Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 29, 1993 TAG: 9310290093
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GARY BLONSTON KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Stories of criminal mayhem fill the evening news. Crime sets the agenda for state and local politics from Florida to California. Polls regularly rank crime alongside the economy and health care as one of the nation's most pressing concerns.
President Clinton promises federal action; Hillary Rodham Clinton declares the fight on crime to be her next big issue. It is as though the country were confronting a devastating new wave of theft and violence.
It isn't. There is no new national crime wave.
Whatever the impressions left by tourist killings in Miami, carjacking deaths in Washington, D.C., drive-by murders in Los Angeles and gang warfare in Wichita, Kan., the most reliable national crime figures available indicate that serious crime has occurred much less frequently since the record-setting years of the early 1980s.
Unquestionably, in the most beleaguered pockets of poor, urban America, the statistics bear out the country's concerns. Crime is increasingly more assaultive. It is more likely to involve guns. It is more likely to involve teen-agers. It is more likely to involve drugs.
But even in the cities, only some categories of violent crime have gone up. The homicide rate - the country's most watched, most accurate single crime statistic - was down last year from the year before. The homicide record has stood since 1980.
Perhaps most surprising of all is the dramatic drop in property crimes, especially in the nation's suburbs. There, the likelihood of a home being burglarized fell to half the rate of 20 years ago - from 88 cases per 1,000 homes in 1973 to just 44 in 1991, the most recent year surveyed.
Overall, in 1981, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 41.2 million crimes. In 1991, that figure was down to 34.4 million, third-lowest in the past two decades.
National crime reports lag a year or two behind events and fall far short of noting every crime. And local situations, good and bad, can depart dramatically from the national average. But experts in the field don't expect 1993 to vary much from the trends reported over the last few years by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The statistics bureau asks a huge sample of Americans - 99,000 the last time around - what crimes they experienced in the previous year and then makes national crime projections for urban, suburban and nonurban areas. Its findings are considered more reliable than statistics compiled by the FBI from local police reports, because not all crimes are reported to local police and not all police keep records the same way.
Further, police and municipal officials have been known to skew their numbers, either to reassure residents that crime is down or to bolster arguments for more money because crime is up.
The statistics bureau's surveys are unarguable in their most consistent finding: that the United States encompasses two distinct and separate worlds of crime. One of them is middle-class, mostly suburban and relatively safe despite its residents' fears; the other is poor, mostly urban and extremely dangerous despite the best efforts of its law-abiding citizens.
In the words of James Lynch, an American University demographer and crime specialist, "The people who are most anxious are the ones least at risk. Of course, for those places where things are bad, they bad . . ." But "it always amazes me that people think there's a crime wave. There just isn't."
The reason for the massive outbreak of concern over the past few years is readily apparent: The country has been bombarded by crime news.
Local TV news broadcasts seeking larger audiences increasingly rely on relentless crime coverage, and a nation full of video cameras has provided them stunning images to display.
Candidates for mayor in Houston and Seattle and for governor in Virginia and New Jersey have turned up the emotional rhetoric on crime issues. Wherever people gather, conversation often turns to the latest episode of crime in the school, the shopping center, the house down the street.
Perhaps most powerful of all, a few nationally publicized incidents in the past two years have intensified a largely unspoken but common fear among people outside the most dangerous inner-city neighborhoods.
It is the fear that criminal violence will break out of its traditional boundaries, intruding on safe streets, reaching into the middle-class neighborhoods of city and suburb, following the people, black and white, who have fled or avoided central cities specifically to get away from crime.
Nothing could have fed that fear more vividly than the sequence of attacks on tourists in Florida this year, in which most of the victims were white and most of the accused assailants black.
Or the shooting of Michael Jordan's father on a rural North Carolina road.
Or the fate of a suburban Washington woman, entangled in her seat belt when pushed from her carjacked automobile, then dragged to her death during the car thieves' escape.
Or the endlessly replayed video image of white truck driver Reginald Denny being attacked by young black men in the midst of last year's Los Angeles riot. (The other famous LA crime video - of white police beating black motorist Rodney King - dramatized why racial fear also resides in the black community.)
But all those grisly events made news precisely because they don't represent either the character or the frequency of most crime.
More than half of all violent crimes, the statistics bureau says, are simple assaults - unarmed encounters between people who, in nearly half the cases, know each other.
Robbery accounts for less than 20 percent of violent crime, rape for only 2.7 percent, murder for just 0.4 percent.
And as it has for decades, crime remains mostly within the same old boundaries of geography and race. While occasional episodes of suburban carjacking, drive-by shootings and home invasions might suggest that urban crime is spreading dramatically beyond its borders, that perception isn't borne out by the record.
Seventy-five percent of white crime victims, now as in 1973, say their assailant was white; 85 percent of black victims, now as in 1973, say their assailant was black; and crime, as always, is concentrated in poor, urban neighborhoods.
Scholars of crime see two big reasons criminals prey mostly on people of their own race. The first is sheer proximity.
The other has to do specifically with black-on-black crime. As University of Pennsylvania sociologist Elijah Anderson says, many black people have long believed that "if you hurt a person in the black community, not much will be done about it," but committing crime against whites can bring major police investigations and stern punishments.
However badly that reflects on the American justice system, Anderson considers the perception of a double standard as a central reason why urban violence doesn't translate into suburban crime.
There is another compelling reason crime in the suburbs is down. It is because the number of young people in America is down, and young people commit most crimes.
That made it easy for demographers to look at the baby-boom generation and predict an increase in crime in the years around 1980 as the bulk of that huge generation became young adults. Next, the statisticians said, would come a decrease, when the boomers got older and the country's total population of young people began to shrink.
Right on schedule, that's what happened. As the 15- to 24-year-old population grew to almost 20 percent of all Americans, crime rates reached their highest levels ever. In the later '80s, as their numbers fell to 15 percent of the total, every category of crime dropped, from murder to break-ins.
In those same eventful years, an unprecedented number of criminals were going to prison, and some people argue that the decline in crime in the 1980s was linked largely to that record increase in incarcerations. From 1980 to 1993, the population in state and federal prisons rose from 330,000 to 925,000. Including city and county jail inmates, more than a million Americans are behind bars.
At the same time, homeowners were locking themselves inside houses with alarm systems, often behind walled subdivisions that sometimes came with guards and gates. Neighborhoods formed "watch" organizations, and suburban police departments grew in size and sophistication.
All those fearful responses had their effect in keeping crime away, but the experience of the past two decades has shown that most people in America won't feel safe until the cities seem safe.
For a few years, the drop in the number of young people brought a decline in crime in urban America as well, bottoming out in 1986.
But in the 1990s, while rates for nonviolent crimes - theft, burglary and the like - have stayed low, crimes against people have not.
In just the two years from 1989 to 1991, the statistical chance of an average city resident being a victim of violence increased 14 percent.
Violence has reignited despite a lower population of young adults, a sharp rise in the prison population and anti-drug crusades, despite neighborhood watches, candlelight marches, street-corner mentoring projects and all-night basketball leagues.
And especially in the most publicized episodes of brutal crime - child homicides, random shootings, casual executions - the heartlessness in the violence suggests a small but growing population of young criminals with little concern for human life.
by CNB