A MURDEROUS TREND DEFIED

New York City is continuing to buck a new big-city trend - rising murder
rates. Police here say there were 503 murders as of mid-November, a 12
percent decline compared with a year earlier and about 70 percent below the
figure nine years ago. The city's challenge, in the face of inevitable
budget cuts, is to maintain its enviable distinction.

The picture is much bleaker elsewhere in the country. Los Angeles is
experiencing a surge in homicides with 594 as of Nov. 20, compared with 587
for all of last year. Washington, D.C., has had more than 240 murders, a
double-digit increase. An upturn nationally in murders, after a decade of
overall decline, began to emerge last year. According to Federal Bureau of
Investigation statistics for 2001, which were released recently, there was
a 2.5 percent rise in murders nationwide.

Criminologists aren't able to identify with precision the causes for the
national increase. But among the possibilities cited are a faltering
economy, an increase in the more crime-prone teenage population, wars
between competing drug gangs, an increase in inmates released from prisons
where they were warehoused rather than rehabilitated and the diversion of
police resources to antiterrorism activities. The problem is that all of
these factors exist in New York as well.

There are many forces, such as changing demographics, over which no city,
including New York, has much control. The expansion of the police force
when Rudolph Giuliani was mayor must have helped push the city's crime rate
down. Compstat, the crime mapping system used to increase management
accountability that has been copied by many other cities, also may deserve
some credit. Now that the Police Department is facing inevitable budget
cuts, Commissioner Raymond Kelly will have to be twice as canny as the
smart people who preceded him in order to keep the number of murders in New
York from ballooning again. No one wants to see a return to anything
approaching the record levels of previous years.