THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, November 29, 1994 TAG: 9411290012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 44 lines
Any drop in crime rates is welcome. So some Norfolk residents perhaps were encouraged to learn that their city had 10 percent less serious crime - fewer rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts and even one less murder (55 vs. 56) - during the first 10 months of 1994 than in the comparable period in 1993.
Crime has been declining nationwide. But most Americans do not sense the trend. There are good reasons why:
Homicide rates remain high, and Richmond's murder rate, for example, is at a record high.
Murders make the evening news and headlines.
Murders by children and of children shock and dismay the nation.
Many of murders are by killers who exhibit no regard for their own lives, much less others' - and the callousness and viciousness of these crimes fan public fear.
The tempo of slaughter is all but certain to rise with the aging of another wave of children, legions of them living in impoverished, single-parent households. Harsher prison sentences aren't expected to reverse the trend.
We pray that expectation is not fulfilled. If it isn't, it will be because more and more ordinary men and women in more and more neighborhoods will have worked together with law-enforcement authorities and social-welfare agencies private, public and religious, to turn crime back.
Norfolk officials attribute their city's inroads against crime to the 3-year-old Police and Community Enforcement (PACE) program underwritten by a slight property-tax increase. The program involves neighborhoods in the campaign to promote public safety. Norfolk's PACE is among the nation's model anti-crime efforts.
If PACE is indeed the key reason for Norfolk's gratifying slide in serious crime (``if'' because it's often difficult to explain the waxing and waning of criminality), there may yet be a safer land in Americans' future. by CNB