ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701280104
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FOX BUTTERFIELD THE NEW YORK TIMES
In the face of America's vast crime problem, liberals and conservatives have long clashed over the causes of lawlessness and what to do about it.
For liberals, crime must be traced to its roots in poverty, joblessness and racism, deep-seated social and economic ills. Nonsense, conservatives counter, the origins are cultural, stemming from the decline of the family along with the rise of welfare dependency, single motherhood and a permissive social ethos.
One thing both sides agree on: there is little the police can do to reduce crime.
Taken together, these views add up to the conventional wisdom about crime that has prevailed for 20 years or more. Without profound changes in society, there isn't much anyone can do about crime in this country.
Suddenly, new facts have turned this accepted wisdom on its head. For five years, reported crime, especially murder, has been dropping sharply, even though the economic plight of the inner cities and the disarray in poor families remain the same. This decline is the longest in 25 years, and when the final figures for 1996 are in, it is likely that the national homicide rate will fall to its lowest level since the 1960s, when an explosion of violence triggered America's modern crime problem.
No one really knows why crime is dropping.
``This is a humbling time for all crime analysts,'' said John J. DiIulio Jr., a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. ``It is a puzzlement.''
Still, a remarkably optimistic new view of crime prevention is emerging among experts, and their revised consensus suggests that law enforcement may make a critical difference after all, through innovative and concerted police strategies on guns, teen-agers and petty crimes. Call this the management approach.
At the same time, another new theory gaining adherents is that fighting crime is like combating an epidemic whose pattern of infection doesn't follow a tidy mathematical progression.
``Acts of violence lead to further acts of violence, creating a contagion effect and a sudden jump in crime rates that is hard to explain,'' said John Laub, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University. This may be what happened when the advent of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s produced a sudden, huge increase in violence.
Epidemiologists term this dramatic escalation the ``tipping point.'' Fortunately, the same effect applies once enough measures are taken to contain the epidemic, even though the measures, by themselves, seem far less ambitious than previous efforts to attack crime at its roots.
William Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner who is credited with introducing some of the successful new law enforcement strategies, said, ``I think we are now at another one of those tipping points, only on the way down.''
Preliminary FBI data for 1996, released this month, seem to support Bratton and underscore how mistaken the old wisdom about crime now appears. The biggest decreases in serious and violent crime last year came in the nation's largest cities, precisely those areas where traditional criminology predicted crimes would be the worst.
In the past five years, murders in New York have fallen by 50 percent, to 984 in 1996 from 1,995 in 1992. The rate also dropped in other big cities where the police have adopted new tactics: in Houston by 49 percent, Chicago by 16 percent and Boston by 62 percent.
It is difficult to overstate how different the new view of policing is. As recently as 1990, Travis Hirschi, an influential criminologist, in a book titled ``A General Theory of Crime'' (Stanford University Press), wrote, ``No evidence exists that augmentation of police forces or equipment, differential patrol strategies or differential intensities of surveillance have any effect on crime rates.''
The seeds of the new approach were sown by Bratton when he took charge of the New York City Transit Authority police in 1990. Following the advice of criminologist George Kelling, Bratton instituted a program of trying to head off more serious crimes by cracking down on minor ones like turnstile-jumping and panhandling.
Later, as commissioner, Bratton added further elements to his management strategy, using computer-generated statistics to target crime hot spots and making his subordinates responsible for reaching crime-reduction goals, the way a businessman demands increased profits.
But, cautioned James Q. Wilson, a professor of management at the University of California at Los Angeles, improved police work is not the whole story. In Los Angeles, Wilson said, ``the police may not be part of the story at all,'' because murders have dropped there by 37 percent over the past five years despite poor police leadership, bad morale and a decline in arrests.
Instead, Wilson said, it is important to note that the adult homicide rate has been declining since 1981, and that the only reason the homicide rate rose in the late 1980s was that juvenile violence tripled with the advent of crack. This form of cocaine brought youths into the drug trade and created a demand for automatic handguns. Many teen-agers suddenly wanted a gun for safety or prestige.
Unlike adult crime, teen-age crime ``follows a fad-like pattern, where the changes come quickly,'' Wilson said. Just as teen-agers' tastes in clothing are driven by trends, so was their jump into crack culture. But when they saw the cost in death, hospitalization and prison time, many turned away, he said.
Geoffrey Canada, president of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in Harlem, who counsels poor children, said he has witnessed a change among 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds in the past five years.
The toll of death in their families, tougher police tactics and stepped-up efforts by neighborhood groups to combat violence have combined to reduce involvement in the drug trade.
The drug market is still there, Canada said, but it is more stable now, back in the hands of older people who treat it like a business.
``When you had 15-year-olds selling crack, they were wild cowboys who shot off their guns if somebody dissed them,'' he said.
There are several other possible explanations for the decline in murder. The development of hospital trauma centers has saved more gunshot victims from death. The ban on assault weapons and the Brady law, requiring a five-day waiting period to purchase a handgun, have made it harder for criminals to obtain guns. Longer prison sentences have removed some career criminals from the streets, though the threat of longer sentences may not actually deter crime.
Given this plenitude of possible causes, it may be that ``this is a case where the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts,'' said Jeffrey Fagan, the director of the Center for Violence Research and Prevention at Columbia University.
This, said Fagan, would also fit in the epidemiological theory of a ``tipping point,'' where a number of small factors help reduce the epidemic faster than can be logically explained.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the drop in murder will last just because it has declined for five years. Some experts are worried that the rapidly rising popularity of methamphetamines, or speed, in the Southwest may turn it into something like crack was in the mid-1980s, an unforeseen catalyst that drives up crime rates.
But the recent decrease does illustrate an important point that often gets forgotten in the shrill public debate over crime: there is nothing immutable in human nature about homicide.
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