In Giulianiville, it's a case of law vs. order

Just his name, Rudolph Giuliani, conjures up two wildly different images.

In one, the leader of America's largest city is the dragonslayer of urban crime, the prince of safe streets, a standardbearer for mayors everywhere. In the other view, much less flattering, he's a law-and-order zealot who tends to overlook constitutional niceties such as freedom of expression.

Lately, these two views have clashed with increasing regularity, with the result that the mayor is often in court defending his tactics as he tries to tame the mean streets of New York. Just in the past two weeks, federal judges ruled that he violated the Constitution when he tried to deny a parade permit to the Ku Klux Klan and yanked city funds from the Brooklyn Museum.

While Giuliani usually loses these legal battles, he may yet win in the court of public opinion. There's a quiet but sizable constituency, it appears, for putting renewed emphasis on quality-of-life crimes such as loitering, vagrancy, and disorderly conduct - a fact not lost on mayors around the US who watch The Giuliani Chronicles with interest.

A veteran lawyer, Giuliani "knows the law as well as anyone else, yet he turns a blind eye to the law, prompts these lawsuits, and goes after these groups," says constitutional scholar David Rudenstine of Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan. "I have no idea what he is trying to achieve by this, other than headlines and vote-getting."

The collision between law and order and freedom of expression is found in other venues, too. Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court said Chicago's antigang loitering ordinance was unconstitutional. And in Austin, Texas, civil-liberties groups are bringing suit against Gov. George W. Bush, charging that state police are illegally arresting people who hold protests near the governor's mansion.

But nowhere does the conflict play out in sharper relief than it does here, where an unabashed law-and-order mayor meets a tradition of boisterous free speech.

Indeed, Giuliani's emphasis on controlling disorderly behavior in public spaces has made New York a successful experiment in the "broken windows" theory of crime reduction. This theory holds that eliminating signs of neglect (such as broken windows) and low-level crime (such as graffiti), and enforcing street-order laws, will help reduce serious crime In cities.

"Mayor after mayor, because they've listened to citizens' concerns, have rediscovered something citizens themselves have known for a long time - that disorderly behavior creates both fear and leads to serious crime," says "broken windows" pioneer George Kelling, a professor at Rutgers University's School of Criminal Justice in Newark, N.J.

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