Homicide Rates Rise in Some Mid-Sized Cities, Countering National Trend

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- "See that alley there?"

Driving her patrol car deeper into Louisville's west end through a downpour
one recent night, Officer Jill Bellafato of the Louisville Police
Department steered down a dark, desolate pathway separating two rows of
rundown houses.

"This is a big drug area," Officer Bellafato said. "We jumped on a guy down
there last night. He got away from us. But you see anybody standing around
here, you know they're here for drugs."

She turned into another alley and gestured toward a house barely visible in
the dark through the pouring rain. "Guy lives in there sells drugs out his
window. People just walk up."

Before her shift ended at midnight, Officer Bellafato pointed out a dozen
other places known to the police as hangouts for drug users.

These days in Louisville, Kentucky's largest city with 260,000 people, drug
activity is not hard to find.

Local officials say that since crack began flooding the city in the early
1990s, the homicide rate has soared. In 1997, according to federal and
local authorities, homicides in Louisville jumped to a 17-year high of 68.

For many midsize cities in the United States, that is not unusual. Contrary
to the trends that show homicide rates falling in many of the country's
largest cities since 1994, some cities with populations of several hundred
thousand are experiencing increases in killings. In Fort Wayne, Ind., last
year, the police recorded 37 killings, compared with 13 in 1996.

The Nashville metropolitan area, one of the fastest growing in the country,
with 525,000 people, logged a record 112 homicides last year.

In some midsize cities, the murder rate has been fluctuating since it rose
in the early 1990s. Among them were Cincinnati, where homicides jumped to
40 in 1997 from 32 in 1996 and Chattanooga, Tenn., where they rose to 36 in
1997 from 21 in 1996. Both cities had years in this decade in which they
had more killings than in 1997.

Not all midsize cities are seeing rising homicides rates. The Memphis
police redeployed many officers into neighborhoods as part of a stepped-up
effort at community policing, and homicides dropped last year to 157, from
181 in 1996 and 190 in 1995. With similar efforts in El Paso, the number of
killings fell to 27 last year from 32 in 1996.

But the surges in killings elsewhere, often a byproduct of drug activity,
contrast sharply with the decline in the overall crime rate across the
United States.

Though there is much debate about drops and increases in murder rates,
police officials and other experts point to evidence of a rising, more
violent drug trade in medium-sized cities, and the fact that some of these
cities are just catching up with the latest trends in crime-fighting.

"Smaller cities are going through what bigger cities went through five
years ago," Alfred Blumstein, a professor of public policy at
Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said of drug use contributing to
homicides. "There is a lag effect in the smaller cities, caused not
necessarily by the saturation of drugs in big cities but the propagation of
markets. There may be entrepreneurs from big cities looking to expand or
new entrepreneurs in small cities looking to get involved."

In any case, Blumstein said, the influx of drugs into cities like
Louisville and Nashville with their under-served markets is touching off
the same cycle of violence that big cities have long been accustomed to:
turf wars between dealers, leading to gunplay as the ultimate in conflict
resolution, then increased efforts of law-enforcement agencies and
community groups to fight the rising crime.

Only then do crime rates fall, the law-enforcement experts say, as they
have in New York, Los Angeles and other large cities, which James Alan Fox,
dean of the college of criminal justice at Northeastern University in
Boston, called "a market correction" after a startling rise in killings
through the 1980s.

Comparing the crime rates in cities in the first six months of 1997 with
those of the same period in 1996, the latest statistics available from the
Justice Department show that crime dropped 6 percent in cities with
populations of more than 250,000 and 1 percent to 3 percent in suburban and
rural areas. Reflecting the drop in the larger cities, the overall homicide
rate for these areas fell by 9 percent.

Not all police departments in cities where the homicide totals are climbing
attribute increases to expanding drug use. In Cincinnati, for example, Sgt.
Michael Gardner of the Police Department said that "I can't say definitely"
that the city's steady increase in drug activity contributed to last year's
rise in homicides.

But citing places like Louisville, where the police last year linked 1 in
every 4 killings to drugs, and Nashville, where nearly 1 of every 2
killings was linked to drugs, federal law-enforcement officials say it is
evident that illegal drugs -- crack, powder cocaine, heroin and more
recently, methamphetamine, an all-purpose drug that can be smoked, snorted
or injected -- are playing a larger role in violent crimes outside the
nation's largest cities.

These officials say that over the last five years, drug dealers in large
cities like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit have reached
a market peak, prompting them to stake out customers in smaller cities and
escape turf wars that are thinning their ranks.

Chief Douglas Hamilton of the Louisville Police Department said he recently
spoke to the chief of a "major Eastern city" police department who told him
that drug activity there was peaking largely because dealers were helping
to eliminate problems "two by two," a reference to turf battles in which
one drug user is killed and the other is arrested. Chief Hamilton did not
identify the city.

Officials say the attractiveness of smaller cities to drug dealers also
stems from their convenient location on Interstate highways, making
distribution easier and faster, and the smaller size of their police
departments.

"We've seen an increase in activity all over the Midwest," said Larry
Galina of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the special agent in charge
of Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan. "Violence is going up, and more teen-agers
are getting involved. Why? Because of an increase in drugs. It all fits in."

Because of its proximity to states in the Midwest and the South, Kentucky
has been hit particularly hard by expanding drug activity. The federal drug
agency has doubled its presence in Louisville since the 1980s and recently
opened another office in Lexington, the state's second-largest city.
Another office, in London, Ky., is scheduled to open soon.

Within the state, Louisville seems to be the hub of illegal drug activity.
The drug agency last year sent in what it calls a regional mobile
enforcement team of 10 agents to assist local and state officials, and
Galina said the group had aided in 100 arrests.

"The fact that they were requested," he said, "they went and were
successful indicates there was a problem."

Just this week, responding to a tip, the police found a car in the parking
lot of Louisville International Airport with nearly $800,000 in cash
inside, wrapped in cellophane and duct tape. A police spokesman said he had
"no doubt" that the money was part of a drug transaction.

Sustaining much of the drug activity, as well as the increase in violence,
Hamilton says, is that residents are afraid to provide information to the
authorities. In one highly publicized incident in 1996, a Louisville
informer for the federal drug agency, Gail Duncan, was killed after
information she gave the police led to the arrest of four drug dealers. In
addition, one of the defendants was killed after he agreed to testify
against the other three. The killings have not been solved.

In addition to federal assistance, Louisville officials have implemented
measures to fight drug activity and other crimes. Last February, Mayor
Jerry E. Abramson announced 27 initiatives to make the city safer, many of
them ideas borrowed from other cities. Parole officers are riding along
with police on patrol, as they do in Boston, to spot parole violators.
Community courts have been set up as they have been in New York to speed
justice.

To combat neighborhood drug dealing, Louisville officials authorized more
money for a crackdown on drugs that included more arrests of dealers on the
street, faster responses to complaints and roadblocks to identify dealers.

Among other efforts, the police created a squad of six officers to combat
teen-age gangs and a squad of five others to transport fugitives back to
Louisville from other cities and states. The city also invested $671,000
for computers in police cars.

"Are we doing everything we can think of?" Abramson asked. "Yes. Are we
making a difference? I don't know."

David L. Armstrong, the judge-executive of Jefferson County, which
surrounds Louisville and suffers many of the same problems as the city,
said that local agencies could do more to combat drug activity and slow the
killings. As the favorite to succeed Abramson, who is barred by law from
seeking a fourth term this year, Armstrong said he would support merging
the city and county police departments to consolidate their efforts.

"This has always been a kindly, gentle community, moving rapidly to become
a city of the future," said Armstrong, a former state attorney general.
"With that optimistic view, I don't want us to be perceived as a high crime
area. But we are getting the reputation of being a dangerous city where
death occurs."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company