Pubdate: Mon, 28 Dec 1998
Source: Ft. Worth Star-Telegram (TX)
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Copyright: 1998 Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas
Author: Fox Butterfield, New York Times News Service

DECLINE IN CRACK USE GIVEN CREDIT FOR DROP IN VIOLENT CRIME RATES

Statistics released yesterday by the Justice Department are helping
criminologists resolve a contentious mystery -- why violent crime has
dropped for seven consecutive years after an upsurge in the 1980s.

The statistics, showing that robbery fell a stunning 17 percent in
1997, suggest that while there are many factors behind the decline in
crime in the 1990s, the crucial ones may be the withering away of the
crack market and police efforts to seize handguns from criminals and
juveniles.

The two crimes that have fallen the most sharply since 1991 are
homicide and now robbery, the two most often committed with handguns
and most associated with the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s,
criminologists said.

"Homicide and robbery were the two crimes most impacted by crack
markets, with the biggest increases, and now, as crack markets have
declined, homicide and robbery have led the way down," said James Alan
Fox, dean of the college of criminal justice at Northeastern University.

The figures on robbery were released yesterday by the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, a branch of the Justice Department, as part of its
National Crime Victimization Survey. The annual survey, carried out
for the Justice Department by the Census Bureau, asks 80,000 people
ages 12 and older whether they have been victims of a crime in the
past year. It complements the other major national set of crime
statistics, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, which measures crimes
reported to police. Fort Worth's homicide and major crime figures
appear to mirror nationwide trends.

Just before the end of 1996, the city had recorded 66 homicides for
the year, 14 fewer than the all-time low of 80 set in both 1974 and
1976. After jumping to 81 during fiscal year 1996-97, the number of
homicides dropped to 62 during fiscal year 1997-98.

Overall nationwide, the Justice Department said, both violent and
property crimes have fallen to their lowest levels since 1973, when
the victimization survey was started. In fact, the rate of property
crime -- which includes burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft -- has
fallen by more than half, to 248 per 1,000 households in 1997, down
from 555 per 1,000 households in 1973.

Property crime, unlike violent crime, has been dropping steadily since
1975. Among the reasons, experts said, are the aging of the baby
boomers beyond their prime years for committing crime, the increased
use of security alarms and the switch of many criminals from burglary
to robbery in the 1980s as a quicker way to make money and buy the
crack they needed.

Violent crime surged unexpectedly with the crack epidemic starting
about 1985, and then began to fall, equally unexpectedly, in 1991.
Only in retrospect have law enforcement authorities and criminologists
been able to theorize about the causes of the rise and decline in
violent crime. At a conference of leading experts in New Orleans this
month sponsored by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Alfred
Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, outlined
research on what has come to be the most widely accepted view -- that
all of the increase in homicide in the late 1980s and early 1990s was
attributable to a rise in killing by juveniles and young people ages
24 and younger, since homicide by adults ages 25 and older has fallen
since 1980.

This increase in killing was driven by the sudden spread of crack
markets and the growing use of high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In
fact, Blumstein said, "The growth in homicides by young people, which
accounted for all the growth in homicides in the post-1985 period, was
accounted for totally by the growth in homicides committed with handguns."

Since 1991, homicides have dropped 31 percent, from 9.8 per 100,000 to
6.8 per 100,000 in 1997, while robberies have fallen 32 percent, from
272 per 100,000 to 185 per 100,000 in 1997, according to the FBI.
These are the largest declines for any of the major violent or
property crimes.

Bruce Johnson and Andrew Golub, scholars at the National Development
and Research Institutes in New York City, showed the crucial role of
crack in leading violent crime up and then down. When crack arrived in
New York in 1985, it created a huge new market for users and dealers.
Unlike heroin, it was sold in small amounts that provided an intense
but short-lasting high that required users to go on constant
"missions" to find more.

Thousands of unskilled, unemployed young men from New York's poor
inner-city neighborhoods jumped into the crack business as sellers,
and to protect themselves in an unstable business environment, they
acquired handguns. An explosion in homicides and robberies resulted
from the combination of impulsive youth, the confused market
situation, the paranoia induced by crack and the increased firepower
of the new handguns.

The sharp drop in violent crime starting in 1991 can be accounted for
by the reversal of these same forces, in what Johnson and Golub
described as "an indigenous shift," as youths who came of age in the
1990s turned against smoking or selling crack.

"The primary reason" these young people give for avoiding crack,
Johnson and Golub reported, "is the negative role models in their
lives. They clearly do not want to emulate their parents, older
siblings, close relatives or other associates in their neighborhoods
who were enmeshed with crack." Crack produced "devastation" in their
lives, and they now shun or deride anyone who smokes crack.

Among other factors that have played a role in the decline in
violence, the experts at the New Orleans conference pointed in
particular to aggressive new actions by the police in many cities to
stop gun violence, either by frequent searches, as has happened in New
York, or by improved efforts to trace guns used in crimes and arrest
gun traffickers, a Boston tactic.

The booming economy of the 1990s has also helped, the experts agreed,
providing legitimate jobs to some urban young people who had worked in
the drug trade.

Staff writer Ginger D. Richardson contributed to this
report.

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