17.9% Rise in County Murder Rate Mirrors National Trend

Los Angeles County’s murder rate soared 17.9% during the first six months of this year, part of a nationwide trend that is projected to break a decade-old record for the United States.

Acting Chief Medical Examiner Lawrence Cogan told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week that the escalating rate of murders--1,168 in the first six months of 1990, as contrasted with 991 for the same period last year--does not appear to be slowing down in July and August. He said the county has about 2,000 homicides a year.

Cogan generally blamed the availability of highly lethal assault weapons, drugs and social factors--such as youth gangs--for the rising murder rate. Statistics, he told the committee, don’t convey the “human suffering of families when they experience a sudden violent death,” he said.

“They don’t convey the retaliatory, youth-gang killings and random drive-by shootings or the deaths of bystanders caught in gunfire,” Cogan said in testimony Tuesday in Washington. “They don’t address the drug involvement either directly . . . or indirectly.”

As an example of the problem, Cogan displayed an article in The Times describing the variety of about 25,000 weapons collected annually by law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County.

Cogan’s testimony dovetailed with a report by the Judiciary Committee.

The panel blamed the abundance of assault weapons and cocaine trafficking for the record pace of murders across the nation. If the killing continues, the committee projected that 23,220 people will be murdered this year, exceeding the record of 23,040 in 1980.

The current national murder rate of 10.5 per 100,000 residents makes the United States “the most murderous industrialized nation in the world,” the panel said.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said that if the homicide rate continues to soar it will make 1990 the “bloodiest year in American history.”

Biden urged the House to approve a Senate-passed bill banning nine semiautomatic assault weapons and imposing the death penalty for 34 federal offenses.

Cogan’s report on Los Angeles County’s murder rate was based on monthly statistics collected by the coroner’s office. He offered no breakdown of statistics from individual communities.