ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 9, 1996 TAG: 9608090050
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
NOTE: Lede
After surging nonstop since 1987, the arrest rate of young people for violent crimes unexpectedly declined last year, led by a sharp falloff in murder arrests.
Preliminary FBI data for 1995 showed that overall violent crime arrest rates for youths aged 10 to 17 dropped 2.9 percent. The arrest rate for murder plunged 15.2 percent, the second year in a row it has fallen; last year's rate was 22.8 percent below the 1993 figure. The last year the juvenile arrest rates for murder and violent crime both dropped was 1983.
The news was unveiled Thursday by Attorney General Janet Reno, whose top priority has been youth violence. But she quickly cautioned at her weekly news conference:
``What is so important is that we not relax and we not take credit for victory yet, because the number of young people is going to increase significantly in the next 15 years. So the actual number of crimes, unless we work real hard, is going to go up.''
Police executives and academic experts echoed her caution but were overjoyed to hear of a reversal in what has become one of the nation's most feared crime problems. While adult violence declined in recent years, youth violence surged.
Reno and these experts cited federal, state and local programs to explain the new numbers: more police focus on the most violent youths, with tougher sentences for those youths; big-city crackdowns on guns in the hands of youngsters; increased community help for first offenders; and prevention programs to occupy youths with free time and little supervision.
Professor Jack Levin, who directs Northeastern University's Program for the Study of Violence and Conflict, said nationwide attention to youth crime amounts to ``a cultural revolution, and it's paying off in these rosy crime figures.''
``The average person is going to regard this as the effect of law-and-order policies like lengthening prison sentences and holding parents criminally responsible, but they're wrong,'' Levin said. ``It isn't that we're punishing our teen-agers more; it's that we're supervising them more. Everywhere, police, clergy, school systems, parents, universities and even businesses are focusing on the problem of youth violence, and it's working.''
The 1995 juvenile murder arrest rate was 11.2 per 100,000, down from 13.2 in 1994. The 1995 combined juvenile arrest rate for murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault was 511.9 per 100,000, down from 527.4 in 1994.
Professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie-Mellon University hailed efforts by several big cities to take guns from juveniles. ``A quarter of all murders occur in seven or eight big cities,'' he said. ``For instance, New York is about 8 percent of the national total, so a drop of 25 percent in New York would take two percentage points off the national rate.''
New York City saw its murder arrest rate for teens 15-to-19 years old drop 27 percent in 1995, which Deputy Police Commissioner Mike Farrell attributed largely to strict enforcement of quality-of-life laws against graffiti, loud music, public drinking and even riding bicycles on the sidewalk.
``These don't necessarily result in arrests, but they increase contact with the police and change the calculation of risk for carrying a gun,'' Farrell said. ``So we see far fewer spontaneous shootings from playground altercations and the like.''
``That `zero-tolerance' policing in New York and Houston may sound tough,'' Levin said, ``but it's the role that parents used to play before we spent the past 20 years letting our teen-agers raise themselves.''
Gun confiscations, gun buy-back and bounty programs are particularly important, said James Alan Fox, Northeastern's dean of criminal justice, because the 169 percent increase in the teen-age murder arrest rate between 1984 and 1993 was fueled ``entirely by guns. There was no change in murders by knives and clubs.''
But Fox warned against complacency, because the new figures are declines from record crime years: ``It's good to see the numbers come down, but we certainly haven't won the war.''
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Chart by AP: Juvenile crime. color.by CNB