Pubdate: Mon, 28 Dec 1998 Source: New York Times (NY) Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/ Copyright: 1998 The New York Times Company Author: Fox Butterfield SHARP DROP IN VIOLENT CRIME TRACED TO DECLINE IN CRACK MARKET New statistics released Sunday by the Justice Department are helping criminologists resolve a contentious mystery -- why violent crime has dropped seven straight years after an upsurge in the 1980s. The statistics, showing that robbery fell a stunning 17 percent in 1997, suggest that while there are many factors behind the decline in crime in the 1990s, the crucial ones may be the withering away of the crack market and police efforts to seize handguns from criminals and juveniles. The two crimes that have fallen the most sharply since 1991 are homicide and now robbery, the two most often committed with handguns and most associated with the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s, criminologists say. "Homicide and robbery were the two crimes most impacted by crack markets, with the biggest increases, and now as crack markets have declined, homicide and robbery have led the way down," said James Alan Fox, dean of the college of criminal justice at Northeastern University. The figures on robbery were released Sunday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the Justice Department, as part of its National Crime Victimization Survey. The annual survey, carried out for the Justice Department by the Census Bureau, asks 80,000 people ages 12 and older whether they have been victims of a crime in the past year. It complements the other major national set of crime statistics, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, which measures crimes reported to police. Overall, the Justice Department said, both violent and property crimes have fallen to their lowest levels since 1973, when the victimization survey was started. In fact, the rate of property crime -- which includes burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft -- has fallen by more than half, to 248 per 1,000 households in 1997, down from 555 per 1,000 households in 1973. Property crime, unlike violent crime, has been dropping steadily since 1975. Among the reasons, experts say, are the aging of the baby boom population beyond its prime years for committing crime, the increased use of security alarms and the switch of many criminals from burglary to robbery in the 1980s as a quicker way to make money and buy the crack they needed. Violent crime surged unexpectedly with the crack epidemic starting about 1985, and then began to fall, equally unexpectedly, in 1991. Only in retrospect have law-enforcement authorities and criminologists been able to theorize about the causes of the rise and decline in violent crime. At a conference of leading experts in New Orleans this month sponsored by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, outlined research on what has come to be the most widely accepted view -- that all of the huge increase in homicide in the late 1980s and early 1990s was attributable to a rise in killing by juveniles and young people ages 24 and under, since homicide by adults ages 25 and older has fallen since 1980. This increase in killing was driven by the sudden spread of crack markets and the growing use of high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In fact, Blumstein said, "The growth in homicides by young people, which accounted for all the growth in homicides in the post-1985 period, was accounted for totally by the growth in homicides committed with handguns." Since 1991, homicides have dropped 31 percent, from 9.8 per 100,000 to 6.8 per 100,000 in 1997, while robberies have fallen 32 percent, from 272 per 100,000 to 185 per 100,000 in 1997, according to the FBI. These are the largest declines for any of the major violent or property crimes. Bruce Johnson and Andrew Golub, scholars at the National Development and Research Institutes in New York City, showed the critical role of crack in leading violent crime up and then down. When crack arrived in New York in 1985, it created a huge new market for users and dealers. Unlike heroin, it was sold in small amounts that provided an intense but short-lasting high that required users to go on constant "missions" to find more. Thousands of unskilled, unemployed young men from New York's poor inner city neighborhoods jumped into the crack business as sellers, and to protect themselves in an unstable business environment, they acquired handguns. An explosion in homicides and robberies resulted from the combination of impulsive youth, the confused market situation, the paranoia induced by crack and the increased firepower of the new handguns. The sharp drop in violent crime starting in 1991 can be accounted for by the reversal of these same forces, in what Johnson and Golub described as "an indigenous shift," as youths who came of age in the 1990s turned against smoking or selling crack. "The primary reason" these young people give for avoiding crack, Johnson and Golub reported, "is the negative role models in their lives. They clearly do not want to emulate their parents, older siblings, close relatives or other associates in their neighborhoods who were enmeshed with crack." Crack produced "devastation" in their lives, and they now shun or deride anyone who smokes crack. Among other factors that have played a role in the decline in violence, the experts at the New Orleans conference pointed in particular to aggressive new actions by the police in many cities to stop gun violence, either by frequent searches, as has happened in New York, or by improved efforts to trace guns used in crimes and arrest gun traffickers, a Boston tactic. The booming economy of the 1990s has also helped, the experts agreed, providing legitimate jobs to some urban young people who had worked in the drug trade. Evidence on the role of imprisonment in curbing crime is less clear, the experts said. There is no question that the almost quadrupling of the number of people incarcerated since 1970, to 1.8 million, has incapacitated many criminals and prevented many crimes. But since the prison population has expanded steadily over the past 25 years, it does not explain why crime increased sharply in the late 1980s or decreased in 1991. Here, said Fox, it may be necessary to look separately at the incarceration of adults and juveniles, a study which has not yet been done. - --- Checked-by: Richard Lake