants daily and taking them--typically in handcuffs--to centers run by the the city’s Boys and Girls Clubs. At the centers, counselors advise the students on programs the clubs offer, and sheriff’s deputies notify their parents, who are obliged to retrieve them.

The program has drawn almost no complaints from parents and community leaders--and high marks from law enforcement. Police have confiscated weapons and drugs from truants, and officials at the centers say that few students swept up a first time have been found on the streets again.

“We’ve all been talking about crime prevention,” says Milwaukee County Sheriff Richard Artison, an enthusiastic supporter. “This is one of the best ways.”

But in other cities, critics hear echoes of the discredited vagrancy laws. In New York, the American Civil Liberties Union fears that truancy sweeps will come down hardest on black and Latino students. In Philadelphia, the Board of Education was forced to shelve a Milwaukee-like plan this year when several City Council members recoiled from the prospect that police would demand identification and even handcuff youths because they were not in school.

“We had City Council members who described the proposal as turning Philadelphia into South Africa in terms of stopping people and asking them for ID,” says Jane Malone, who studied truancy for the organization Philadelphia Citizens For Children and Youth.

And yet in some cities, heavily minority neighborhoods are among those clamoring loudest for greater efforts to suppress disorder. Some community organizers argue that the loss of parks and other public spaces to disruptive behavior most harms lower-income residents, who cannot retreat to country clubs or private pools.

“In the nice white communities don’t be drunk on the street, don’t be throwing down litter, the cops will stop you,” says Ace Backus, a community organizer for the Sherman Park Community Assn. in Milwaukee. “In the middle of the black ghetto you can do that and the police will drive past. It’s reverse discrimination.”

Racial politics also shadowed the redesign plan in Five Oaks. Some residents, both black and white, complained that the plan was designed to wall off the community from an almost all-black neighborhood to its southwest.

Those criticisms did not derail the plan, primarily because Five Oaks itself is integrated. But the allegation of discrimination and exclusion remains a sore point in Dayton and virtually everywhere cities have taken steps aimed at deterring disorder.

For all the political and legal fireworks that the order agenda is generating, its impact remains uncertain. “Why do they think if you pass another law, police will be able to enforce it?” Ripston wonders.

Still, the order advocates can claim some successes. As chief of New York’s transit police in the 1980s, Bratton implemented an anti-crime strategy that emphasized regulating disorderly behavior. From 1990 to 1993, subway robberies and assaults dropped by about 40%.

In Five Oaks, Newman’s plan--supplemented by targeted police and housing code violation enforcement and an assistance program to encourage homeowners and landlords to spruce up properties--has lifted the cloud of demoralization over the neighborhood, residents say.

On a warm night earlier this spring, children and families had almost entirely supplanted cars on the tree-lined streets. Two summers earlier, said Patrick Donnelly, families avoided the streets for fear that cars would screech away at high speeds from drug deals.

As families have moved back onto their front porches, the area has experienced what some here term the reverse of the “broken windows” cycle. With more families in the streets, residents feel more confident censuring disorderly behavior, and the heightened vigilance has made the area less hospitable to criminals, says Major Jaruth Durham-Jefferson of the Dayton Police Department.

“In the minds of some residents, this was about setting up a zone that we could defend,” she says. “It’s not that at all. It’s setting up a zone where they can have more control.”

There is a strong sense that all of these gains are fragile. Drug dealing remains a problem in some areas, and the daily conflicts of a racially and economically diverse population persist.

The lesson here may be that in urban areas, disorder is like the tide: It can be held back only with constant exertion.

“We’re not sitting back saying we’ve got the streets closed, we’re done,” says Karen DeMasi-Risk, who has lived in Five Oaks for 14 years. “We’re not done. Now we are saying, ‘We can breathe, what’s the next step?’ It never stops.”