MAYOR 'NOSE' WHEN TO BLITZ CRIME

A day after Mayor Giuliani got assaulted by the scent of marijuana wafting
in a Midtown breeze, his administration is renewing its war on
quality-of-life offenses.

"I was walking out of the speech that I gave [and] I smelled marijuana. I
turned around and these guys took off, and my detail couldn't catch them,"
Giuliani said yesterday at City Hall.

The mayor had just addressed widows and orphans of firefighters.

"You do not get to smoke marijuana. If you do, we're going to arrest you,"
he declared.

The crackdown will focus on such offenses as street prostitution and
panhandling and will use computer statistics to identify hot spots around
the city.

Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said that in recent weeks precinct
commanders had "identified 800 different problem areas, some very minute,
some [with] bigger problems than others."

"Those areas will be handled just like violent crime, murders, robberies .
. . if we stay on them constantly through the Compstat process, we'll be
able to keep them to a very minimal level," he added.

Compstat is the method by which police brass distribute resources based on
computer statistics to identify areas where crime is on the rise.

Giuliani said there are intricate connections between violent crime and
minor offenses and that some of the most dangerous criminals were nabbed on
quality-of-life offenses.

"When we did our first squeegee-operator blitz, we found that 30 to 40
percent of them were wanted for violent crimes," the mayor said.

The last quality-of-life initiative, which began just before Thanksgiving
last year, targeted the homeless, infuriating civil libertarians and
others. Some 1,317 were arrested, others were steered to hospitals and
shelters, and some just moved along.

Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union,
contends that many of those arrests were false arrests and said he is
poised to challenge the administration if sweeps begin again this holiday
season.

"If it's merely public relations and his legacy we don't care, but if it's
a change towards the homeless, panhandlers, then we'll need to challenge it
legally," Siegel said.

He pointed to Boston and San Diego as cities that drove crime down by
creating partnerships between cops and communities.

"Giuliani has not done that," he said. "I'm glad crime is down but we have
to be on guard with these kinds of initiatives. You can't always send the
cops in."

The "Mayor's Quality of Life Initiative 2000" is in essence the same policy
that his administration has had for the past six years. He said the
difference this time is that it needed to be "reinvigorated" and included
in Compstat.

Officials said noise complaints have been the most frequent reports made to
the city's 877-677-LIFE hot line. Other areas to be targeted will be public
consumption of alcohol, squeegee men, graffiti artists and the homeless.