Slight Crime Dip Fails to Cheer State Officials

The downward trend in California’s crime rate continued for the fourth straight year in 1984, but that encouraging news was tempered by slight increases in the incidence of murder and aggravated assault.

The 800,615 major crimes reported last year represented a 3.3% drop from 1983, according to a report made public Friday by the state Bureau of Criminal Statistics.

“While that is better than an increase, the decrease is so small that there is little reason to be very happy with it,” Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp said in releasing the report.

The report showed there was a 1.2% decrease in violent crimes, which accounted for 25% of all the major crimes reported. The biggest drop was in forcible rape, where the 11,702 cases reported in 1984 represented a 4.8% decrease. The 84,015 robberies reported were 3.8% lower than the 1983 figure.

Property crimes were down 4%, with most of the decrease coming in burglaries. The 443,624 burglaries reported in 1984 were 5.3% fewer than the previous year’s figure. The 161,341 motor vehicle thefts were only 0.2% lower than 1983.

Juvenile Burglaries Decline

One factor that Van de Kamp cited as “reason for optimism” was the continuing marked decline in the number of juveniles arrested for burglary.

“Juveniles accounted for more than half (54.2%) of all the burglary arrests in 1974,” Van de Kamp said, “but last year’s figures show that percentage had dropped below one third (33.1 %) of the state’s 76,295 burglary arrests.”

He noted that the 45.1% drop in juvenile arrests for burglary was far greater than the 9.8% decline in the juvenile population over the last 10 years.

Van de Kamp convened a conference of criminal justice experts at UCLA last month with the goal of determining why the crime rate has taken a downturn after three decades of spiraling upward. From 1979 to 1984, the crime rate in California has decreased 14.1%.

“We called that conference together to see if this decline was real and if it represented a trend,” Van de Kamp said. “Those answers were not easy to come by just as it is not easy to provide a simple answer for why crime is down.”

The consensus among the participants in the conference was that the crop of post-World War II “baby boom” children was getting older and the subsequent juvenile population, which commits most of today’s crimes, is diminishing.

But the same experts warned that society may be in for another rise in crime when, as Van de Kamp put it, “the echo boom from the children of the earlier baby boom hits us.”

One of those joining in that prediction at the UCLA conference was Alfred Blumstein, director of the Urban Systems Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He predicted that the next upward swing in crime would be the mid-1990s “because once again there will be a larger percentage of the population in that crime-prone age group.”

One other major explanation offered by the justice system experts for the crime downturn was the record number of people now sentenced to the nation’s prisons and jails.

The director of the Rand Corp.’s criminal justice research program, Peter Greenwood, said his studies show that sending greater numbers of people to prison for longer terms does affect the crime rate “quite simply because it takes the people who are commiting most of the crimes off the street.”

Prison Space

But Greenwood also told the group that, unless California develops preventive programs to deter youths from becoming career criminals, “there won’t be enough space in the state prisons to hold them.”

He said the key factors that lead to higher incidence of crime among juveniles are “the criminal or drug- and alcohol-addictive conduct of their parents, inadequate parenting, learning disabilities and generally low achievement in school.”

One of the sociologists at the conference, Troy Duster, a professor at UC Irvine, also cautioned that while crime is down statistically, the nature of crime “is changing toward more violence.”

He attributed the violence trend to “an increase in meanness” both on the part of criminals and those in society who “are saying they don’t want their tax money to go to social programs that might cope with the causes of crime.”