A Response to Fear

Crime and fear of crime are evergrowing realities of the city streets, and nowhere are they more acute than in the District of Columbia. Last week the Senate responded to the condition and the mood by passing the tough and controversial D.C. crime bill. The 54-33 vote was carried by a coalition that cut across party and traditional philosophical lines to come down for a measure that provides for broadened wiretap powers, preventive detention and "no-knock" entry when police officers feel that revealing their identity might result in destruction of evidence or endanger their lives.

The Senate fight against the bill was led by North Carolina's conservative Democrat Sam Ervin, whose image as the strictest constructions! of them all has moved him to combat such diverse events as civil rights legislation and the proliferation of computerized data banks. Ervin's argument that the bill was unconstitutional persuaded only two of the Southern colleagues who had followed his legal lead on so many other bills. And he was opposed by a collection of liberal Northern Senators who might ordinarily be expected to share his constitutional conviction that the bill must be defeated. Opponents were hampered by a scant week's debate on the complex, 243-page bill. But the overriding factor deciding many key, usually liberal votes was the magnitude of Washington's crime problem and the scope of the issue's political ramifications in an election year.

Desperate Crime. Democratic Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana was one of the earliest to show the temper of the Senate. After President Nixon scored the Congress in June for failing to act on his anticrime legislation, Hartke, who faces a tough re-election race against a conservative Republican opponent, issued a statement to his constituents praising the merits of the Nixon proposals. Wisconsin's Democratic William Proxmire explained that the Senate's and the public's fear of crime outweighed obscure and difficult-to-explain constitutional rights: "Where you have a desperate crime-increase situation, you take measures you might not take otherwise."

But it was Charles Percy, a first-term Republican from Illinois who will not run for a second term until 1972, who better reflected the Senate's mood. He had strong doubts about the bill when it was first reported out of conference. After attending the funeral earlier in the week of a Chicago policeman slain by snipers, he returned to Washington to vote for the D.C. crime bill.

The Republican leadership fell in line behind the President; Hugh Scott voted for the bill, as did his potential challengers for the post of minority leader, Robert Griffin and Howard Baker. The Administration kept up the pressure: Justice Department official Donald Santarelli was a constant visitor to the Hill; Attorney General John Mitchell appeared early in the week to sanitize the language of the debate, changing "No-Knock" to the presumably less odious "Quick Entry."

But in the end, it was not constitutionality, lobbying or more palatable phrases that carried the day. On the floor, Senators talked of the "balance" of good and evil, and safeguards in the bill that leaned toward, if they did not wholly embrace Fourth and Eighth Amendment rights. Proponents applauded its proposals for such reforms as an overhaul of the District's clogged court system and a public-defender program. The fine distinctions, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield asserted, could be decided later in the courts. Opposition Leader Ervin protested that by then the D.C. bill would be a model for a federal law affecting the entire nation. The American Civil Liberties Union moved quickly to close the time gap. The day after the bill was passed, its National Capital Area chapter promised to challenge the constitutionality of the 1970 D.C. crime bill.

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