A PUFF IN NEW YORK SUBWAY CAN MEAN NIGHT IN JAIL

NEW YORK - Some police officers enforcing Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's
continuing crackdown on quality-of-life crimes in New York are
focusing their efforts on a new public menace, according to defense
lawyers and prosecutors.

This spring, a dozen people have been arrested and jailed overnight
for smoking cigarettes on Manhattan subway platforms. The formal
charge is disorderly conduct.

The arrests come as defense lawyers say that the city's
quality-of-life crackdown, which has long taken aim at turnstile
jumpers and marijuana smokers, is continuing apace and broadening.

While city officials credit that approach with driving down crime by
allowing document checks, defense lawyers assail it as expensive and
unfair overkill that frequently involves racial profiling.

Police officers, they contend, are arresting growing numbers of people
for increasingly petty offenses.

Mundane offenses that resulted in a summons or a warning in the past,
defense lawyers said, now result in a night in jail until people have
been checked and arraigned.

The one-night jail terms usually be come the only punishment for the
crime, because most defendants in such cases are sentenced to time
served. If they had been given summonses and appeared in court later,
they would probably have been fined but not sentenced to any time in
jail.

Defense lawyers cited a string of arrests this spring as
examples.

In interviews, three men recently apprehended for smoking on subway
platforms expressed astonishment at what had happened to them. One
man, arrested by Officer Richard Nenadich at I a.m. Wednesday at the
137th Street station of the Seventh Avenue line, said he could not
believe he had spent a night in jail for smoking a cigarette

"This is ridiculous," he said.

David Kapner, the Legal Aid Soci ety's Manhattan arraignment super
visor, said smoking was the latest pretext the police were using to
stop people and check them for warrants or weapons. "Last spring, they
were arresting people for taking up too much space on park benches,"
he said.

Quality-of-life arrests involve a host of petty offenses. On Feb. 5,
for example, Officer John O'Reilly arrested a 27-year-old man in
Manhattan for selling tamales on the street without a license,
according to court papers. The man was held overnight.