THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 17, 1994 TAG: 9408170001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
With more than a hundred homicides since Jan. 1, Richmond is well on its way to chalking up its most murderous year - a distinction gained in 1992, when the city recorded 120 killings.
What more could be done to curtail the carnage and other serious crime in Richmond was the topic of the two-day Summit on Violent and Drug Related Crime convened last week.
Twenty-one political, governmental, church and civic leaders involved in the anti-crime struggle assembled. Said Mayor Leonidas B. Young: ``I am tired of hearing of the burdens on our criminal-justice system. I am tired of being told what we can't do.''
Aren't we all?
At the summit's end, Richmond City Hall promised not to deploy the National Guard, as the city's alarmed School Board chairman urged, but to expand and intensify police patrols in crime-stricken areas, where most killings occur.
The slaughter usually involves people who know each other. Killers and victims are typically young black males.
The summiteers were reminded of existing anti-crime programs, many of which aspire to steer children in low-income households away from crime and prison inmates toward constructive lives. But Richmond's violence is unabated.
Experience in Norfolk and some other localities where serious crime has declined indicates that community-based policing - in which police and residents interact to combat crime - is helpful. Richmond has some of that. It needs more.
More police - and more prisons, too - are needed to keep dangerous criminals at bay. They are not the whole answer: Violent-crime rates have soared even while prison-building has boomed.
So we seek preventatives, prevention being cheaper than crime and punishment. Proposals tumbled forth at the Richmond summit: Shrink class sizes and lengthen the school day; arrest loiterers and prostitutes; create a crime-prevention agency; declare high-crime neighborhoods disaster areas and look for federal aid; yank ABC licenses of convenience stores that tolerate on-premises drinking; try teens as adults; reorganize the police force; establish an all-male school for African-Americans; enforce juvenile-curfew laws. . . .
The torrent of suggestions reflects the anxiety over the breakdown of law and order from here to Hawaii. That anxiety is focusing minds. Is it too much to hope that more intellectual, spiritual and material resources will be mobilized to push the violence curve downward?
KEYWORDS: MURDER CRIME
by CNB