Homicide rates linked to crack epidemic

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 crack cocaine 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 like New York, which have instituted
aggressive police strategies, but also in cities like 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 from 1987 to
1993, 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 mid1980s with the advent of the crack epidemic, ``cocainetest
positive rates generally increased. Similarly, when homicide rates
declined, cocainetest positive 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 like New York.

Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia University, said the study
failed to take into account the loss of jobs, increasing income inequality
and growing racial segregation that caused longterm decay in the inner
cities and made them more susceptible to the ``contagion of crack, guns and
gangs.''

``It was not demon crack'' by itself that triggered the upsurge in violence
in the 1980s, he said.

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
that 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.

The study is one of several recent reports that document a close
relationship between the increase in crack in the 1980s and the rise in
violent crime. The studies have also found a striking drop in crack use,
particularly among young people, beginning about 1989, which may help
account for the decline in violent crime since 1992.

A new study of 142 cities by Eric Baumer of the State University of New
York at Albany and Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri at St.
Louis, for example, found that ``the emergence and proliferation of crack
cocaine is responsible, at least in part, for the increase in violent
crime,'' especially
robberies, in the 1980s.

``If these findings are correct,'' the authors wrote, ``they may help to
explain the recent decline in violent crime, including robbery rates,
observed in many U.S. cities'' because of the ebbing of the crack epidemic.

``The early and pronounced decline in crime rates for New York City, widely
attributed to enforcement measures, is also consistent with New York being
among the first cities where crack appeared and, in turn, plateaued,'' the
authors wrote.

Another study, by Andrew Golub and Bruce Johnson, of the nonprofit National
Development and Research Institutes in New York, found a dramatic decrease
in crack use among young people being sent to jail in places like
Manhattan, Washington and Detroit, starting in the late 1980's. In
Manhattan, the rate of detected crack use among juveniles admitted to jail
dropped to 22 percent in 1996 from 70 percent in 1988. In Washington, that
rate declined to only 10 percent in 1996 from 30 percent in 1989, and in
Detroit, it fell to 5 percent in 1996 from 45 percent in 1987.

The reason this decrease in crack use by young people is significant,
criminologists say, is that it was a doubling of the rate of homicides by
juveniles that produced much of the increase in violent crime in the 1980s.
The homicide rate for adults 24 and older has actually been shrinking since
1981.

Johnson said he believed that the reason young people stopped smoking crack
``was that the standards of the street subculture changed.'' He explained,
``In 1985 in New York, it was cool to get into crack, it was where there
was lots of money to be made and easy to get into business, and the
consequences weren't yet too harsh.''

But by 1989, the situation had changed dramatically for young people,
Johnson said. The crucial factor was what they had witnessed with their own
eyes: the ravages of crack on their families and friends, whom they now
looked down on as ``crackheads.'' Crack suddenly was no longer cool. While
older, established users continued to smoke crack, fewer younger people
started using it, depriving crack of new recruits, Johnson said. In this
way, the epidemic was reversed.

Johnson said police crackdowns on drugs in cities like New York had clearly
had an impact on crack, but he said the effect was more on how crack was
marketed, closing down socalled open air drug markets, than on the drug's
actual consumption.

Johnson's opinions was disputed by Robert Silbering, the special narcotics
prosecutor for New York City, who said he believed that the ``dismantling
of violent drug gangs'' in New York by his office and the police had made a
major difference in both crack use and in making the streets safer.

On the issue of why crack use leads to murder, David Musto, a professor of
child psychiatry and the history of medicine at the Yale School of
Medicine, said: ``There is a strong pharmacological effect. When you smoke
crack, it gets to your brain very fast, and your judgment is greatly flawed
and you easily become paranoid.''

When combined with the advent of new, more powerful handguns, he said, ``it
is easy to see how homicide and crack are linked.''

But Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University,
said the connection between crack and homicide could be linked to the
way crack created new markets. Crack was a new, cheap drug that was
outside the control of the older, established dealers, he said. ``You
had a lot of kids recruited to sell it,'' he said, ``and when they
got recruited, they armed themselves, and then their friends got
guns, too, to protect themselves,'' sparking an arms race on the streets.

Rosenfeld, of the University of Missouri, said the link was a combination
of the pharmacological properties of crack and the new way the drug was
sold. Because crack has an intense high that lasts only about 10 minutes,
he said, ``you have lots of users who are in urgent need of it, and this
creates a demand for lots of sellers, who sell it cheaply in small
quantities.'' He added, ``This generates lots of competition and greater
levels of violence.''