The Littlest Victims

By JOELLE ATTINGER NEW YORK

At a little after 4 p.m. on a humid summer day, nine-month-old Rayvon Jamison was maneuvering his blue-and-white walker toward the refrigerator in his grandmother's kitchen. Suddenly, seven 9-mm bullets ripped through the tin-plated front door, one piercing his tiny body. Rayvon's chilling shrieks of pain shot through the dingy pale brick apartment building in the Highbridge section of the Bronx. His mother Esther scooped up the bleeding child and ran down five flights of stairs and into the street screaming, "They shot my baby! They shot my baby!" Within the hour Rayvon was dead, the innocent victim of a pointless quarrel involving a neighbor's caricature on a T shirt.

A little piece of New York City died with him. Rayvon was the fourth child to be killed by a stray gunshot in less than nine days and the second to perish within the safety of his own home. By the time he was buried last week, yet another child had been fatally shot and three more wounded. The slain children are called mushrooms in street lingo -- as vulnerable as plants underfoot. Their deaths have pushed New Yorkers, already reeling from a daunting inventory of urban ills, to a new depth of despair. "The job of taking back our streets requires an all-out assault on every front," said Mayor David Dinkins. "We must restore confidence and security."

More than the epidemic of homelessness, more than inadequate schools, filthy streets, high taxes and the outrageous cost of living, violent crime is gnawing at the soul of the city that thinks of itself as the embodiment of American energy and creativity. The random nature of such crime spares no one. As the case against three of the alleged participants in the brutal rape and assault of a young female jogger in Central Park last year drew to a close, a 33-year-old advertising executive was shot to death while returning a phone call on a quiet Greenwich Village street.

Lee Brown, the police commissioner brought from Houston by Dinkins to lead the 26,000-officer force, acknowledges the anxiety. "The top priority has to be public safety," says Brown. "That's the basic function of government." But with violent deaths mounting so quickly that the homicide record of 1,905 set last year appears likely to be broken, the ability of Brown and Dinkins to restore security to the city's streets is in doubt.

Both Brown and the mayor have admitted as much, citing harsh budgetary constraints, the absence of tough federal gun-control laws and the slew of social ills that are at the core of urban warfare. "People know that I'm not responsible for the crime rate," says Dinkins. "They know that crime is directly attributable to drug addiction." The mayor may well be right. But Dinkins' statements strike many New Yorkers as a dismaying confession that government has no remedy for the mayhem that has made toddlers unsafe in their own homes.

The rash of child killings has renewed questions about whether the calm and dignified Dinkins is tough enough to cope with his city's myriad woes. A reactive politician, New York's first black mayor has long preferred the back room to the front line, opting time and again for private negotiations over public displays of leadership. His soothing style suited a city bruised by the abrasive and divisive style of his predecessor, three-term mayor Edward I. Koch. But it has served him poorly in reassuring New York's 8 million people that he is in charge. "Dinkins doesn't match up against the problems of this city," says Mitchell Moss, director of the Urban Research Center at New York University. "He presides rather than leads."

In fact, it took the 63-year-old mayor nearly two weeks to address concerns about the current crime wave, and even then his response was paltry. With minimal fanfare, Dinkins announced on Aug. 3 a 60-day amnesty for all those who turned in illegal firearms, an idea that failed miserably when it was first tried 10 years ago. By week's end only 12 weapons had been received, a minuscule fraction of the arsenal of 16,214 illicit guns that police seized last year. Stung by the derision that greeted his amnesty plan, Dinkins then proposed squeezing $24 million out of the city's $28 billion budget to hire 1,058 new policemen. "Now we are striking back," he said. It was a painful about-face for Dinkins. As a candidate last year, he pledged to be the "toughest mayor on crime ever." But the city's $1.8 billion budget shortfall forced him to renege on his promise to hire more police officers as soon as he assumed office in January. As recently as Aug. 1, Dinkins had publicly chastised city council members for jumping the gun by proposing additional budget cuts in order to hire more police.

, Even after the new officers hit the streets next spring, the city's police force will be 14% smaller than it was in 1975. Since then violent crime has increased more than 25%. Most experts agree that the most significant cause of the surge is an epidemic of crack cocaine that has infected all five of the city's boroughs. "The drug scene has no conscience," says city council member Priscilla Wooten, whose Brooklyn neighborhood is one of the city's deadliest. "It used to be that you spared children. That's no longer the case." Residents of such areas are convinced that simply adding more police, while welcome, will not be enough to stop the violence. Says Gloria Corley, 48, a community activist and native East New Yorker: "Cops can't come into homes, can't heal family problems and can't stop drugs from being there."

No longer willing or able to wait for government to help them regain control of their streets, neighborhood groups are assuming the responsibility themselves. At least 375 crime-watch groups have formed the Alliance for a Drug Free City, and according to director Sally Dunford, the organization's ranks are swelling daily. "People say this is my city and I'm going to do something about it," she says. David McKenzie is one of them. When crack moved into his Bronx neighborhood five years ago, the youth counselor openly confronted dealers, organized his neighbors into a community patrol and raised more than $50,000 to launch a local youth center that provides job counseling and recreational opportunities for some 70 neighborhood children.

But for Marie Laroche, such laudable efforts are too little, too late. Her five-month-old son Pierre was sound asleep in bed in the Laroches' Manhattan apartment last week when a .38-cal. bullet, fired in an adjoining apartment, pierced his bedroom wall and lodged itself beneath the skin on his forehead. Miraculously, the child survived. If she could, Laroche would turn her back on the American Dream and return to her native Haiti. "Violence is something I expected coming here," says the 27-year-old mother of three, "but now my dream is to get out of here."

With reporting by Stephen Pomper and Janice C. Simpson/New York