Reason for Dramatic Drop in Crime Puzzles the Experts

Crime has declined dramatically for six years, but new studies prepared for
a national conference of academic experts on crime suggest that
criminologists are no closer now to understanding the reasons than when the
downturn was first detected.

"The closer we look at the drop in crime, the more complex it gets," Eric
Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California at Los
Angeles, said in an interview before the conference, which took place in
Chicago on Saturday.

"It's like cancer," said Monkkonen, an expert on the history of homicide in
American cities. "The more we know, the more what looks like one problem
becomes a series of problems."

The papers commissioned by the The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
at Northwestern University School of Law, restated most of the favorite
explanations offered for the drop in crime: improved police tactics, more
criminals behind bars, a better economy and a revulsion by young people in
the nation's inner cities against the culture of drugs and guns that
spawned much of the violence of the late 1980s.

There were some novel ideas suggested: that the decline in violence could
be traced to a drop in alcohol consumption, or that the reduction reflects
a return to greater social stability after the upheavals in politics, the
economy and the family in the 1960s.

But there was no consensus on an explanation -- even as mayors and police
commissioners across the country are taking credit for their 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 policy problem is exacerbated because crime is local,
with enormous variations in crime rates from city to city, and even from
block to block. The reasons crime has declined in New York may be very
different from why it has dropped in Los Angeles -- or why it has increased
in some places, including Baton Rouge, La., and Indianapolis.

Nevertheless, several of the papers propounded what seems to be an
increasingly dominant view among criminologists that there are multiple
causes for the drop and that they center on a reversal of the dynamic that
drove crime rates higher in the 1980s.

At the heart of this line of explanation is a recognition that what
accounted for the sudden growth in homicide, with the advent of the crack
cocaine epidemic in 1984, was a rise in murder by young people, most of it
committed with handguns.

Homicides by adults age 25 and older actually have been declining 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."

Similarly, because murder by adults was already declining, the biggest
reduction in homicides since 1991 has been in those by young people,
Blumstein and Rosenfeld said.

The experts regard the killings of four students and a teacher at a school
in Jonesboro, Ark., as an indication that juvenile violence remains a
troublesome issue, far higher than it was in 1984 before killings by young
people made a sharp increase, even though the rate of juvenile violence has
declined for three years.

The professors found that just as murders 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 killings
involving guns. Because there have been two different trends -- the
long-term decline in murder by adults, and the sudden increase and then
drop in killings by juveniles -- there are different factors at work in
each trend, Blumstein said in an interview before the conference.

For adults, the crucial reasons are 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 a change in drug markets,
as older, more established dealers have taken control, and the impact of
new police tactics that focused on seizing guns from young people,
Blumstein said. In a separate paper examining the drop in homicide in New
York City, Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia University, and
Franklin Zimring, the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the
University of California at Berkeley, found a further complexity -- a sharp
divergence between the trends for murders committed with a gun and those
without a gun. From 1985 to 1992, in the middle of the crack epidemic,
homicides without a gun began to decline steadily, dropping 35 percent,
while murders with a gun doubled, they wrote. Since 1992, both rates have
fallen. The early and consistent drop in murders without a gun at least
partly undercuts New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's claims that his use of
tough police tactics is responsible for New York's decline in violence, the
professors note, and it "remains a pleasant mystery that shrouds the whole
explanation of variations in New York City homicide in fog." One factor may
be a change in behavior by young people themselves, said Richard Curtis, an
associate professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

In a paper based on 10 years of observation of residents and drug dealers
in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in New York City, he said that many
young people there, frightened and sickened by the spate of drug deals,
killings and arrests, and the epidemic of AIDS, had turned away from the
violence of street life and found legitimate jobs starting in 1993. Curtis
gives Giuliani's police little credit for this transformation, viewing
their repeated sweeps through Bushwick and arrests of its residents as
largely angering the young people. Left unsaid is what would have happened
without such police pressure.

Still another theory was put forward by Gary LaFree, a sociologist at the
University of New Mexico, who believes the decline in crime nationwide
results from a return to stability, with people more confident in
government, more affluent with an improved economy, and more settled as
society has come to accept a variety of nontraditional family arrangements
that began in the 1960s.

Particularly important, LaFree suggested, is that more young people than
ever before are in school, from prekindergarten to college, as schools have
replaced many of the functions of the family.