TRYING TO STEM CRIME IN CHICAGO PUBLIC HOUSING

The Clinton administration, and now the Senate through its voice support, are walking on dangerous legal ground in trying to subject public housing tenants to unannounced warrantless searches for illegal guns and drugs.

Such searches, known as sweeps, were declared unconstitutional two weeks ago by U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen in Chicago, who said they violated tenants' Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

Andersen's ruling resulted from a conflict last August between the Chicago Housing Authority and the American Civil Liberties Union over an authority-sponsored warrantless sweep of the Robert Taylor Homes by police searching for guns. Andersen agreed that the dangers to citizens in and around housing projects like the Taylor Homes exist, but he rejected the authority's defense of urgent necessity. He found that although the sweeps occurred at least two days after violence broke out, even in an emergency police needed probable cause.

Many tenants had intervened on the side of the housing authority, saying the sweeps were acceptable. Those tenants, "apparently convinced by sad experience that the larger community will not provide normal law enforcement services to them," were "prepared to forgo their own constitutional rights" against search and seizure, the judge said. But that does not give them the right "to suspend their neighbors' rights as well," he concluded.

On grounds that any waiver of a constitutional right must be freely given, Andersen ruled correctly and courageously, considering the outcry of the housing project's tenants who sided with the housing authority in the wake of fear they must face daily.

But President Clinton's plan, which the Senate lent its support to on Thursday, is not the answer. The president proposes to require that public housing leases include a tenant's waiver of protection against warrantless searches and seizures ... the very protection that Andersen so ably upheld. Should subjecting one's self to warrantless searches be a condition of public housing? We think not, and suspect, if this proposal goes through, that the courts will agree.

Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole, R-Kansas, Thursday offered a non-binding resolution endorsing the proposal, which was adopted by voice vote. Seeing approaching perils, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., at least added a condition saying tenants couldn't be denied housing for refusing to agree to a search clause in their lease. Biden also questioned whether a lease for public housing, which would contain the search clause, even qualifies as a voluntary contract because they are imposed by the state on people who have no real alternative housing.

Among other parts of the plan, the administration would authorize public housing officials to erect fences around buildings, install metal detectors at entrances, issue identity cards to tenants and frisk those coming into building and search their packages. It also includes $28.8 million in new or reprogrammed funds for security and crime prevention in Chicago's 135,000 public housing units. Police also will be able to search open spaces and vacant apartments.

The president's proposal in regard to stepped-up law enforcement and security within public housing projects is a good one, but requiring tenants to waive Fourth Amendment rights as a condition of housing is not. If, as the administration hopes, the tenant waiver plan for Chicago were to become a model to be used across the country in public housing projects, it would be a model of government intrusion, which the Constitution clearly protects us from.