Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Contact: Author: Fox Butterfield, New York Times Pubdate: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 CRIME DECLINE BAFFLES EXPERTS One theory: U.S. Has Finally Adjusted To The Convulsive Changes Of The 1960s Crime has declined dramatically for six years, but new studies prepared for a national conference of academic experts Saturday in Chicago suggest that criminologists still don't completely understand why. ``The closer we look at the drop in crime, the more complex it gets,'' said Eric Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California-Los Angeles. The papers, commissioned by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology at Northwestern University School of Law, restated the favorite explanations: improved police tactics, more criminals behind bars, a better economy and inner-city young people's revulsion for drugs and guns. And some new explanations were offered: a drop in alcohol consumption and the return to social stability after upheavals in politics, the economy and the family in the 1960s. But there was no consensus -- even as police and politicians take credit for falling crime rates. ``Our ultimate concern is policy,'' Monkkonen said, ``but now we see there can't be any one single policy'' that resolves the United States' crime problem. The reasons for a decline in New York may be different from the drop in Los Angeles -- or an increase in Baton Rouge, La., or Indianapolis. Nevertheless, several of the papers propounded what seems to be an increasingly dominant view among criminologists that although the drop has multiple causes, it centers on a reversal of the dynamic that drove crime rates high in the 1980s. At its heart is a recognition that what accounted for that sudden growth in homicide, beginning with the crack-cocaine epidemic in 1984, was a rise in killings by young people, most of them carried out with handguns. Homicides by adults 25 and older have declined since 1980, said Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie-Mellon University and Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri at St. Louis. ``All of the increase in the level of homicide in the United States during the growth period of the late 1980s and early 1990s,'' they wrote, ``was due to the trends in the younger ages, because homicide rates for those 25 years old and older did not go up.'' And now, because murder by adults was already declining, the biggest reduction in homicides since 1991 has been among young people, Blumstein and Rosenfeld said. The experts see the recent killings in Jonesboro, Ark., as an indication that -- although the rate of juvenile violence has declined for three years -- juvenile violence remains troublesome, far higher than it was in 1984. Scholars found that, just as slayings by juveniles using handguns increased more than 100 percent between 1985 and 1994, the drop in homicides by young people is almost entirely a result of fewer gun killings. For adults, crucial is a decline in murder of spouses as American society has changed; a reduction in traditional barroom brawls as the neighborhood tavern has disappeared; and more people in prison, he said. For young people, the causes appear to be older people taking over drug markets and police seizure of guns from youths, Blumstein said. Ten years of research in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn also show that many young people there, sickened by the spate of drug deals, killings and arrests, turned away from the violence of street life and found legitimate jobs starting in 1993. Another theory was put forward by Gary LaFree, sociologist at the University of New Mexico, who believes the decline nationally results from a return to stability, to confidence in government, to increased affluence and to the society feeling more settled as it comes to accept a variety of non-traditional family arrangements that began in the 1960s.