VOA19980226.2300.1437 NEWS TRANSCRIPT New York newspapers are headlining Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's campaign for a cleaner, quieter and more civil society in a city not known for much of any of that. VOA Correspondent Elaine Johanson reports the goals have received mixed reviews from skeptical New Yorkers. The goals may be unrealistic perhaps but not to Mayor Giuliani taking the pose of a modern philosopher king. The mayor quotes the ancient Greek Plato to explain his quality of life approach. The ideal he says is never achievable, but it doesn't matter. The point is to keep striving toward it, moving the goal ever closer to your dream. Mayor Giuliani wants to slow down city traffic, regulate taxis more strictly, stop littering and excessive noise, and subject violators of street crossing rules to fines, and he wants people from city workers to merchants to shoppers to be more polite to each other. The mayor's vision sounds to many New Yorkers like a sleepy, small town that could be almost anywhere else in the United States. The mayor says he has not wish to change New York's hustling, bustling character, but it's a question of rights he says. Everyone deserves respect. We're all going to respect each other's rights. This is a crowded city. It's a densely populated city. A car going through a red light driving at a high rate of speed, a bicyclist on a sidewalk or a pedestrian deciding they can just walk right in the middle of Fifth Avenue while cars are coming down, all of them are contributing to a sense of disorder and a sense of disrespect. But what about human freedom, Mr. Mayor: There is no right to drive in a way in which you endanger the life of another. In fact, if you think about what freedom is all about, freedom includes mutual responsibilities like this, and a city in which people have to be afraid of crossing the street, it's not a city that has much freedom. The problem could be enforcement of the new rules. The mayor seems to have public support for regulating taxis or enforcing speed limits on the road, but ignoring street crossing rules for example is almost traditional in New York. It often is the fastest, sometimes safest way of moving through the labyrinth of city streets. Professor Fred Segal of Cooper Union College in New York worked on Mr. Giuliani's quality of life speeches when the mayor was running for re- election last year. He says the mayor will fail in any area where he lacks public backing. The whole idea of community policing is to enforce a community consensus that already exists which means you don't have to use force. You don't have to use the threats of state power, but going beyond that, I think you begin to move to the margins where the consensus is strong and your ability to enforce the news rules is limited, and that's something like a backlash. The mayor's aides deny Mr. Giuliani is trying to move New York toward the Singapore way of doing things. Strict laws for example against chewing gum or spitting in public places, even corporal punishment for vandalism. Some concede, however, that as a former U.S. prosecutor, Mr. Giuliani likes to keep his house in order, and at least for the rest of his second and final four year term of office, New York is Mr. Giuliani's house to keep. Yet generations of Americans have come to the big city in part to escape paternalism or the societal restrictions of smaller places. Veteran observes of New York affairs say New Yorkers seem to feel they have an inalienable right to be messy, rude and loud, perhaps an overstatement, but even the commentators who are not always friendly toward the city, admitted vibrancy hangs in the balance if the mayor's rules defy New York's basic character. Elaine Johanson, VOA News, New York.