''He should not have said 'blacks','' Ms. Starr said. ''He should have said 'suspicious characters.' Everyone would have known who he meant.''

Larry Dean Hardison of New Orleans said in a letter published in The Times-Picayune Monday, ''I'm rather in the mood to canonize Harry Lee, not crucify him.'' Mr. Hardison identified himself as a crime victim who had been ''actively involved in civil rights organizations for the past 15 years.''

Ms. Starr, a 34-year-old interior designer, said she was recently robbed at gunpoint in her white middle-class neighborhood to which she moved last year, thinking it would be safer than New Orleans.

Ms. Starr said she and her companion were held up on her front porch at 6:30 P.M. by two blacks, ''decently dressed young men looking almost like college students.'' They took $23,000 worth of jewelry and fled, she said.

Ms. Starr is one of 750 people who have written or called Sheriff Lee about his statement. Sheriff's Lee's public relations agent, Bernard Klein, said the telephone calls, letters and telegrams had included 700 ''positive'' and 55 ''negative.''

A survey conducted for the ABC-TV affiliate in New Orleans by John Grimm, Jefferson Parish poll-taker, found that of 266 people telephoned after the sheriff's remarks, 68 percent had a favorable opinion of Sheriff Lee. A poll with a sample of that size would have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus six percentage points, according to polling specialists.

Sheriff Lee, 54 years old, first won office in 1979, gaining name recognition with the message, ''Vote for Harry Lee'' tucked into fortune cookies. The sheriff was born of immigrant Chinese parents in the back room of his parents' laundry in New Orleans.