AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands -- Parents put up a sign reading 'Children's playground -- no fixing' when they became terrified of soiled needles discarded at night by heroin addicts in their tiny neighbourhood park.
Slender pink plastic syringes with bloodstained needles litter gutters, doorways and secluded corners in a 500-yard radius around the seamy Zeedijk on the edge of Amsterdam's red-light district.
'The addicts have their own problems, but I dare not think what could happen if my son finds or falls on one of their filthy needles,' one young mother said.
The playground off the Kleersloot in a 750-year-old part of central Amsterdam is just a three-minute walk from the Zeedijk, where heroin pushers deal within sight of an overworked police station.
The dealers, mostly young Surinamese addicts working for unknown wholesalers, lounge against the boarded-up windows of shops and cafes whose owners have fled the crime and violence drugs brought to the site of Amsterdam's first settlement.
Police patrol in pairs, but they seldom act to stop the open trade in hard narcotics.
Money changes hands during a muttered conversation on the sidewalk and the buyer moves off to lift a paving stone and remove a small plastic packet containing a gram of heroin cut into a white powder.
Amsterdam's city council does not pursue heroin users, so the buyer seldom waits for the street to be clear of police before removing his purchase and heading off to find a place to shoot up.
'We don't go after the users,' said Justice Department drugs specialist Edzard Koning. 'We have heavy sentences for the pushers, but if a person has less than three or four grams of heroin we leave him be.'
Police work closely with sociologists in a campaign designed more to wean addicts off the drug than to frighten them off. But officials acknowledge that recognition of an addict's human rights means neglect for the civilian right to safety and security.
'Ten years ago we had hardly any hard drugs problem and we had very little street crime,' said police spokesman Bob Hoornstra. 'Now we have somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 heavily addicted heroin users and petty crime has exploded.'
Felonies rose from 22,649 in 1970 to 84,120 in 1980, he said.
'Only 124 people were victims of street robberies in 1970, but in 1980 the figure was up to 114 a month. Thefts from parked cars are up from 68 a week in 1970 to 45 a day now and it is largely a result of the drugs problem,' Hoornstra said.
Police crime prevention specialist Jan Foppes said there has been a clear shift away from crimes against property to street crime, but the problem is not as severe as the national press suggests.
'To an extent we are going to have to learn to live with it, but people would feel a lot more relaxed if they stopped reading certain newspapers,' Foppes said.
Hoornstra agreed that petty crime has become a part of Amsterdam life, but he said most residents in the city appeared to accept the fact and merely increased precautions.
'We have maybe 2,000 heroin addicts who need to find $55 a day for a one-gram habit,' he said.
'Unless they steal cash, they need to find new goods worth about five times that amount, because the average fence seems to pay about 20 percent of the new value.'
Addicts who steal second-hand goods cannot expect more than 10 percent of the shop value and might need to steal to a value of $550 a day, he said.
Police attempts to control drug-related crime are complicated by the recent escalation of vandalism and civil disorder triggered by the squatter problem.
'Vandalism has risen to enormous proportions,' said sociologists Paul van Soomeren and Bram van Dijk in a joint thesis recently.
Confrontations between police and squatters cost the law enforcement agencies dearly both in time and money, according to a police report for 1980. Police used for riot squad duty ran up an overtime bill of $1.2 million and spent 104,000 man-hours trying to keep order. Riot damage to police vehicles cost the city $216,000 and the bill for tear gas and training rocketed, the police report said.
Hoornstra is convinced the city's population takes the crime rise in its stride and said there is no evidence that tourists are being put off by reports of street robberies.
A law and order pressure group recently ran full-page newspaper ads asking people disturbed by rising crime and lawlessness to hang a white sheet or towel out their windows one Saturday. Journalists who drove through the city counted fewer than 100 silent protests in response.
'Serious crimes like murder and rape are stable at reasonably low rates and people see the petty crime as part of Amsterdam life,' Hoornstra said.
