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