Plan to Cut Mall Bus Service Called Racist : Connecticut: Teens sometimes bring in more trouble than dollars, suburban merchants say. They hope to bar buses on popular cruising nights, Fridays and Saturdays.

TRUMBULL, Conn. —  Almost every afternoon, Kiko Boyd and Tim McNeil hop a bus in Bridgeport and head to the mall in suburban Trumbull, where they check out the CDs and eat french fries, but mostly just hang out.

They’re not alone. On weekends, the corridors of the sprawling Trumbull Shopping Park are clogged with teen-agers.

Mall officials complain that the crowds sometimes bring in more trouble than dollars. They’ve come up with a plan to keep the Bridgeport youths out: bar buses from stopping at the mall on Friday and Saturday nights, the two most popular cruising nights for teens.

Community groups call the plan racist.

“There are a lot of kids who are troublemakers, but they’re not all from Bridgeport, and I think this is pointing the finger at Bridgeport kids, and it’s not fair,” said Alma Maya, a member of the Puerto Rican Coalition.

The Greater Bridgeport Transit District intends to ask a federal judge to ensure that bus service continues. Mall officials deny their plan is discriminatory, but have agreed to wait for a court decision.

“The volume of kids and the behavior concern us,” said Gary Karl, the mall’s general manager. “We just are unable to deal with it effectively.”

The idea of banning the buses came after one teen shot another in the leg last year at a store entrance just yards from the bus stop. Karl said it was an isolated incident.

But the fear of crime lingers in Trumbull, a quiet suburb just over the border from Bridgeport, which led the state in murders last year with 63.

McNeil, 16, and Boyd, 14, who are both black, said that mall security guards often harass them, ordering them to split up if they are in groups of more than five.

“Truthfully, I think it is racial,” McNeil said. “I can’t say no one causes trouble, but half the kids who come here want to buy things and they get kicked out.”

Other youths say they get harassed regardless of color. Paul Kochiss, a white 18-year-old from Bridgeport, said guards pester most groups of teens who hang out in the corridors outside Filenes, Abraham & Strauss and other stores.

“You don’t come to the mall to spend money all the time. You come to see your friends and look at girls,” Kochiss said. “They don’t like that.”

Mall operators have proposed stopping buses from coming to the mall after 6 p.m. on Fridays and 4 p.m. on Saturdays. Karl said the plan is intended to deal with a legitimate safety issue.

“On Friday evenings and late Saturday afternoons, we have what we feel is an unnecessary increased level of young people in the shopping center . . . coming via public transportation,” he said.

But stopping the buses would also end an economic lifeline for teens who work at the mall and have no other means of transportation, Maya said.

And it would inconvenience the 86% of the passengers who aren’t teen-agers, said William Finch, the transit district’s general manager.

Transit district lawyer Thomas Weihing said the plan would violate the constitutional right to freedom of assembly and would be unfair to handicapped people who depend on the buses.

The mall has moved the bus stop to the far end of a parking lot, hired police to help its security guards and increased bicycle patrols on the grounds. Teens say these are better ways of dealing with the gangs that sometimes congregate at the mall than stopping the bus service.

“There’s trouble every once in a while,” said Adam Catropa, 14, of Stratford. “They should keep the buses, but they should have more security.”