COLUMN ONE : N. Dakota Keeps Flavor of Mild West : Murders are at record levels nationwide, but the Northern state remains the safest place in the U.S. Good social and economic factors combine to keep it calm on the range.

Last year more than 24,000 Americans were murdered.

That’s more dead than the U.S. Marines suffered on the combined battlefields of World Wars I and II, the equivalent of wiping out the entire population of Helena, the capital of Montana.

From Oakland to New Orleans and in dozens of cities in between, the killing of Americans reached record levels in 1991. “A year which saw the rest of the world become safer . . . saw this nation become less safe for its own citizens,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This, though, was not greatly on police officer Sue Anderson’s mind as she headed her black sedan, with a 12-gauge shotgun mounted overhead, down Bismarck’s Washington Street, past the Elks Club and back toward the center of town. Outside the shops and bars she passed, empty cars were parked with doors unlocked and motors running, their heaters operating full blast to keep the biting cold at bay.

Her shift was nearly over and in 11 hours she had not received a single call from the Bismarck police dispatcher.

“Basically,” she said, “you’ll find people are more trusting here. If I stop a car with out-of-state plates, especially Texas, I might be a little suspicious, wondering what they’re doing in North Dakota in the winter, but in terms of violent crime, we’re pretty fortunate.”

Fortunate, indeed. While crime threatens the civility--if not the survival--of urban America, North Dakota, year in and year out, is the safest place in the nation. The chances of being the victim of a violent crime here are only half of those in even the 49th-ranked state, South Dakota.

In 1988, a typical year, North Dakota led the nation in crime safety, with the fewest robberies per capita, the fewest burglaries, the fewest assaults. It ranked next to last in property crime and third from last in car theft.

Though the state’s crime rate was jolted in January when a teen-age boy in Bismarck murdered his parents, a brother and a sister, North Dakota (population 634,000 and shrinking) last year recorded nine homicides. (The state’s figures do not include crime on its five self-governing Indian reservations.) Washington, D.C., with a nearly identical population, had 489 homicides.

Normally, North Dakota spends about $100 per person on its justice system--less than any state except Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia. Washington, D.C., spends the most--about $900.

“The safety issue,” one law enforcement officer says, “simply isn’t an issue in North Dakota.”

“I’d love to take credit for the low crime rate, but I can’t,” said Atty. Gen. Nicholas Spaeth. “The reasons are almost entirely social and economic. This is still a state with family stability, a low divorce rate, an ethnically homogeneous population. The influence of the Catholic and Lutheran churches is strong. We don’t have much urbanization. There’s no great diversity between rich and poor. We don’t have gangs and we don’t have a big drug problem.”

Significantly, when a mini-oil boom brought hundreds of workers into the state in the late ‘70s, there was a blip and crime increased. Then the boom ended, the workers left and crime returned to minuscule levels.

What this suggests to some criminologists is that the low crime rate in North Dakota and its sparsely populated neighbors is related to mutual respect engendered when people know each other, and to peer pressure that makes antisocial behavior unacceptable.

It is as though Bismarck and, say, New York City had nothing in common except places on the same map of the United States.

“Is crime less acceptable here?” asked Michael Meyer, chairman of Criminal Justice Studies at the University of North Dakota. “The answer is yes, definitely. In North Dakota, the community has more potential to exert controls. You’re not an anonymous person and your anchor, your status, your identity in the community are affected by what you do.

“I don’t want to carry this analogy too far, but look at what is written about Japan’s low crime rate. One of the explanations often given is that there is linkage between the individual and his family, his job, his community, his identity. And a consequence of these conditions is that people have respect for each other.”

North Dakota’s prison population numbers just 550, the nation’s smallest. The penitentiary--built in 1885, four years before North Dakota became a state--has never seen an inmate murdered and has not had a stabbing or an escape in nine years. With good behavior, inmates can have computers and television sets and work their way out of the old four-tier East Block into the new 62-cell South Block, which would be considered a nice motel if it were placed on a Dakota roadside.

“It’s kind of weird when you think about it,” said Richard McNair, 33, who is serving a life sentence for murder (and studying for a college degree in literature). “Here you’ve got 500 guys closed in and you don’t have fights and stuff. Guys don’t carry knives. You don’t have rapes. You see young people sent here, and once they get over the stigma of being in prison, they say, ‘Hey, this isn’t so bad.’ ”

Outside the interview room, Warden Tim Schuetzle, alone and unarmed, was making his morning rounds. “Good luck with the parole board, Jim,” he said to a passing inmate. And to another, “Hi, Ambroise. How’s that leg of yours?”

Stay straight and Schuetzle will treat you fairly, inmates say. Get out of line and the perks disappear fast. Federal prisoners housed here are shipped to tougher institutions out of state at their first misstep. Some have appeared in tears before the warden’s desk to ask for a second chance. They don’t get it.

“Other places have lost control because of the sheer numbers,” Schuetzle said. “That hasn’t happened to us. Our philosophy is that we’re not the punitive ones, the judges are. We try to treat the prisoners with some respect and we find, for the most part, that they in turn treat the staff with respect. I know that sounds very liberal, leftist, goodie-goodie, but it seems to be working.”

Many factors contribute to North Dakota’s low crime rate and prison population, criminologists believe. (The pattern even extends to the state’s two Air Force bases, where the incidents of violent crime are about 50% less than the national average at other Strategic Air Command bases.)

Among the factors: The tough winters and shortage of summer tourist attractions keep out what local people think of as “the riffraff.” The population density--nine people per square mile, contrasted with 8,333 in Washington, D.C.--reduces the tensions that city dwellers live with. Nineteen of every 20 youths, ages 7 to 18, are in school. And a like-minded citizenry--95% white, largely of German and Scandinavian ancestry--produces far less conflict than do the components of an urban melting pot.

The other afternoon, Jim Thompson, who with his son Ryan owns the Sioux Sporting Goods store, joined some friends for coffee at the cafe on Broadway and the subject of crime and gun control came up. What was happening in the cities? someone asked. Had everyone gone crazy?

Guns traditionally are the weapon used in about 60% of the nation’s homicides. But in well-armed North Dakota, a bastion of National Rifle Assn. support, only three of the state’s nine murder victims were killed with guns (two rifles, one shotgun, no handguns) last year. In all nine of the state’s murders, the assailant was an acquaintance or relative of the victim.

“Tell me this, Jim,” said Art Beuar, an attorney. “In all the years you’ve been in business, how many of the guns you’ve sold have been traced back to a crime?”

“Well, I’ve been in business just short of 45 years,” Jim Thompson said. “There were years I’d sell 1,500 guns. And at the outside, at the absolute tops, the answer is six.”

“People here are brought up properly,” Ryan Thompson said. “They have a reverence for guns and they understand what a wound is. It’s unfortunate what’s happening in the cities, but I don’t know why that should reflect on us in the prairie. Why should someone want to take my gun away in North Dakota because someone in Los Angeles or Miami doesn’t act responsibly?”

“What’s a man in Pittsburgh need a gun for anyway except to shoot someone?” Jim asked. “There are over 20,000 laws on the books right now controlling guns. I don’t know that we need any more. We just ought to enforce the ones we’ve already got.”

James Q. Wilson, a UCLA professor of political science, notes that, with the exception of gang-related homicide, violent crime as a whole has been declining in this country since the mid-1980s.

“However, the rate hasn’t gone down as much as you would have predicted in relation to the aging population,” Wilson said, “and that’s because the average young male today is more apt to commit a violent crime than the average young male was in the 1950s.

“No one knows why but you can make some guesses: First, the pervasive spread of the drug culture, and second, a kind of value shift in American culture that makes people more inclined to do their own thing and less inclined to worry about their reputation in the eyes of older people.”

That value shift is unnerving to sociologists because, if something fundamental has changed in the United States, it seems that all the elements that keep crime low in North Dakota--family stability, a homogeneous population, an absence of slums, drugs and poverty--are attributes that may be gone forever in many American cities.

And what of North Dakota? “You could eliminate crime entirely if you could provide a stable environment, jobs, self-esteem,” Spaeth said. “But as we move away from an agricultural economy and bring in manufacturing, I’m not sure people here realize that that could create the same type of problems other places already have.

“We’re at a crossroad. We’re going to have to find a balance. That’s our challenge, because I’m not sure we can have it both ways.”