CRIME DOWN, REASONS UP

Trial-and-error is the more powerful method of human advancement because
trial-and-success, though more satisfying, is more subject to
interpretation. When it fails to rain after a ceremonial dance, the lesson
is relatively clear.

A post-dance cloudburst can be misleading.

So it is with another year's worth of favorable crime statistics. The FBI's
final totals for 1997 show that national rates for homicide and other
serious crimes have declined, again, for a sixth consecutive year. Similar
findings are reflected in the Justice Department's annual household survey.
The best news: The murder rate last year was the lowest in 30 years--just
6.8 homicides per 100,000 population, or 7 percent below 1996 levels.
Chicago's rate also was down for the third year in a row (though New York's
is falling so fast that, this year, Chicago may end up with more homicides
than Gotham.)

Some experts say this reflects an inevitable recovery from the years of
1992-93 and before, when gangs battled for supremacy in the then-novel
crack cocaine trade.

Now the crack market has settled into a less-lethal, business-as-usual
mode. But this theory does not satisfy law-and-order professionals, nor
does it explain why all kinds of crime, violent and non-violent, from rape
to car theft, are trending down.

Demographers explain that Baby Boomers have moved past the crime-prone
years and there aren't enough Baby Busters to cause that much mayhem.

This reasoning, in turn, galls those who've been trying new anti-crime
methods and want some of the credit.

One such is Chicago's Community Policing, or CAPS program, which tries to
prevent crimes before they happen.

In New York, former police commissioner William Bratton credited his own
leadership in a recent autobiographical book. In Chicago, Mayor Richard
Daley can be expected to do something similar on the campaign stump.

Then there's the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key explanation. Last year
the number of Americans in jail rose to 1.7 million, a one-year increase of
5.2 percent.

Get-tough advocates say this is no coincidence--that the price of safer
streets is our willingness to jail record numbers of felons.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, though evidence also mounts that jails
are filling with substance-addicted repeat offenders whose non-violent
crimes might be more efficiently prevented by drug treatment.

It is undeniably good news, this continuing decline in the crime rate. It
will be even better news if the nation manages to cut through the pet
theories and self-serving explanations and actually learn something from
our success.