RISE IN CITY'S HOMICIDES PUZZLING

GREENSBORO - When police investigated a then-record 37 homicides in 1991,
the City Council called on police Chief Sylvester Daughtry to explain the rise.

"We're too busy reacting to homicides to analyze them," he told the council.

Police had no ready answers for why the city saw 16 more killings than the
year before, although the emergence of crack cocaine certainly played a
role, police said.

Police Chief David Wray could find himself in a similar position in coming
months as he goes before the City Council to request more officers.

And his answers could be just as hazy.

The city surpassed the 1991 record with 39 killings last year, even as
cities statewide reported significant drops in killings.

"It's inexplicable at this point," Wray said. "It might be that we have a
retrospective view on it down the road and something becomes clear to us.
But we haven't found that. We know that there's been a rise in street-level
drug activity (and) a rise in gang activity, and we think that has
something to do with it."

Police say that typically seven in 10 of the city's killings have a
connection to drug use. That can range from a drug dealer shooting someone
over money to a domestic killing in which one person regularly used drugs.
But drugs played a direct role in only three of last year's homicides,
police said, and only one killing was labeled gang-related.

To curb drug sales, Wray created an investigative squad of about 30
officers to tackle street-level drugs citywide starting this month. And the
department's three gang detectives are working with schools to teach
students, teachers and parents about gangs, Wray said.

The biggest motive in last year's killings appears to be passion. Nineteen
people died during arguments - seven in domestic disputes, eight during
arguments with people they knew well and four at the hands of people they
didn't know well.

Investigators have even more questions in eight cases in which the motives
are unknown. They don't know, for example, why someone killed 44-year-old
Hazelene Harper-Fields and left her body in woods behind Smith Homes in
April. That is just one of the department's 14 unsolved homicide cases for
the year.

"Is there one thing I can tell you? No, it's a pretty complex set of
circumstances," Wray said of the year's killings.

Police also had few answers when homicides surged in 1991. But the increase
came when other cities were seeing similar rises in killings, and crack
cocaine was labeled a main contributor.

Greensboro recorded 39 homicides last year and 31 homicides in 2002 - after
four years investigating 23 or fewer killings.

In the past two years, Winston-Salem and Charlotte have recorded half the
number of homicides those departments investigated when killings peaked in
the early 1990s along with Greensboro. Durham reported 22 homicides last
year, marking a 30 percent drop from the year before.

And Raleigh hasn't seen a homicide spike since 2000, when it recorded 27
killings - almost twice the number Raleigh police investigated last year.
One person was killed in Guilford County last year, a drop from two the
year before.

That Greensboro is left out of a statewide trend leaves Wray and others
searching for answers.

"I'm not sure you can explain it," Wray said. "If you look overall some of
our violent crime is down, so why did homicide increase? We don't know if
this is simply an anomaly or what it is."

From January through November last year, the city investigated 17 percent
fewer rapes, 17 percent fewer aggravated assaults and the same number of
robberies as the same period in 2002, according to police statistics.
December numbers are not yet available.

"I don't have an specific increase that's driving the homicide rate," said
Capt. Craig Hartley, who oversees crime analysis. "It's a whole cadre of
social factors that play into that. Some of it's related to prostitution.
Some of it has to do with domestic situation. Some of it's narcotics.
There's no focal issue."

The city has seen unexplained surges in the past. Killings jumped 13 to
reach 35 in 1997, and jumped 12 to reach 34 in 1995. Each time, those
numbers dropped by more than a third the following year. That leads some to
think the past two years could simply be an anomaly that won't be repeated
this year.

Wray said he hopes to have more answers after he studies the city's
demographic changes in recent years and other social factors that could
affect crime.

"That would be down the road," Wray said. "When you're doing all you can to
investigate these things and solve them, there's not a lot of time for
demographic research."