n the last 17 months, as crime began to increase around the country, many people began to question whether New York City had reached the limits of its crime-fighting successes.

With the Giuliani administration gone and a persistent budget deficit and antiterrorism demands eating away at the resources of the New York Police Department, many New Yorkers began to sense that crime was on the rise.

But statistics show that crime has continued to fall, and the Bloomberg administration says the credit should go to a series of highly selective crime-fighting initiatives that has won significant victories in the streets.

Operation Impact, for example, redeployed 800 police officers into 61 crime pockets around the city. Since then, according to the latest statistics available from the mayor's office, homicides in those areas have dropped nearly 47 percent compared with the same period last year, while robberies fell 43 percent and grand larceny crimes dropped 31 percent.

Operation Spotlight targets a small group of chronic misdemeanor offenders who commit a disproportionate share of crimes and sends them to a special court for stricter sentencing. The number of those offenders sentenced to jail has increased 46 percent from last year, and the percentage of those defendants held on bail has increased nearly 20 percent over the same time last year, the statistics show.

A program that focuses on those quality-of-life offenders who by every indicator seem to vex New Yorkers the most — the noisy — has yielded 55,000 summonses and more than 800 felony arrests.

During his mayoral campaign, Michael R. Bloomberg's law enforcement message, such that it was, centered on a basic theme: Rudolph W. Giuliani had put the lid on crime, and if elected, Mr. Bloomberg would try to keep it there. But crime clearly took a back seat to his other priorities, like education.

Mr. Bloomberg, who came to the job with no crime-fighting background, has relied on the advice of his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, and his criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt. The administration says it has come up with ways to make crime drop further, by zeroing in on the most intransigent pockets of criminality.

It has done that by keeping the key Giuliani-era crime fighting program, Compstat, a system that uses data to measure where crime is most persistent.

But the Bloomberg team has taken Compstat even further, using the statistics to sharpen its crime-fighting focus beyond merely making more arrests.

"The two administrations are night and day when it comes to fighting crime," said Jeffrey A. Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University and an expert on crime in New York City.

"Giuliani launched large-scale initiatives citywide under the broad-brush theory about disorder," Professor Fagan said. The Bloomberg administration, he said, has "done a very, very good job of being highly selective in terms of how they use their resources."

Clearly, Mr. Bloomberg benefited from inheriting a city where crime rates had fallen dramatically in recent years, as they did in most of the nation's large cities. But while crime rates seem to have leveled off or crept up in other cities in the last year or so, in New York, much to the surprise of many experts, the rates continue to fall.

Major crime over all has fallen 8 percent this year from the same period last year, and dropped in every category except rape. Reports of felony assaults, for instance, have dropped 10.7 percent, according to administration figures, and shootings are down 10.3 percent.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, total violent crime and property crime reported to law enforcement agencies across the country during the first six months of 2002 increased by 1.3 percent compared with the same period in 2001.

Mr. Bloomberg is many things to many people — school reformer, cigarette hater, tax raiser — but the crime fighter reputation still appears to belong to his predecessor.

"The public understands that they are safe in this city in ways they have not been in modern memory," Mr. Bloomberg said in a telephone interview on Sunday. And the mayor, who is not a fan of self-promotion, even when it involves his most successful programs, thinks people will soon associate that accomplishment with him. "They will in a re-election campaign, you may rest assured," he said.

Mr. Bloomberg announced his first anti-crime initiative before he was sworn into office. Operation Clean Sweep was aimed at so-called quality-of-life crimes, apparently to send a message to New Yorkers that he would not let Mr. Giuliani's efforts go by the wayside.

His administration's more recent initiatives have been more narrowly focused. Early this year, Mr. Kelly announced Operation Impact, which uses recent police academy graduates to step up enforcement in 61 neighborhoods where shootings and other crimes appeared to be rising. Crime in those areas has fallen 36.5 percent since the program began, according to police statistics.

"Operation Impact is a perfect example of going beyond self-imposed boundaries," Mr. Kelly said. "We deployed our resources on those locations where crime was worst, and the numbers show those efforts have been a great success."

Operation Spotlight, announced in May 2002, illustrates several hallmarks of Mr. Bloomberg's way of doing business. It makes extensive use of technology, it forces agencies and offices that traditionally compete for resources and attention to work together and it focuses on very specific problems that need fixing.

The program began concentrating on thousands of petty criminals who seemed to be recycling through the criminal justice system. Using a computer program, repeat misdemeanor offenders are identified at the time of their arrests, then sent to be arraigned in a special part of Criminal Court in each borough. The cases receive priority treatment there, and the defendants ostensibly face lengthier sentences.

The program expanded and now all five boroughs have courts that speed up and toughen sentencing of felons who violate their probation. Brooklyn also has a special court to handle all felony gun possession cases from five Brooklyn neighborhoods — Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East Flatbush, Brownsville and East New York — where a quarter of the city's shootings occur.

More than 10,000 arrests were made in the first seven months of Operation Spotlight, and jail sentences longer than 30 days have increased 55 percent. The Brooklyn gun court began in April, but of the cases disposed so far, 100 percent have resulted in conviction and jail sentences, according to city officials.

"He is not just interested in arrests," Mr. Feinblatt said of Mr. Bloomberg, "He wants to pull the thread through. `What is the outcome here? Are people going to jail? Are the right people being supervised?' You want to focus on the criminals who you already have under supervision, or who are already on parole but at risk."

Mr. Feinblatt cited another initiative, the use of digital technology on 911 tapes to better catch and prosecute domestic violence offenders. "There is nothing more chilling and persuasive when somebody was getting battered than to hear the utterance of the domestic violence victim on the phone screaming for help," Mr. Feinblatt said.

John E. Eck, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati who studies policing and crime prevention across the nation, said that targeted policing efforts and better coordination of every aspect of criminal justice have been used successfully around the country.

Many of the Bloomberg administration's programs, however, hark back to old-fashioned law enforcement techniques.

"Ray Kelly came up through the same generation I did, that addressed crime with swiftly instilling in offenders' minds that apprehension and punishment will be swift and sure," said Edward Mamet, a 40-year veteran of the New York Police Department who now works as a police consultant.

Perhaps helping the drop in crime is the administration's relationship with minority groups, which appears better than that of the prior administration, even in the wake of two recent controversial cases in which black New Yorkers died as a result of actions by the police. This may stem from the administration's speedy attempts to take responsibility for police errors, and its overall efforts to improve community outreach.

"When we came into office," Mr. Kelly said, "we talked about the three C's: crime, counterterrorism and community relations. If there is a theme, it is that those three things have to be given co-equal status."