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.