
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, January 20, 1995                   TAG: 9501200066
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RANDOM DEATH

ARE YOU safer from random death in the center of a Virginia metro area than in its outlying parts? You are by the reckoning of a professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia.

First: Although center cities have higher murder rates than do the suburbs, William H. Lucy observes, most murders - about 85 percent in Virginia - are not random crimes against strangers but crimes against victims whom the murderer knows.

Second: Traffic deaths, also random, should be counted as well, he says - and outlying areas have more traffic deaths than center cities have murders, let alone murders by strangers.

Combine traffic-death and nonacquaintance-murder rates per 100,000 people by locality, Lucy reports, and you find that, from 1988 through 1992, within each of Virginia's metro areas, the center cities were safer than the suburban and exurban localities. Roanoke County had 11.1 stranger homicides and traffic fatalities per 100,000 population, for example, compared with Roanoke city's 10.2. In exurban Botetourt County, where the traffic-death rate was more than four times the city's, the overall random-death rate was 38.1 per 100,000 people.

Lucy's analysis isn't gospel. More traffic victims than murder victims, it seems probable, reside outside the locality where they're killed; if so, using each locality's population to arrive at random-death rate skews the figures a little bit in the center cities' favor.

Nor is randomness always as absolute as the method assumes. Some traffic victims contribute to their own deaths by speeding excessively or driving while intoxicated. Conversely, killings committed by acquaintances - such as at a New Year's party in Roanoke this year - can have random qualities. And random or not, murder by definition involves intent to kill, which lends it a moral horror beyond that of most traffic deaths.

But if the figures can't be as precise as carrying them to the first decimal point implies, Lucy nevertheless offers a useful reminder not to let legitimate concern about crime overtake common sense. In fleeing the perceived danger of urban crime, it's easy to forget the consequent increase in other dangers. The chance of being killed without warning is greater on a high-speed highway than on an urban street-corner; the chances of either are too high.

by CNB