ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 19, 1996 TAG: 9608190163
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CLEVELAND
SOURCE: New York Times
Back when Sgt. John Kaminski started out in homicide in the 1960s, the most common murder cases were barroom brawls.
There was a bar on every street corner in Cleveland in those days, and the men who worked in this city's steel and automobile plants took the trolley to their jobs, stopping off for a shot and a beer on the way home. In some bars, it was like clockwork, Kaminski remembers. After a few drinks, a patron would insult the man on the next stool, usually a friend, and pretty soon a knife or a gun would be pulled out, and one of the customers would be dead.
No more. The factories, the bars and that way of life are largely gone. ``I can't even remember the last bar fight,'' said Kaminski, 65, who has been a homicide detective for 30 years.
The virtual disappearance of barroom killings is part of a profound change in American crime and society. Murders committed by adults have dropped almost in half over the last 15 years.
In 1994, the last year for which figures are available, there were only 4.7 homicides per 100,000 adults 25 years or older, compared with 8.1 in 1981, according to an analysis of FBI data by James Alan Fox, the dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.
The drop in adult homicides is perhaps the sharpest in the nation's history, and is even more pronounced among blacks than whites. It has helped drive a decline in murder rates reported by many cities over the last three years, experts say.
Now, if the drop-off in juvenile homicide rates announced earlier this month by Attorney General Janet Reno continues, the United States could experience the first sustained decline in murder since the crime wave that began in the mid-1960s.
Homicide detectives have their own theories, based on years of street experience, for the long-term decline in adult murders. In interviews in precinct houses, squad cars and threadbare offices in Buffalo, N.Y.; Chicago; Dallas; and Cleveland - some of the cities with the sharpest declines - more than a dozen detectives offered their reasons in addition to the decrease in barroom murders, which have fallen 69 percent nationwide since 1981. Among the reasons are these:
* A drop of almost 40 percent in killings involving spouses and other partners as society has become less tolerant of domestic violence and police officers nationwide are now required to make arrests whenever they find evidence of physical harm, heading off possible fatal violence.
* The popular calls for tougher prison sentences, which have resulted in a tripling of the prison population from 1980 to 1994, coinciding with the decline in adult homicides. (Experts disagree on how to measure the results of the imprisonment boom. But Sgt. Tom Keane, a detective in Chicago since 1978, said that ``if the bad guys are in prison, they can't commit another murder.'')
* An improvement in emergency medical services and hospital trauma centers, so that many gunshot victims who might have died in the past are now saved. (Many victims who survive shootings today, Keane said, ``would have been caskets before.'')
* The aging of the baby-boom generation. Its members were about 16 to 34 years old in 1980, still in the prime age for committing crime, but they now are about 32 to 50 years old. (``I think it's the baby boomers getting older,'' said Detective Edward Kovacic of Cleveland. ``We've never had a group of people as big as that before.'')
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB