CRIME IS FALLING. STREETS ARE SAFER. WHY ARE WE SO AFRAID? : `NOWHERE SAFE' IS REFRAIN THAT HAUNTS PUBLIC.

Byline: Dennis Love Daily News Staff Writer

On the picture-window-size TV screen before him, 58-year-old Keith Dice watched as the images unspooled, anarchic images that may as well have been from Beirut as the San Fernando Valley:

Ski-masked outlaws in black, brandishing sleek semiautomatic weapons, peeling off rounds scattershot. An ocean of cops closing down streets. Sprawling gun battles. Exploding windshields. Muzzle flash and smoke and chaos and terror.

``My God, it's something,'' Dice said, frozen in the screen's hypnotic glow at Fry's, a Woodland Hills electronics store, along with a knot of other mesmerized customers. ``It's something to think that you could walk into the bank to cash a check . . . and this could happen.''

Crime is falling, they say. The streets are safer, we're told.

Forgive Dice and countless others if Friday's shootout in North Hollywood seemed to present vivid, roaring evidence to the contrary.

``Most of us were brought up to have some sort of respect for human life,'' said 33-year-old Chris Thomas, another Fry's customer. ``But these people, whoever they are, are from some kind of different place. How do you protect yourself against people who don't care if they live or die?''

Even in Los Angeles - where violence is not only street-real but often glorified for the masses - the notion of weapon-draped cops and robbers blazing helter-skelter across pavement and lawn is a bit much to fathom.

Even in Los Angeles, many people still cling to the belief that the mayhem that streams from the media and our personal experience is isolated, containable, manageable and, most importantly, comprehensible.

World gone mad

Yet there was nothing comprehensible about this botched heist, due to the sheer blooming brazenness of it all - in the Valley, no less, still the law-and-order poster child for a metropolis that seems to be unraveling by the minute.

``There's a certain segment of society that feels protected, that this can't happen where we are,'' said Andrew Yellen, a Northridge clinical psychologist. But Friday's nationally televised drama ``had a `this could have happened to you' quality,'' he said.

Adding to the sense of a world off its axis were some of the stories that began to filter out from the fray. A list of the sophisticated weapons and gear the suspects carried - full body armor, AK-47s, armor-piercing bullets - brought whistles from the gallery at Fry's.

``Who are these guys?'' asked Chris Thomas. ``I can't wait to see who they are, where they come from. . . . These are no ordinary bank robbers.''

Bank-robbing terrorists among us, bringing firepower and swagger galore. The first cops on the scene, outgunned, had to resort to charity under fire from a nearby gun dealer to survive while better-armed reinforcements arrived.

That disparity between well-heeled crooks and cops with popguns fueled a collective sense of vulnerability. Beth Chambers, like thousands of others, responded by tapping out computer bulletins: ``For the police to go to an independent gun store to get the guns that the police don't have is pitiful,'' the 24-year-old wrote. ``(That) any schmuck can walk into (a gun store) and get guns that the police don't have is ridiculous. We all have a right to bear arms; doesn't that include our right to have a police force that is just as armed?''

Could happen anywhere

Later Friday, Chambers, still restricted to her apartment by the police activity, said by phone that she ``freaked out'' when the shooting started and called her father in Chicago and ``started screaming at him to come right now and help me move back there, to get out this place.''

``But he said it could happen everywhere,'' she said. ``He talked me off the ledge. But I do intend to leave. . . . This city is full of haves and have-nots, and that creates a tension. You have actors making $3 million a picture, and other people working 20-hour days to make a living wage. No wonder people rob banks.''

But the visceral beating inflicted upon Los Angeles on Friday cried out for perspective as well.

``This thing is off the scale,'' said John Stafford, a spokesman for the California Bankers Association in San Francisco. ``You can't compare it to anything. Bank robberies are down. Convenience stores are robbed three times more often than banks.

``ATMs are robbed only once in every 2.6 million uses. But people worry about these things. There is a psychological resonance that goes beyond the actual risk, and that's what we're dealing with here.''

Dice, still transfixed before the big screen at Fry's, was dealing with that resonance Friday, as was an entire city.

``What if you had been just walking by that bank?'' he said, his voice trailing away.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) A couple cowers in a doorway Friday as police clear the intersection of Victory and Laurel Canyon boulevards.

Myung J. Chun/Daily News

(2) Bearing shotguns and assault rifles, officers manuever around the scene of the shootout Friday.

(3) no caption (Bullet-riddled police car)

Gene Blevins/Special to the Daily News