WHERE HAVE THE CRIMINALS GONE?

No single explanation stands out for drop in crime rates

It is a mystery that police, prosecutors and criminologists can't seem to
solve: Why have crime rates been going down?

The recent improvement in the economy, shifts in population, more
aggressive law enforcement strategies and tougher sentencing laws -- all
have been advanced as reasons for the decline, but none seems to completely
explain the downward trend.

``Each of the explanations that pundits and social scientists put forth
these days are partially on point, but nobody can definitively argue for
one over the other,'' said Gregg Barak, chairman of the critical
criminology division of the American Society of Criminology and a professor
at the University of Michigan.

Jeremy Travers, the director of the U.S. Justice Department's National
Institute of Justice, echoed Barak's assessment.

``There is a tendency for a lot of people to claim credit for this,'' he
said, ``and there is a need on the part of the public to find a simple,
single answer for what has been happening. But that's a tendency that has
to be resisted.''

The one thing that is certain is that the types of traditional crimes
reflected by statistical data have been declining since 1993.

Violent crime nationwide declined by 5 percent during the first six months
of 1997, according to FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics, and property
crimes declined by 4 percent.

Victimization surveys by the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice
Statistics show violent crime down nationwide by 10 percent and property
crime down by 8 percent.

In releasing last year's annual victimization survey in November, Jan
M.Chaiken, the director of the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice
Statistics, noted that some types of criminal activity had dropped by as
much as 44 percent in the past four years.

``The victimization rates in 1996 are the lowest recorded by the National
Crime Victimization Survey since its inception in 1973,'' Chaiken said.

EXPLANATIONS ELUSIVE

Yet explanations of why crime seems to be on the wane depend on who is
doing the explaining.

Many academics and law enforcement sources point to recent growth in the
U.S. economy as a factor, noting that crime always seems to drop when
employment rates are high.

A study of declining homicide rates in seven U.S. cities over the past
decade released in November by the National Institute of Justice seems to
support this argument. The report noted that certain increases in
unemployment in New Orleans, Richmond, Va., Washington, D.C., Atlanta and
Tampa, Fla., were accompanied by rising homicide rates in those cities,
indicating a potential connection.

However, there are also weaknesses in the improving economy hypothesis for
falling crime rates: Although national unemployment figures have been
falling since 1992, some categories of crime actually increased temporarily
since then -- and crime has climbed steeply in some cities where economic
conditions have improved.

For example, the national murder and assault rates both went up between
1992 and 1993, even though unemployment dropped nearly a whole percentage
point during the same period.

One Justice Department source noted that the U.S. employment rate
fluctuated drastically during the 1970s, while violent crime rates remained
relatively stable.

``I'm not so sure you can draw a relationship between the two,'' he said.

AGING POPULATION FACTOR

Another common explanation for falling crime rates is the country's aging
population. The vast majority of all criminal suspects arrested in the
United States are between the ages of 18 and 40. According to the aging
population hypothesis, the number of people in this age category has
declined by more than 7 percent since 1990, and the drop in crime has been
a result of this demographic change.

Again, some evidence seems to support the argument. Since 1970, the median
age of the U.S. population has climbed from 28 years to 34.6 years, while
crime has tapered off. But the surprisingly high decreases in crime in
recent years seem out of proportion to the relatively modest decrease in
the size of the age group in which most potential offenders are to be
found.

Another possible cause for the falling crime rate is the decline in the
nation's crack cocaine problem, which is associated with large increases in
violent crime among young people in the 1980s.

Noting that homicide rates for most other segments of the population
remained fairly stable during that decade, Travers said murders involving
young people doubled over a seven-year period, and much of the increase
appears to have been associated with the crack epidemic.

He said that crack use has declined and the market for the drug has
stabilized, with established older dealers controlling the market. ``The
introduction of crack into our large cities brought with it an increase in
violence among kids, and sucked guns into the hands of young people, who
then used them in connection with non-crack-related activities,'' he said.

As police shifted enforcement strategies to crack-dealing hot spots where
many of these crimes were occurring, the rates fell off, he said, noting
that the upsurge of crack trafficking was an anomaly that appears to have
been directly related to historically high crime rates in metropolitan
areas.

``We're really just starting to offset the increases that occurred in the
1980s,'' he said. ``We have not suddenly become a much safer society. We
have just gone through a very traumatic decade.''

GET-TOUGH APPROACH

Similar to the crack epidemic hypothesis is the theory that crime has
fallen because of a nationwide get-tough approach to law and order: more
aggressive policing strategies by law enforcement agencies coupled with
tough new sentencing laws such as California's ``three strikes.''

Law enforcement advocates tend to credit the recent apparent decline in
crime to these tougher police and prosecution policies.

In reporting a continuing drop in California crime rates for the first six
months of 1997, state Attorney General Dan Lungren pointed to community
policing and tougher sentences as the primary factors.

``I have heard naysayers state that crime is only dropping because of
demographics,'' Lungren said. ``When are these so-called experts on crime
going to admit that what we have done in California is dramatically driving
down crime?''

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno struck a similar tone last fall on the
third anniversary of the signing of the federal Crime Act, noting that
crime had decreased steadily since 1994, and the federal statute, with its
provisions for tougher sentences and hiring more local police officers,
``is one of the most important reasons.''

Similar arguments have been offered by a host of analysts on the political
right. In a report for the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis
earlier this fall, Morgan O. Reynolds, a law professor from Texas A&M
University, wrote that crime rates rose between 1950 and 1980 as the amount
of jail time served for criminal convictions declined.

``Between 1980 and 1995, expected punishment for serious crimes increased
from 9.7 to 22.1 prison days, a 128 percent increase, and serious crime
declined,'' Reynolds wrote.

Like the other explanations for decreasing rates of crime, the get- tough
argument appears to be partially supported by fact. But even law
enforcement-oriented sources like the National Institute of Justice note
that increases in police staffing levels and hard-line enforcement and
prosecution policies fail to totally account for falling crime rates.

``However, in most of the cities, all these programs were started too
recently to judge their impact on homicide trends during the 10- year
period that ended in 1994,'' analysts from the institute said.

`THREE STRIKES' EFFECT UNCLEAR

And a study of the national ``three strikes'' movement released by the
institute in September says that it is still too early to tell whether
California's tougher sentencing law is having any substantial impact on
crime rates -- although it is already clear that it has had a major effect
on the state's prison capacity and criminal court caseloads.

In fact, some analysts note that a number of states -- including California
- -- began increasing sentences for convicted offenders through the
imposition of determinate sentences and tougher penalties for certain
categories of crime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Despite the longer
sentences that resulted, there was no substantial decrease in crime rates
until 1993.

Critics of the get-tough approach have argued that innovations such as
determinate sentences and ``three strikes'' have had a minimal impact on
crime rates, but have tied up public resources on prison expansion and
construction that could have been used on other governmental programs.

``The tripling in the number of violent offenders in prison during the
1980s resulted in only an estimated additional 9 percent decrease in
violent crimes above the decrease that would have occurred had imprisonment
not grown,'' William J. Sabol and James P. Lynch wrote in an August 1997
review of the get-tough strategy for the Urban Institute, a liberal
Washington, D.C., think tank.

Many experts on crime believe some of the explanations offered for
declining crime rates may be partially correct, but that none completely
explain the phenomenon or help predict what directions the trend may go in
the future.

``Each situation (in which a crime occurs) is different,'' said one Justice
Department official. ``There are so many elements involved that you can't
simply ascribe weights to them. It's scientifically impossible.

``Every year we get reports of 35 million crimes. There are different
reasons for 35 million of them. . . . You can't just point to one thing and
say, `This is what is causing this.' There is no way to accurately measure
it.''

CHART 1: CALIFORNIA VIOLENT CRIME Total violent crime statistics and
percent change from 1992 to 1996 -- Adult arrests

Offense 1992 1996 %change
Murder 2,724 2,090 -23.3%
Forcible rape 3,389 2,630 -22.4%
Robbery 22,284 16,671 -25.2% .
Source: FBI Chronicle Graphic

CHART 2: VIOLENT CRIME

1993 1994 1995
Murder 24,530 23,330 21,600
Forcible rape 106,010 102,220 97,460
Robbery(a) 659,870 618,950 580,550
(a) - Robbery total consists of: Street/highway, gas or service station,
convenience store, residence, bank, other businesses and miscellaneous
Source: FBI Chronicle Graphic

)1998 San Francisco Chronicle