CIVILITY CAMPAIGN IN GREENWICH VILLAGE RAISES CIVIL-LIBERTY ISSUES

NEW YORK -- Friday night was balmy, and Aaron Cohen and his twin brother,
Ari, rolled down the windows of their Acura Integra and cranked up the
tunes as they tooled through Greenwich Village, past peddlers and prom
dates, bums and bankers. The 19-year-old college students never saw the
beefy arm hanging out of a cherry-red Ford Taurus.

The arm belonged to an undercover police officer, Thomas Purdy, who was
holding a sound meter, checking for stereos blasting at more than 68
decibels. Aaron Cohen's broke the barrier, and he left Greenwich Village
with a ticket for "unreasonable noise."

"This is like martial law," Ari Cohen grumbled.

The Cohens had stumbled into Operation Civil Village, an every-weekend
crackdown that has turned Manhattan's hothouse of bohemian culture into one
of the most heavily policed areas of New York City.

Amid the crazy quilt of colonial streets and rickety sidewalk bistro
tables, tourists and uptown visitors now find radar traps, sound traps,
drunken-driving checkpoints, stolen-vehicle checkpoints, motorcycle
checkpoints and license, registration and insurance-card checkpoints.

As a result, the Village, where so many movements have been born over the
centuries, now cradles a new one: a backlash against Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani's crackdown on quality-of-life crimes.

"I feel safe, but I also feel annoyed," said Kathleen Ryan, 45, the owner
of a travel agency who has lived in the Village for 10 years. "It's like
they're trying to make an example of everyone who comes to the Village."

To deter cruising on Fridays and Saturdays, officers block up to 10 streets
a night with sawhorses. The effort turns Avenue of the Americas into a
virtual parking lot and produces a cacophony of horns that has some
residents of nearby high-rises thinking about moving.

"It's overwhelming," said Joey Dominich, 33, a longtime AIDS activist who
lives in the Village. "I'm waiting for the tanks to come pouring in."

But Gene Bassin, a 70-year-old stockbroker, recalled the days when the
Village was a well-known drug-dealing zone where tourists often were
accosted with the question "Smoke?"

"This place was a horror before," Bassin said. "Now, it's almost as if this
place has been sanitized. The problems are small."

Jammed between Wall Street and midtown Manhattan, Greenwich Village is
known around the world as a haven for writers, musicians and other artists.
It remains largely raffish, although stretch limousines move in on weekends.

The Village is home to Life -- a club so hot, according to its promoter,
Steve Lewis, that "when Leonardo DiCaprio comes here, people don't even
talk to him."

Many residents of the Village say they appreciate the safer streets but are
exasperated with the phalanx of officers deployed on Friday and Saturday
nights. They say drivers and pedestrians are hounded, inconvenienced and
forced to supply identification even when they have done nothing wrong.

Thomas Duane, a Democrat who has represented Greenwich Village on the City
Council for six years, said he appreciates the greater police presence but
thinks the officers need to be better trained, especially in dealing with
young people.

"The libertarian streak runs very wide through Greenwich Village," he said.
"I get calls and letters from people who feel visitors, and even some
residents, are being harassed."

Alan Gerson, chairman of Community Board 2, expressed similar concerns. He
praised the improvements in policing in the last two years, but he added,
"The police need to be sensitive to the fact that they can be sending a
signal that's the opposite of what they intend, and create the perception
that the Village is more dangerous than it is."

Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union,
said that even some early supporters of Giuliani's aggressive approach to
enforcement were beginning to question its scope and direction. He predicts
that more people will begin to protest what he calls "the dark side of a
joyless mayoralty."

The police, on the other hand, see the program as a huge success, and they
offer these statistics with pride: Criminal-court summonses for the first
three months of the year were up 87 percent over last year, to 1,200, and
the number of traffic tickets rose to 4,100, from 3,400.

As a sign of the progress they have made, officers from the Sixth Precinct
show tattered photocopies of a 1993 article from New York magazine
declaring "The Village Under Siege" and chronicling a menacing mix of drug
dealers, drunks and window smashers.

"We have created a safe environment so people can relax and enjoy
themselves and then get home safely," said Capt. Gabrielle Sbano, who
directs the operation on most weekend nights.

And Giuliani enthusiastically defends the program.

"Most people in the Village," he said, "are very happy that there are fewer
drug dealers, that crime is down about 50 percent and that the quality of
life has improved."

A different view is offered by visitors like Marc Turkel and his fiancee,
Neena Beber, who said they recently spent more than an hour in a traffic
jam caused by a police checkpoint where Turkel had to produce
identification. He said he was never told why.

"It felt like a military state," said Turkel, 34, an architect who works in
the Village and lives nearby. "Once we turned onto the street, they
wouldn't let us leave. We were being physically held against our will."

Capt. Sbano said the roadblock had been set up to search for drunken
drivers. She acknowledged that long tie-ups result, but she said cars were
prevented from turning out of the line so that intoxicated drivers could
not evade arrest.

That explanation provided little to comfort Ms. Beber. "This whole notion
of having to show your papers when you haven't been doing anything wrong is
very disturbing," she said.

Another person caught up in Operation Civil Village was David Niewinski,
18, whose drinking of a 24-ounce Heineken on a bench in Bleecker Street
early Saturday drew two police cruisers, eight officers and a summons for
consuming alcohol in public and underage drinking.

For the Cohen twins, despite the ticket, the night could have turned out
far worse. When the noise from a car exceeds 76 decibels, the police seize
the car until the driver settles the summons. The driver is given a bag to
pack possessions, and then cannot retrieve the car until court opens on
Monday.

"You see these people dressed up to go to clubs, and they're walking down
the street with a garbage bag," Purdy, who was wielding the sound meter, said.

His partner, Kevin Mulcahy, said his fellow officers on the precinct's
cabaret squad, which specializes in quality-of-life crimes, are extra busy
these days. "We want to set a tone for the summer," he said.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company