CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE UNTAMED FRONTIER

Crime and punishment doves this week surely must be lauding the new strategy adopted by the city of Fort Worth, Texas, to cope with that city's mounting gang violence: Hire the punks.

The Fort Worth City Council, with the police chief's backing, has agreed to pay six gang leaders $204 a week to visit schools and civic organizations and to mediate disputes. The gang leaders will counsel youths about the violent consequences of joining gangs -- presumably consequences more violent than acquiring a city job.

To date, there have been 56 drive-by shootings and 10 gang-related homicides in Fort Worth this year, police say, and a gang truce, a beefed up gang task force and other enforcement measures have failed to curb the violence.

The city thinks employing the vanguard of the scourge will stem the lawlessness. The people of Fort Worth aren't persuaded. They've lighted switchboards at police headquarters and call-in radio shows to voice their displeasure with the plan.

The police chief admits the idea is controversial, but refuted the notion that the program rewards bad behavior. "We're paying them to try to establish some better behavior on the part of gang members," he told the Associated Press. What, I wonder, would the chief consider acceptably "better behavior on the part of gang members?" Perhaps if they stopped killing people and restricted their drug sales to established addicts older than 18, city officials would call the program a success.

Were not talking here about some wayward kids who get out of hand occasionally, soaping windows and rough-housing. These gang leaders are wealthy drug dealers who protect their turf with armed violence, killing anyone who might threaten their lucrative trade. To believe that all they need is a summer job with the city to turn them around and inspire reform in other gang members is, at best, naive.

I can imagine such foolishness in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. But Fort Worth? With wistful sentimentality, I can imagine the Texas city when it was established as a frontier settlement in a vast, untamed and often violent land. Those who settled Fort Worth were rugged men and women with sand. Mostly an honest and hard working lot, they no doubt held visions of what they wished their town to become. Imagine, near the end of the ah century, how these pioneers would react if a gang of hoodlums shot up their town and terrorized the citizenry.

The menfolk likely would meet, load their rifles and belt guns, track down the punks and see them hanged. Such swift, thorough justice sent a clear message to other would-be criminals: "Threaten our lives, our property or our dreams, and you'll be killed or run out of town." No ambiguity there.

Today, city officials send a different message: "If you can't beat them, hire them."

But while crimes committed by professional hoods go unpunished and even rewarded, the full power of the federal government is unleashed against ... the corner mechanic.

In St. Louis this week, federal attorneys successfully prosecuted a Chesterfield auto mechanic for violating the Clean Air Act. His crime? He released Freon, an air-conditioner refrigerant, from cars he repaired.

Forget that until the Clean Air Act was passed in 1992 not a puff of Freon was captured and recycled, the refrigerant has been linked to (ital) possible (unital) ozone depletion, which leads to increased ultraviolet radiation, which (ital) might (unital) increase the risk of skin cancer and other diseases. The EPA says it's so, and the federal government intends to put an end to such lawlessness.

The convicted mechanic could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. U.S. Attorney Edward Dowd Jr. said, "We are prosecuting this defendant because he endangered all of us."

I'm sorry, Mr. Dowd, but it's difficult to believe that an auto mechanic releasing Freon into the air endangers lives more than drug-pushing, gun-wielding punks who roam the streets of St. Louis.

If only the Chesterfield man had abandoned auto repair to take up gangsterism, which, in Fort Worth at least, might have earned him role-model status and a city salary.