CRIME:

Better police work and longer prison sentences also contributed,a Justice
Department report says.

At a time when many politicians and lawenforcement officials are saying
their innovative police tactics are responsible for the sharp drop in
homicide rates over the past five years, a new Justice Department study has
found that the most important reason for the decline may be the waning of
the crackcocaine epidemic.

The Justice Department report, commissioned by Attorney General Janet Reno,
acknowledges that improved police work, along with longer prison sentences
and improved emergency medical care, have all contributed to the lower
homicide rate. But the report suggests that the close link between crack
and homicide may be a fundamental dynamic that explains why homicide rates
have declined not only in cities such as New York that have instituted
aggressive police strategies, but also in Los Angeles, where the police
have been demoralized or have not adopted new methods.

"What we found is that there was a very strong statistical correlation
between changes in crack use in the criminal population and homicide
rates," said Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice,
the research arm of the Justice Department.

The study tracked homicide rates and crack use in six cities in 19871993,
using data on drug use obtained from the Justice Department's program to
test newly arrested criminals for narcotics when they are brought to jail.

"In five of the six study communities," the report found, "homicide rates
track quite closely with cocaine use levels among the adult male arrestee
population." The report said that when homicide rates increased in the
mid1980's with the advent of the crack epidemic, "cocainetest positive
rates generally increased. Similarly, when homicide rates also generally
declined."

The report did not address the question of why crack use might drive
homicide rates, but experts have suggested that it might be the
pharmacological properties of the drug, which creates a brief, intense
high, often with feelings of paranoia, or the way crack spawned a new type
of drug market, bringing in large numbers of younger dealers who began
arming themselves with semiautomatic handguns.

The study, which was requested by Reno to try to understand what has led to
the drop in homicide rates since 1992, is to be released next month. The
cities that were selected were those that showed the clearest patterns in
homicide trends, including Detroit and Washington as well as Indianapolis,
where crack use and homicide rates have risen dramatically in the 1990s, an
exception to the national declines.

Some have criticized the new study, saying its sample of cities was too
small and did not include some large cities such as New York.

Lee Brown, the former police commissioner of New York who is now a
candidate for mayor of Houston, commenting on the study's findings, said he
believed it was hard to single out any one factor that was responsible for
the drop in homicide rates in cities across the nation. "I think it is a
combination of factors, from crack going down to community policing to
demographics," Brown said.