By RICK BRAGG

Willie Barrett and Robert Collins live in the same neighborhood, on different worlds.

Mr. Barrett lives in a neat, two-story house on Park Hill Avenue in Clifton, Staten Island, on a street where the drug dealers have run down the neighborhood to the point he no longer feels safe. He wants a strong police presence in his neighborhood, to reclaim it.

Mr. Collins lives one block away in the Park Hill Apartments, where 22-year-old Ernest Sayon, once convicted of possessing drugs, died after a struggle with the police on Friday evening. He knows that drugs are sold on the sidewalk but it is a stifling police presence he resents more, he says, because in their zeal the officers ignore basic human rights.

Like others who live on and around Park Hill Avenue, they know the neighborhood is besieged. They just disagree on who is doing the besieging.

Police Presence

The neighborhood is one of mostly small homes and apartments surrounding the six-story, 1,100 unit red-brick Park Hill complex. The area, including the nearby Stapleton Houses project, has a heavier police presence than any other place on Staten Island. But that has not been enough, said people who live here.

It is not a disagreement based on race. Most of the people in the apartment complex and in the surrounding homes, like Mr. Barrett, are black.

Mr. Barrett, an electrician, bought his house here 16 years ago, "and there has been a hell of a change," he said. "For years there have been a lot of drugs on the street, and the cops tried to do the right thing. "No one wants anyone to get hurt, but we want drugs out of the neighborhood."

He said he is afraid to get out of his car when he drives through some parts of the neighborhood. "You tell people you live in Park Hill, it's like it's a taboo," he said.

The decay of a neighborhood because of drugs is a fact of life in New York, but several people said they came to Staten Island to escape that world.

"I've been here 17 years, and when I first came, it was nice," said William Rodriguez, 72. "The neighborhood is full of drugs. I've been robbed three times" in the last few years.

The death of Mr. Sayon was a tragedy, he said, but was bound to happen in the culture of drugs and violence that has claimed the area.

"I don't think the police do enough," he said, when asked if he thought they had cracked down too hard in recent months. Others agree with him, like Fawzy Amadu, who stays alone in the housing project when her husband drives his taxi.

"I live in fear," she said.

The Police Department says it has responded to what it saw as a cry for help from the neighborhood.

Chief Tosano Simonetti, the borough commander, said that dealers sold drugs in stairwells and on the roof, and that armed robberies were common on the sidewalks.

In March a 2-year-old boy was hit by a stray bullet and crippled, and two other people have been wounded by gunfire in the neighborhood since then.

"We heard very clearly from the community that they needed relief," said Mr. Simonetti.

In the last year the department conducted vertical sweeps -- sweeping the buildings top to bottom to locate drug dealers. Officers also did sidewalk sweeps intended to chase crack and heroin dealers away from the apartments.

They have succeeded in making the apartments a better and safer place to live, he said.

In letters to the 120th Precinct, Chrisida Howard, president of the Park Hill Tenant Association, praised the work of the officer assigned to community patrol, Donald Brown.

An Officer Praised

"Officer Brown knows what has to be done in order to decrease crime," she wrote in a March 31 letter to Capt. Joseph A. Lehan. "He is diligent in his pursuit of criminals and suspected criminals. At the same time, he seems to respect the rights of everyone.

"He is irreplaceable."

On Friday, it was Mr. Brown who struggled with Mr. Sayon. Several residents of the neighborhood said they had seen the officer beat him.

"The drugs are just an excuse for what happened" and have been an excuse for a police presence that has made even the innocents feel like criminals, said Mr. Collins.

"The police have used heavy-handed tactics" in dealing with people of the community, he said. "There is a feeling that the community is being surrounded."

Since Mr. Sayon's death, it has only gotten worse, he said. People try to sleep with the noise of helicopters in their heads and children look up to see armed police officers looking down from the roof, he said. By yesterday that presence had trickled down to a few police vans and stepped-up patrols.

For weeks before the incident on Friday, police officers stopped young people on the sidewalks at random and searched them for drugs, people who live in the apartment complex said.

Mr. Brown and others "constantly harassed people for no reason," said Dorrine Irwin, who lives in the apartment complex.

"Yes, there is a drug infestation," she said, standing under a tree painted red, yellow and green to honor Mr. Sayon. "But does that give you the right to kill people?"

Painted on the sidewalk next to the tree are the words "No Justice, No Peace."

A few seconds later, a silver Toyota pulled up beside a group of young men on the sidewalk and the driver said, "What you got?" The young men told him they did not have any drugs, and "get the hell out of here."

A police cruiser was parked at the curb about 50 yards up the street.

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company