CRIME: LAW AND ORDER

WANT TO SEE A CIVIC MONUMENT THAT NO CITY would ever want? Go to New Orleans and proceed to the intersection of Congress and Law streets, just a few blocks from the tourists' Latin Quarter. Walk anywhere in that neighborhood of trashed storefronts and blunt-shouldered housing projects. It won't take long to find walls that are spattered with grimy little craters. Those are bullet holes. Every one of them is an unofficial memorial to the mayhem that was daily life around there until not so long ago.

Starting in the late 1980s, drug dealers had claimed the place as their own, part sales ground, part killing ground, where they seized market share the hard way, with drive-by shootings and turf wars. At the nearby St. Philip Social Service Center, preschoolers learned to dive for the floor in "shooting drills,'' then stay there until their teachers sounded the all clear. By 1994 there were three or more killings each month on the streets outside. Standing now where the unthinkable used to be the unremarkable, police lieutenant Edwin Compass III looks around with a shudder. "I'd bet it was the most dangerous block in the U.S."

The good thing about monuments is they commemorate the past. Last year the city inaugurated a Community Oriented Policing Squad (COPS), now headed by Compass, a name so foursquare no novelist would dare invent it. With secondhand furniture and federal money, police set up round-the-clock substations in vacant apartments at three of the city's most deadly projects. The 45 cops assigned to them work foot patrol, get to know the law-abiding residents and sweep out the street dealers. They also help pick up trash, combat graffiti and round up kids who play hooky.

That mix of shoe leather and social work has made a difference. By the end of last year killings around the three projects had dropped 74%. A dozen dead bodies per annum is still no small problem. But if you don't happen to be one of them, it is cause enough for celebration. Lately, the neighborhood even sees its share of those spontaneous street parades that are defining outbreaks of civic life in New Orleans. What are people celebrating? Maybe just the return of their freedom to move around.

New Orleans is not alone. After years of depressing and implacable upswing, serious crime is retreating all around the U.S. In the nine cities with a population of more than 1 million, the decrease in violent crimes was 8% in 1994. Nationally, murders fell 12% in the first six months of 1995, and serious crimes of all kinds dropped 1% to 2%. The suburbs, long a growth area for felonies, posted declines between 4% and 5% last year in violent crime.