JUVENILE HOMICIDE RATE DROPS 68% SINCE 1993

Tighter Enforcement, Decline Of Cocaine And Gangs Account For 33-Year Low,
Experts Say

WASHINGTON -- A six-year decline in slayings by teenagers brought the 1999
homicide arrest rate for juveniles down 68 percent from its 1993 peak to
the lowest level since 1966, the Justice Department reported yesterday.

The arrest rate of juveniles for four major violent crimes -- murder, rape,
robbery and aggravated assault -- plunged 36 percent from its 1994 peak to
1999, reaching the lowest point since 1988, according to FBI statistics
cited in a report by Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention.

Experts say the decline of crack cocaine and the violent gangs that peddled
it, combined with big city police crackdowns on illegal guns and expanded
after-school crime prevention programs, have turned around the juvenile
crime wave that pushed murder arrest rates for youths, age 10 to 17, up
from 1987 to a peak in 1993.

The federal government also reported yesterday that teenage drug use held
steady in 2000, the fourth straight year it has either fallen or stayed the
same. Smoking dropped significantly but use of the club drug ecstasy
climbed for the second year in a row.

That violent youth-crime wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s was
overwhelmingly concentrated among black teenagers in the nation's largest
cities, and the murder declines have been greatest among them.

But there also were sharp declines in murders by white male teenagers, said
James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminal justice professor who
has combined several data sets to produce more detailed reports than the
Justice study.

Fox's data estimating actual offense rates rather than merely arrest rates
showed that the rate of murders committed by blacks age 14-17 fell from
244.1 per 100,000 youths in 1993 to 67.3 in 1999. The white teenage murder
rate fell from 21.8 per 100,000 in 1993 to 10.2 in 1999, Fox said.

"The reduced level of violent crime shows how the power of prevention, when
combined with constructive intervention and strengthened juvenile justice
systems that hold every offender accountable, makes our communities safer,"
Attorney General Janet Reno said.

But polls have showed that word of the juvenile crime turnaround have been
slow to sink in among the public.

"America's kids are committing fewer crimes than they have in three
decades," said Vincent Schiraldi of the Justice Policy Institute, which
advocates alternatives to incarceration. "But this does not seem to be
making it into the public consciousness."

Highly publicized school killings, such as the Columbine High School
killing in which 15 people died in 1999, overwhelmed news of a decline in
school violence.

Fox and others have noted that the demand for crack cocaine abated during
the mid-1990s and the gangs that peddled it either eliminated their
competition or made peace with it.

"The police also played a role," Fox said. "They targeted gang members,
traced illegal guns and aggressively confiscated guns, particularly in New
York, Boston and Los Angeles where the biggest drops were."

A booming economy helped, too. "Not because a teenager would give up the
profits from crack for a McDonald's salary, but because it meant the cities
had money to spend on policing, crime prevention, recreation and
after-school programs," Fox said.

Increased imprisonment was a smaller factor, Fox said, because even though
more juveniles were sentenced to prison during the decade they still were
locked up less often and for much less time than adult offenders.

In the annual "Monitoring the Future" survey, a study of teen drug, alcohol
and tobacco use, had mostly good news, with drops among eighth-, 10th- and
12th-graders.

But it also found the number of high school seniors using heroin hit its
highest point since the survey began in 1975, and more 10th-graders are
using steroids.

The survey of 45,000 students in 435 randomly chosen schools nationwide
found that use of cocaine and hallucinogens such as LSD dropped, with
marijuana use unchanged from 1999.

The results were released yesterday by Health and Human Services Secretary
Donna Shalala and Barry McCaffrey, White House drug policy director.

"The national drug control strategy is working," McCaffrey said.