DOLE, CLINTON SPAR ON ISSUES OF JUVENILE DRUG USAGE, CRIME.

Byline: Adam Nagourney The New York Times

The 1996 presidential campaign abruptly shifted from the economy to crime Monday. Bob Dole maintained that President Clinton had presided over an epidemic of juvenile drug use and crime, and Clinton appeared amid an ocean of blue uniforms to receive the support of the nation's largest police union.

Dole's tough-worded attack, at Villanova University, was buttressed by a new round of television advertisements devoted to crime and drugs, and signaled that he would play down, at least for the next few days, the tax-cut proposal that has dominated his campaign for more than a month but has yet to show signs of catching on.

Instead, he will turn increasingly to the crime issue, which has served Republicans reliably since Richard M. Nixon's election to the presidency in 1968.

But the endorsement of Clinton by the Fraternal Order of Police, a 270,000-member union that had never before supported a Democrat for president, was only the latest evidence of success in his longstanding effort, dating from his years as governor of Arkansas, to seize the issue from Republicans.

For the event where he received that endorsement, the president traveled to Cincinnati, where George Bush won the same union's backing four years ago in the race against Clinton. Monday's event was scheduled by the Clinton campaign so that it competed with Dole's appearance at Villanova, a major stop on the Republican nominee's schedule.

Dole issued his critique of Clinton's record on drugs and crime to a cheering, mostly teen-age audience in a gymnasium at the university, along Philadelphia's Main Line.

He won a standing ovation as he promised that he would cut drug use among teen-agers in half during his first term in office. His audience cheered again when he promised that as president he would issue an executive order requiring able-bodied federal convicts to work at least 40 hours a week while in prison, with their pay compensating the victims of their crimes.

He also called for cutting back prisoner access to pornography and weight-lifting rooms; urged legislation to treat violent juvenile criminals as adults in sentencing, consideration of prior crimes and public release of their criminal records, and said he would double, to $810 million, the annual federal contribution to state prison-building programs to make it easier to abolish parole for violent felons.

Dole already has pledged to cut taxes by $548 billion over six years while concurrently balancing the federal budget, and his aides were unable to explain Monday where the increased financing of prison construction would come from.

In any event, his speech was less notable for new proposals than for his introduction of aggressive new themes and the implicit acknowledgment that the tax-cut idea that has been a staple of his campaign may not be working. He repeatedly suggested that what he described as Clinton's liberal ways had contributed to a values breakdown that explained a surge in drug use.

``Liberalism keeps showing itself through the administration's crime policies,'' Dole said, speaking forcefully as he stood on a stage filled with the Republican governors of 13 states as well as his running mate, Jack Kemp. ``Yes, the President talks about being tough on crime. But, as with so much else that this administration does, his actions tell a different story than his words. He talks like Dirty Harry, but he acts like Barney Fife.''

Clinton aides later noted that the line contrasting Clint Eastwood's tough San Francisco police officer with the bumbling deputy sheriff on the old ``Andy Griffith Show'' was originally used by Gov. Zell Miller of Georgia, in referring to President Bush, in the keynote speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

Dole placed blame for drug use among teen-agers on the ``administration's old liberal view that law enforcement is less important than social engineering.'' His aides explained later that this was a reference to what they portrayed as Clinton's emphasis on drug-use treatment, at the expense of law enforcement.

``This liberal approach failed over and over and over again through the decades,'' Dole said, adding, ``Americans are tired of being guinea pigs in a discredited liberal-leaning laboratory of leniency.''

``What works in combating crime is no mystery,'' Dole said. ``It begins with the understanding that the cause of crime can be explained with one simple word: Criminals. Criminals. Criminals.''