THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 9, 1996 TAG: 9608090480
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 69 lines
After surging nonstop since 1987, the arrest rate of young people for violent crimes declined unexpectedly last year, led by a sharp falloff in the rate of murder arrests.
Preliminary FBI data for 1995 showed that overall violent crime arrest rates for youths aged 10 to 17 fell 2.9 percent. The arrest rate for murder plunged 15.2 percent.
The murder arrest rate has now declined two years in a row, to 22.8 percent below the 1993 figure. Not since 1983 have both these juvenile arrest rates - for murder and violent crime - dropped in one year.
The news was unveiled Thursday by Attorney General Janet Reno, whose top priority has been youth violence. But she quickly cautioned: ``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.''
Reno and police and academic experts cited a panoply of programs: more police focus on and tougher sentences for the most violent youths, big-city crackdowns on guns in the hands of kids, increased community help for first offenders, and prevention programs to occupy youths who have 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.''
``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 teenagers more; it's that we're supervising them more.''
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: ``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 aged 15 to 19 drop 27 percent in 1995, which Deputy Police Commissioner Mike Farrell attributed largely to strict enforcement of quality-of-life laws against graffiti, loud noise from boom boxes, public drinking and 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 teenagers 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 teenage murder arrest rate between 1984 and 1993 was fueled ``entirely by guns.''
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,'' Fox said. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic with charts
Violent Crime
Murder
THE LIKELY CAUSE:
More supervision of youths, and a push to cut the number of guns in
their hands. Says one academic, ``It isn't that we're punishing our
teenagers more; it's that we're supervising them more.''
KEYWORDS: JUVENILE CRIME by CNB