Blotter for the First Year

In his campaign for the presidency, Richard Nixon touched a responsive chord when he promised voters an all-out war to make the nation's streets safe again. He also found a convenient target in the incumbent Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, who Nixon implied was to blame for much of the soaring crime rate. "If we are to restore respect for law in this country," Candidate Nixon told cheering Republicans in 1968, "there is one place we are going to begin. We are going to have a new Attorney General."

That new Attorney General was dour John Mitchell. His message was soon clear: less permissiveness and more punishment in federal law enforcement. Instead of Clark's philosophizing on individual rights, the nation would have aggressive prosecution of offenders. Whereas Clark had felt that his department should be concerned as much with social justice as with law enforcement, Mitchell took a narrower view of his job --simply as a lawyer for the Government. Clark was dismissed by Mitchell's deputy, Richard Kleindienst, as "a sociologist, not an aggressive prosecutor." Said Kleindienst condescendingly: "He would have been better at HEW."

Watchdogs and Guards. After a year in office, how does the new Administration's police blotter look? While Nixon and Mitchell have made some notable efforts against organized crime and drug traffic, they have discovered that crime in the streets is no respecter of party. Violent crimes are more numerous than ever. Nationwide, they jumped 12% during Nixon's first nine months in office--faster than the 85% rise in eight years under the Democrats. Forcible rape was up 17%, robbery 15%, murder and aggravated assault 9%.

Each day brings more new evidence that the U.S. urban dweller conducts his life as though in an armed camp. In New York last week, a court ruled that a woman tenant could keep a watchdog in her apartment, in violation of her lease, because of "the present circumstances of rampant crime." Schools around the U.S. have been hiring guards to protect students. In Washington, D.C., a 15-year-old junior high school student was shot to death recently in his school by a classmate.

Largely Hyperbole. It is the nation's capital, in fact, that supplies the most embarrassing evidence of the Administration's inability to curtail crime. The federal city is the one area where the Government can put its precepts directly to work. Yet in the first ten months after Nixon took office, serious crimes in the capital rose 29% over the previous year. The Administration has submitted to Congress an ambitious anticrime package for Washington, but its key provision is preventive detention of potentially dangerous defendants, a concept of such dubious constitutionality that even law-and-order conservatives are reluctant to endorse it.

Elsewhere, Mitchell has authorized wider use of wiretaps, ordered federal prosecutors not to concede a case simply because a suspect received inadequate warning against selfincrimination, and allocated $236 million to finance a new program to help localities fight crime. So far, his tactics have not paid off.

The main reason is that there is very little the Federal Government--under Republicans or Democrats--can do about the problem. Police powers belong to the states and they have jealously protected those prerogatives from federal incursions. Nixon's campaign comments were largely hyperbole, of the same ilk as John Kennedy's "missile gap" alarms of 1960. Mitchell admitted as much when he first met Clark at a cocktail party after the election and apologized for the personal campaign attacks. They were made, said Mitchell, only to personalize the crime issue.

Bailing Out. Ramsey Clark accepted the apology as part of politics, but he does not accept continuing law-and-order rhetoric now that Nixon and Mitchell are in office. He believes that loose promises delude people into thinking something is being done about crime while the real troubles, such as unemployment, housing and education, are ignored. "Law enforcement can only deal with the symptoms of crime," Clark says. "It's like, bailing out the basement without turning off the water."

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