KEEPING TABS ON THE PEOPLE KEEPING TABS

YESTERDAY morning, as usual, the report on Operation Clean Sweep was
sitting in the center of Theodore Roosevelt's old desk on the 14th floor of
Police Headquarters. It informed the current commissioner, Raymond W.
Kelly, of notable incidents the day before:

PSummonses for urinating in public were issued to three people on Port
Richmond Avenue near Charles Avenue, in Staten Island. Seven other people
in that stretch were cited for under-age drinking.

POne squeegee operator got a summons at Queens Plaza South and Jackson
Avenue in Long Island City, Queens.

PTwo summonses for aggressive panhandling were issued on Jerome Avenue near
the Cross Bronx Expressway.

It's probably safe to assume that Theodore Roosevelt did not spend a lot of
mornings at Police Headquarters worrying about the precise number of New
Yorkers caught urinating or panhandling the day before. But then, he didn't
have the benefit of computers or of the broken-window theory of controlling
crime by preventing disorder in public spaces.

"You take care of the little things and you help stop big things from
happening," said Mr. Kelly, who gets the daily reports from 200 spots in
the city, with recurring complaints about disorderly conduct and other
petty offenses. It's part of his new effort to track these problems with
the same computerized tools used to track more serious crime in the
department's vaunted Compstat program.

"What you measure gets done," Mr. Kelly said, and repeated his appeal for
New Yorkers to call in complaints to the quality-of-life hotline at
888-677-LIFE. "We want to know where the work is. Tell us."

He pointed to what had happened at the Customs Service after he and Paul J.
Browne, an adviser there who is now a deputy police commissioner, began
monitoring the number of searches to see if they were being made
unnecessarily. "Paul and I put in a system where I got a report every
morning on the searches," he said. "The number of searches went down by 70
percent, while at the same time the number of drug seizures went up 25
percent."

For New Yorkers worried about a return to the bad old days, for Giuliani
fans concerned that some of the appointments at City Hall sound like
Dinkins Redux, the new effort to monitor quality-of-life offenses is
probably the most encouraging news so far from the Bloomberg
administration. Longtime cranks like myself are delighted to think that the
police will pay attention to our complaints now that their boss is keeping
tabs.

But some of us cranks can't help complaining about one very big
quality-of-life problem that so far is not a focus of Operation Clean Sweep
even though it's by far the No. 1 complaint of New Yorkers: noise.

LAST year, more than 80 percent of the calls to the quality-of-life hotline
were about noise, while fewer than 2 percent were about the problems
monitored in Operation Clean Sweep: public drinking and drug use, squeegee
operations, public urination, aggressive panhandling, prostitution,
disorderly conduct by homeless people, illegal peddling.

"Why aren't police focusing on the most important quality-of-life problem?"
said Arline Bronzaft, a psychologist who is a member of the mayoral agency
the Council on the Environment. "Last year more than 97,000 calls to the
quality-of-life hotline were about noise, and 20 were about squeegee men. A
squeegee man doesn't cause sleeplessness and learning problems in children."

Dr. Bronzaft, who for decades has been the city's most dedicated antinoise
crusader, said that noise was one of the top three environmental issues,
along with air pollution and litter, cited by community boards in a
citywide survey conducted by the Council on the Environment in 1999.
Research by the Census Bureau has shown that noise, not crime, is the major
reason Americans give for wanting to move.

Mr. Kelly said that the police in the future would be paying more attention
to noise complaints received at both the quality-of-life hotline and the
911 system, in order to identify trouble spots and send in extra officers.
Dr. Bronzaft wants to see noise tracked as carefully as criminal offenses.

"Many police officers don't see noise as a serious issue, but it's often
symptomatic of bigger social problems, and it can lead to violence," she
said. "Police have told me there's nothing they can do about most noise
complaints, but just having an officer show up can make a big difference in
bringing peace and avoiding future complaints." And that officer is a lot
more likely to show up if he knows that someone high above him is keeping
count of each complaint.