Pubdate: 26 Oct 1997 Source: San Jose Mercury News Contact: FOX BUTTERFIELD, N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE Homicide rates linked to crack epidemic At a time when many politicians and lawenforcement officials are saying their innovative police tactics are responsible for the sharp drop in homicide rates over the past five years, a new Justice Department study has found that the most important reason for the decline may be the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic. The Justice Department report, commissioned by Attorney General Janet Reno, acknowledges that improved police work, along with longer prison sentences and improved emergency medical care, have all contributed to the lower homicide rate. But the report suggests that the close link between crack and homicide may be a fundamental dynamic that explains why homicide rates have declined not only in cities like New York, which have instituted aggressive police strategies, but also in cities like Los Angeles, where the police have been demoralized or have not adopted new methods. ``What we found is that there was a very strong statistical correlation between changes in crack use in the criminal population and homicide rates,'' said Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department. The study tracked homicide rates and crack use in six cities from 1987 to 1993, using data on drug use obtained from the Justice Department's program to test newly arrested criminals for narcotics when they are brought to jail. ``In five of the six study communities,'' the report found, ``homicide rates track quite closely with cocaine use levels among the adult male arrestee population.'' The report said that when homicide rates increased in the mid1980s with the advent of the crack epidemic, ``cocainetest positive rates generally increased. Similarly, when homicide rates declined, cocainetest positive rates also generally declined.'' The report did not address the question of why crack use might drive homicide rates, but experts have suggested that it might be the pharmacological properties of the drug, which creates a brief, intense high, often with feelings of paranoia, or the way crack spawned a new type of drug market, bringing in large numbers of younger dealers who began arming themselves with semiautomatic handguns. The study, which was requested by Reno to try to understand what has led to the drop in homicide rates since 1992, is to be released next month. The cities that were selected were those that showed the clearest patterns in homicide trends, including Detroit and Washington as well as Indianapolis, where crack use and homicide rates have risen dramatically in the 1990s, an exception to the national declines. Some have criticized the new study, saying its sample of cities was too small and did not include some large cities like New York. Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia University, said the study failed to take into account the loss of jobs, increasing income inequality and growing racial segregation that caused longterm decay in the inner cities and made them more susceptible to the ``contagion of crack, guns and gangs.'' ``It was not demon crack'' by itself that triggered the upsurge in violence in the 1980s, he said. Lee Brown, the former police commissioner of New York who is now a candidate for mayor of Houston, commenting on the study's findings, said that he believed it was hard to single out any one factor that was responsible for the drop in homicide rates in cities across the nation. ``I think it is a combination of factors, from crack going down to community policing to demographics,'' Brown said. The study is one of several recent reports that document a close relationship between the increase in crack in the 1980s and the rise in violent crime. The studies have also found a striking drop in crack use, particularly among young people, beginning about 1989, which may help account for the decline in violent crime since 1992. A new study of 142 cities by Eric Baumer of the State University of New York at Albany and Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, for example, found that ``the emergence and proliferation of crack cocaine is responsible, at least in part, for the increase in violent crime,'' especially robberies, in the 1980s. ``If these findings are correct,'' the authors wrote, ``they may help to explain the recent decline in violent crime, including robbery rates, observed in many U.S. cities'' because of the ebbing of the crack epidemic. ``The early and pronounced decline in crime rates for New York City, widely attributed to enforcement measures, is also consistent with New York being among the first cities where crack appeared and, in turn, plateaued,'' the authors wrote. Another study, by Andrew Golub and Bruce Johnson, of the nonprofit National Development and Research Institutes in New York, found a dramatic decrease in crack use among young people being sent to jail in places like Manhattan, Washington and Detroit, starting in the late 1980's. In Manhattan, the rate of detected crack use among juveniles admitted to jail dropped to 22 percent in 1996 from 70 percent in 1988. In Washington, that rate declined to only 10 percent in 1996 from 30 percent in 1989, and in Detroit, it fell to 5 percent in 1996 from 45 percent in 1987. The reason this decrease in crack use by young people is significant, criminologists say, is that it was a doubling of the rate of homicides by juveniles that produced much of the increase in violent crime in the 1980s. The homicide rate for adults 24 and older has actually been shrinking since 1981. Johnson said he believed that the reason young people stopped smoking crack ``was that the standards of the street subculture changed.'' He explained, ``In 1985 in New York, it was cool to get into crack, it was where there was lots of money to be made and easy to get into business, and the consequences weren't yet too harsh.'' But by 1989, the situation had changed dramatically for young people, Johnson said. The crucial factor was what they had witnessed with their own eyes: the ravages of crack on their families and friends, whom they now looked down on as ``crackheads.'' Crack suddenly was no longer cool. While older, established users continued to smoke crack, fewer younger people started using it, depriving crack of new recruits, Johnson said. In this way, the epidemic was reversed. Johnson said police crackdowns on drugs in cities like New York had clearly had an impact on crack, but he said the effect was more on how crack was marketed, closing down socalled open air drug markets, than on the drug's actual consumption. Johnson's opinions was disputed by Robert Silbering, the special narcotics prosecutor for New York City, who said he believed that the ``dismantling of violent drug gangs'' in New York by his office and the police had made a major difference in both crack use and in making the streets safer. On the issue of why crack use leads to murder, David Musto, a professor of child psychiatry and the history of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said: ``There is a strong pharmacological effect. When you smoke crack, it gets to your brain very fast, and your judgment is greatly flawed and you easily become paranoid.'' When combined with the advent of new, more powerful handguns, he said, ``it is easy to see how homicide and crack are linked.'' But Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, said the connection between crack and homicide could be linked to the way crack created new markets. Crack was a new, cheap drug that was outside the control of the older, established dealers, he said. ``You had a lot of kids recruited to sell it,'' he said, ``and when they got recruited, they armed themselves, and then their friends got guns, too, to protect themselves,'' sparking an arms race on the streets. Rosenfeld, of the University of Missouri, said the link was a combination of the pharmacological properties of crack and the new way the drug was sold. Because crack has an intense high that lasts only about 10 minutes, he said, ``you have lots of users who are in urgent need of it, and this creates a demand for lots of sellers, who sell it cheaply in small quantities.'' He added, ``This generates lots of competition and greater levels of violence.''