The disappearance of Svetlana Aronov "is getting the full court press," as one police official said.

"We're treating it like a homicide," said the official, who asked not to be named. "Not to say that she's dead, just it's receiving the attention of a homicide."

Actually, the missing person case is receiving more attention from the NYPD than the average New York City homicide, especially in comparison to investigations involving slayings in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

And that raises a question: Is the disappearance receiving so much police attention because Aronov is a wealthy, white doctor's wife from Manhattan?

Some two dozen detectives were assigned every day last week, police said, to try to find out what happened to Aronov, 44, who vanished while walking her father's cocker spaniel last Monday.

In most homicides, after the rush of the first day of an investigation that could involve scores of officers and evidence technicians, the matter is usually left to three or four detectives.

In Aronov's case, police held a news conference, unusual in a missing person investigation, on the day after she vanished. They traced phone and bank records and are analyzing film from security cameras along York Avenue where Aronov was thought to have walked.

Detectives traveled to Bridgehampton after receiving a report that Aronov may have been shopping in a grocery store there.

"We're doing a lot of work, a lot of canvassing," Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said last week. "It's still very much an open and aggressive investigation."

One detective, who previously worked in the Missing Persons Squad, said as he sees it, the case is being given disproportionate attention. "But I understand why it's happening," said the detective, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's happening because number one it's Manhattan, then she's got money, and her husband's a doctor, and she's white."

"I guess this woman receives the special status because they believe she's the victim of a crime - why they believe that I don't know. You can say, 'Well, it's because she just disappeared,' but people just disappear all the time and most of them do it on purpose. If I was a missing person and I lived in the Bronx and I wasn't a doctor, I don't think the case would get the attention this case has gotten."

But Deputy Chief Joseph Reznick said certain missing persons cases, like Aronov's, deserve the extra attention they have received.

"It gets more treatment because it appears they're leaning toward a crime having happened, as opposed to a more typical missing persons case," said Reznick, who previously headed the Special Investigations Division, which includes the Missing Persons Squad. "You're adding a criminal mix to the soup, so to speak, so I think it makes sense to use more resources."

Between 2000 and 2002, 26,433 missing persons cases were filed in New York City. More than 70 percent of those cases involved runaways, most of them young women, police said. The next biggest category is elderly people with Alzheimer's disease.

The so-called "class G" missing persons, the ones involving suspicious disappearances where criminality is feared - "those cases where they just disappeared off the face of the earth" - are rare and inherently require more attention, Reznick said.

He said the idea that more is done when rich Manhattanites disappear is a fallacy.

As an example, he points to the case of Samiya Haqiqi, a Quinnipiac College student of Afghan descent from Flushing. She disappeared in November 1999 after meeting a boyfriend who she planned to break up with. Although they never found her body, investigators spent thousands of hours on the case over the next 2 1/2 years. They finally arrested the boyfriend, Fahid Popal, whom they tracked down in California, after allegedly tying him to her slaying through a single hair ripped from her head that was found in his auto repair shop. He was charged with second-degree murder last year.

As for the idea that the "haves" get special attention over the "have-nots," Reznick said, "It's always been portrayed that way. But the reality of it is it's just not the case."