Come on in. No, Stay Out.

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Shining his flashlight around the dark corridors of a Chicago public-housing project, a police officer whose street name is Ghost (his real name is Enriquito Florez) illuminates some places where he has found hidden guns: behind broken exit signs, behind an electrical panel, atop a doorframe. On this night his light flashes on a hallway garbage drop that has been left open, with twine flapping loose; someone had apparently tied a gun inside but hastily wrenched it loose. Inside apartments, the officer relates, he has found cocaine in a container of Comet cleanser, guns hidden inside toilets and, once, under water in a mop bucket. And that was when gang members agreed to let him in, thinking they had hidden drugs and firearms so cleverly that Ghost would pronounce their quarters clean. Imagine what he might find if he could just bust into any apartment he wanted.

Well, he can't. U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen last week issued an injunction reaffirming a February restraining order that forbade the police to conduct sweeps of public-housing projects during which they searched apartments without obtaining warrants. The judge in March modified the order to allow cops to ransack without warning a building's "common areas" (lobbies, hallways, stairwells), and it was such a "vertical patrol" of the Stateway Gardens complex that Ghost joined. But Judge Andersen agreed with an American Civil Liberties Union complaint that warrantless searches of individual apartments violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids "unreasonable searches and seizures."

Those who disagree include no small number of the people the ACLU claims to be representing: the tenants of public-housing projects. In the Robert Taylor Homes just south of Stateway Gardens, Ray Goodwin, 9, describes how one of his friends was gunned down on the monkey bars in a neighborhood playground "because he didn't want to be in a gang." Says Goodwin: "I want the sweeps. There be too many guns in our buildings." Around Easter they went off at an especially horrifying rate: after a truce between the Black Disciples and Gangster Disciples gangs apparently broke down, police recorded more than 300 shooting incidents in the Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens in only four days. In Stateway Gardens, Juanita Bishop counts five other tenants she knew who were killed by guns and says, "I'm for the whole sweep. Then we could let our kids outside."

ACLU lawyer Harvey Grossman protests that "doing searches of apartments is a meaningless gesture. Weapons come back." Tom Sullivan, a lawyer for pro- sweep residents, agrees that the searches are only "a Band-Aid." Even Vincent Lane, chairman of the Chicago housing authority, thinks a long-run solution would have to be really drastic: "We ought to be looking for ways to get rid of the Robert Taylor Homes of the world and provide ((different)) housing for poor people."

But the houses will be around awhile, and so will the controversy. Lane began the weapon sweeps in 1988, restricted them a year later to cases involving "immediate threat" after negotiating a court-ordered consent decree with the ACLU, then resumed them after armed gang members chased away repair crews dispatched by the housing authority from a project last August. That led to the restraining order that Judge Andersen has turned into an injunction. Lane says he will respect that ruling -- for now. But "if the circumstances that existed two weeks ago, when we heard 300 shots, exist again, I will search for weapons" -- warrants or no.

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago