THE CITY: TERROR IN WASHINGTON

TO crime analysts in the Washington police department, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is just an address--if a rather important one--in the city's Third Precinct. In addition to the White House, the Third includes the State Department, the Executive Office Building and several other bastions of the Federal Government. To judge from the police blotter, it is a pretty dangerous neighborhood: according to latest figures, crime there has jumped 26.2% in a single year. There were almost 400 crimes recorded in that period--62 of them involving at least the threat of bodily harm. In fact, crime in the White House precinct slightly outstripped that of Washington as a whole (up 26%). When Richard Nixon recently announced his anticrime drive for the nation's capital, he was speaking very much as one of its worried householders--though in far more relaxed terms than most frightened citizens of middle-and above-middle income would employ.

"Crime has replaced the war as topic A in Washington," says Political Columnist Mary McGrory. For Miss McGrory, the change of subject was not hard to make, since her parkside apartment in Northwest Washington has been burglarized four times. Another indignant burglary victim recently was Colorado's Senator Peter Dominick, whose son's gold watch was pilfered from Dominick's inner office. Last week Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, returned from the presidential tour of Europe to find that her one-bedroom apartment in the elegant Watergate complex had been ransacked by thieves. Missing: more than $5,000 worth of jewelry and several gifts from her boss.

Even more unsettling than property losses, though, is violent crime, especially rape and armed robbery, which increased 50% in the past year. Some recent examples:

>After enjoying a late-evening drink at the elegant Sulgrave Club, a group that included U.S. Senators Mark Hatfield, Hugh Scott and Howard Baker and Nixon's Communications Chief Herb Klein walked out into a volley of gunfire on the street. The victim was a 29-year-old Treasury agent-in-training who was shot when he refused a holdup man's demand for money. He was treated by another member of the group, Kentucky Congressman Tim Lee Carter, who happens to be a doctor as well as a politician.

>Mrs. Leonard Marks, wife of L.B.J.'s Information Agency chief, attended a bridge luncheon with eleven other women in fashionable Cleveland Park. In the middle of it, two men invaded the house, tied up hostess and guests, and made off with their purses and jewelry. -- Two thieves with a sense of timing strolled into the Internal Revenue Service headquarters and, with the assistance of a gun, claimed a "deduction" of nearly $1,000.

> Washington stores in the High's dairy-products chain have been held up 317 times in the past six months.

Ambience in Danger. Because such crimes occurred in supposedly "safe" neighborhoods, because of the victims' renown and the criminals' audacity, affluent Washingtonians feel like the terrorized citizenry in an outlaw-ruled old-frontier town. So many people refuse to stay out late that the National Theater has moved up its curtain time one hour to 7:30 p.m. No longer is it necessary to reserve a table for dinner at a fashionable downtown restaurant.

Since posing as a deliveryman is a favorite trick of burglars, many luxury apartment houses require the doorman to accept all packages. After a number of sanguinary holdups, one fatal, bus drivers have no access to cash (passengers must use tokens or take scrip in change). Some athletic events in public high schools have been canceled or played unannounced because crowds have gone on the rampage at earlier games. "A lot of us--and I was one--kept saying that it couldn't happen here," says Mrs. Tom Wicker, wife of the New York Times columnist. "But it did, and we had to eat our words."

"Here," for Mrs. Wicker and other well-to-do worriers, is a big, comfortable house in Cleveland Park, one of the charming residential areas that used to make Washington one of the nation's most habitable cities. Today, the capital's ambience--its malls and boulevards, its monumental architecture, cosmopolitan atmosphere and happily frenetic social life--seems imperiled.

The crime wave is the most frightening symptom of breakdown and change, but it is only part of the capital's trauma. Washington is now 67% Negro--by far the highest ratio of any major U.S. city--and the slums have expanded as blacks arrived and whites departed for the suburbs. The flight of middle-class residents and their tax revenues has placed increased demands on municipal services for the poor and made them that much less adequate. Hardest hit is the public-school system, which some real estate agents now frankly warn home buyers to avoid.

Spilling Lawlessness. In fact, the only new aspect of Washington's ills is their sudden visibility to the people who count. As in center cities across the nation, crime in capital ghettos has been a problem for years, and it is still the ghetto that suffers worst: the 84% crime increase in Washington's mostly Negro Navy Yard district makes the White House precinct sound positively safe, which it is not.

One event can hardly explain why the blatant lawlessness that has always terrorized slum dwellers should spill out into the rest of Washington. Yet, in the disorders that shook Washington after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. last April, ghetto rioters and looters learned that downtown stores and prosperous neighborhoods can be as vulnerable as their own. For many citizens, that legacy is far more troubling than all the rhetoric and social studies with which official Washington has documented the spread of crime.

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