New York’s Finest have been hailed around the world for helping bring down the city’s obscenely high crime rate. In just three years murders have dropped nearly by half. While there are many reasons for the decline, few experts dispute that the NYPD’s aggressive take-back-the-streets crackdown has played a significant role.

But in New York and some other cities where the get-tough strategy is spreading, a tough question is being raised: does that style of policing come at an unacceptable price? Polls show that most New Yorkers approve of the NYPD’s crime strategy. But in some communities, there are rumblings that the crackdown has grown heavy-handed and is straining already poor relations with young African-Americans and Hispanics. New Yorkers’ complaints of police abuse, reported to the city’s civilian review board, rose by more than 50 percent in the last two years. Last week Pittsburgh residents voted to establish a civilian review board, and Charlotte, N.C., is expected to follow-in response to both a rash of complaints and disputed police shootings. In Washington, D.C., some citizens are starting to complain of a new police crackdown there. While few people are claiming widespread police brutality, complaint hot lines are flooded with calls, typically minorities claiming they were stopped or hassled for trumped-up reasons.

In many ways the issue echoes a long-standing and contentious debate how to balance the rights of individuals against the community’s interest in calm and order. Put another way, it’s whose son is being hassled. “I’ve attended community meetings among African-Americans where single parents are saying these police policies are wonderful and young male blacks are saying this is terrible,” says Herman Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin law professor. The same kind of split is developing in Washington, where the police department’s new “zero tolerance” policy is going after everyone from the drunk on the corner to Yuppies singing Chardonnay in their yards. Officer Joseph Zelinka likes the new policy but says, “They want you to lock up the drug dealers, but if you arrest Uncle Harry for having a beer on his corner, there are going to be a lot of people who will start hating the police.”

Relations between police and minorities have rarely been untroubled, and incidents of excessive or deadly force occur with frustrating regularity. But the surge of complaints these days often grows out of a style of policin that’s based on attacking “quality of life” offenses. In New York, police began in 1994 to enforce behavior that it ignored for years–going after people who drink or urinate in public, blow horns, jump subway turnstiles. It was based on the theory–known as broken windows–that those petty crimes create an atmosphere of disorder (like a broken window) that leads to more serious offenses. And it turned out that some of the people stopped for minor offenses were packing guns or wanted for crimes.

William Bratton, the former New York police commissioner who initiated new policing tactics, says it’s not surprising that complaints would increase–the police are arresting or coming in contact with lots more citizens. Of course some cops go too far, he says. But while there are about 5,000 official complaints, he contends, there are 240,000 fewer victims of crimes. “In a city of 7.5 million people, 30 million tourists, 38,000 police, is the level of complaints an appropriate trade-off?” he asked. “I think so, and the people seem satisfied.”

He may be right. But his critics ask whether that sort of trade-off is appropriate to democracy: is there’s zero tolerance for street crime, why isn’t there zero tolerance for overzealous cops? This carping doesn’t come just from the criminal class. Indeed, even George Kelling, a Rutgers University criminal-justice professor who co-authored the broken-windows theory–and helped Bratton implement it–now worries that his ideas are getting twisted on the ground. “There’s an enormous potential for abuse,” he says. He criticizes departments that encourage cops to demand IDs from residents or conduct neighborhood drug sweeps, indiscriminately stopping and frisking people–too often involving excessive force. Pushed to make more arrests, cops are “just making guesses, and quite often they are wrong,” says James Fyfe, a Temple University professor for criminal justice.

Some cities, like Seattle and Chicago, have managed to step up enforcement and maintain, if not improve, police-community relations. As practiced in those cities, experts say, the key is to make sure the cops become intimately familiar with their neighborhood and its residents. Chicago has also more than doubled the percentage of black and Hispanic officers, to 36 percent of the force. In cities like Charlotte and New York the complaints haven’t gone unnoticed. But have started training programs to temper the rough edges of their cops, sending them to ethnic-sensitivity lectures and community meetings. In New York–which dubbed its program CPR, for “courtesy, professionalism and respect”–commanders are held accountable for citizen complaints, just as they are for the number of crimes. Given the nature of police work, the dream of a cordial crack-down may be a fantasy. But a nasty one isn’t inevitable, either.

The nations five largest cities are enjoying a major drop in the number of murders.

MURDERS MURDERS PERCENT CITY 1990 1996 CHANGE New York 2,245 984 -56% Los Angeles 983 688 -30 Chicago 854 791 -7 Houston 568 261 -54 Philadelphia 503 431 -14

SOURCE: FBI, NEWSWEEK RESEARCH