Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 1, 1993 TAG: 9312300031
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Crime in general is down considerably from 10 years ago. In some places for some kinds of crime, the decline is especially dramatic: A suburban home is only half as likely to be burglarized as it was not just 10 but 20 years ago.
So, are today's politicians - from President Clinton to Virginia's gubernatorial candidates to the commonwealth's House of Delegates hopefuls - wrong to make an issue of crime? Is the public wrong in telling the candidates, via public-opinion polls and other methods, that crime ought to be not just one issue but a primary issue?
Not at all.
Why not?
First, beneath the good-news averages lie bad-news specifics.
The suburbs may be safer. But parts of inner-city America are war zones.
With the passage of the postwar baby boom into middle age, there are fewer young males - the demographic group likeliest to commit crimes - in the population. But crimes of extreme violence are being committed by younger and younger children.
Second, America remains a high-crime, violence-prone culture compared to other developed nations of Western Europe and the Pacific Rim.
Many of the costs of crime are obvious. There is the cost to victims, whose property or lives are damaged or lost. There is the cost to society, which must divert resources to crime's detection, prosecution and punishment.
The indirect costs of crime can be even broader. Too much of it, and we grow numb to it; we grow too numb to crime, and we get callous toward all manner of social ills, crime-related or not.
Can anyone calculate crime's cost in terms of disinvestment in America's cities, and the effect this has had on racial integration, educational progress and poverty? Can anyone calculate the cost when society's moral fabric rots?
Even so, if the politicians - reflecting the people - are right to make crime a concern, neither should they toss off reports such as those from the Bureau of Justice Statistics as immaterial.
The trouble with isolated anecdotes, however dramatic, is that they give too little information to lead to effective steps to prevent their recurrence.
Good statistical evidence - including the correlation of crime with substance abuse and dropping out of school, for instance - may be less compelling than a horrendous story. It provides, though, a truer guide for fashioning public policies that can cut the risk of the horror stories' recurring.
by CNB