Why Falling Crime Statistics Don’t Make Us Feel More Secure

Some people think the recent decline in California’s crime rate indicates that the public’s fear of crime is exaggerated and that politicians are fostering a paranoid mentality.

No. The crime rate is down but remains far above its 1960s’ levels. California mirrors the nation. Except for youthful homicide, things have been getting better in the United States for more than a decade. Since 1980, robbery rates (as reported in victim surveys) have declined by 15%. The homicide rate was no higher in 1990 than it was in 1980 and in many cities it was considerably lower.

This was as it was supposed to be. Starting around 1980, three things happened that reduced most forms of crime. First, the postwar baby boomers entered harmless middle age. By 1990, there were 1.5 million fewer boys between the ages of 15 and 19 than there had been in 1980. These are the ages at which criminality peaks. (One worrisome development is that the peak age for murder, once about 20, has of late slipped to about 17. And the number of murders committed by this age group has gone up dramatically.)

Second, there was a great increase in the size of the prison population. No one can know the exact effect this had on crime, but it stands to reason that when more offenders are in prison, there are fewer on the streets to steal and rape. Third, potential victims took more precautions by buying locks, hiring guards and watching their steps.

But despite these changes, juvenile homicide increased. The rate at which young males, ages 14 to 17, kill people has gone up significantly for whites and incredibly for blacks. Between 1985 and 1992, the homicide rate for young white males went up by about 50%; for young black males, it tripled. Meanwhile, the homicide rate for older males scarcely changed at all; for adult blacks, it is much lower than it was 20 years ago.

The public is not paranoid and politicians are right to be energized. It is not media hype to report at length on an 11-year-old Chicago boy who murders another child and then is executed, gang-style, by other boys. Juvenile murders may be only a small fraction of all killings, but they are more frightening than adult homicides for four reasons. Youngsters are more likely than adults to kill with guns; they are shooting at people at a far higher rate than at any time in recent history; they are more likely to kill strangers, and they often kill for reasons that adults regard as trivial or bizarre. As a result, the risk to innocent bystanders has gone up and even the deaths of intended victims seem inexplicable.

What is to be done? After studying this subject for 30 years, I confess to feeling that I know less today about what works in reducing crime--especially juvenile crime--than I ever did. But I can offer some informed guesses. Courts, prisons, family intervention and community strategies are all important, but let me speak here only about policing.

The Los Angeles Police Department is committed to community-based policing. But what does this mean? Something more than holding feel-good meetings with citizens but something less than allowing neighborhoods to assume control of the police function.

It means that the police ought to engage in directed as well as random patrol to reduce, consistent with fundamental liberties, the opportunity for high-risk persons, especially juveniles, to do those things that threaten others. The police ought, in consultation with neighborhood groups, to define specific problems and fashion solutions to them. Here are some examples:

* Stop and pat down persons whom the police reasonably suspect may be carrying illegal guns. The Supreme Court has upheld such frisks when an officer observes “unusual conduct” leading him to conclude that “criminal activity may be afoot” on the part of a person who may be “armed and dangerous.” This is all rather vague, but it can be clarified. Statutes can be enacted that make all probationers and parolees subject to searches for weapons as a condition of their remaining on probation or parole. Since three-fourths of all offenders are in the community rather than in prison, there are on any given day more than 3 million convicted criminals on the streets under correctional supervision. Many are likely to become recidivists. Keeping them from carrying weapons would materially reduce the chances that they will rob or kill.

* Technology can be developed to provide officers with a reasonable suspicion that a suspect is carrying a concealed weapon. Efforts are now under way to develop methods for detecting from a distance persons who are carrying concealed weapons on the streets; should these work, they will provide the police with the grounds for stopping, questioning and patting down even persons not on probation or parole, and doing so without harassing innocent passersby.

* Whether the technology works, the police can offer immediate cash rewards to people who provide information about individuals illegally carrying weapons. Spending $200 on each good tip will have a bigger effect on dangerous gun use than will the same amount spent buying back guns from law-abiding people.

* The same directed-patrol strategy might help keep known offenders drug free. Most persons jailed in big cities were using illegal drugs within the day or two preceding their arrest. When convicted, some are given probation on condition that they enter drug-treatment programs; others are sent to prisons where (if they are lucky) drug-treatment programs operate. But in many places the enforcement of such probation conditions is lax and parolees are released into drug-infested communities with no effort to ensure that they participate in whatever treatment programs are available.

Almost everyone agrees that more treatment programs should exist, but what many advocates overlook is that steadfast participation is the key to success and many, probably most, offenders have no incentive to be steadfast.

Patrol officers could enforce random drug tests on probationers and parolees on their beats; failing to take a test or failing the test should be grounds for immediate revocation of probation or parole. The tests would help keep offenders drug free, lessen their incentive to steal the money needed to buy drugs and reduce their likelihood of committing crimes because they are high.

But be careful: As yet, we have no good reason to think that doing this will reduce the crime rate by very much. Something akin to it has been tried under the name of “intensive supervision programs,” or ISP. In a set of randomized experiments carried out in 14 cities, Joan Petersilia and Susan Turner, both then at RAND, compared the rearrest rates of offenders assigned to ISP with those in ordinary probation. There was no difference.

But this study does not settle the matter. For one thing, since the ISP participants were under much closer surveillance than the regular probationers, the former were bound to be caught breaking the law more frequently than the latter. Since a higher fraction of the crimes committed by the ISP than of the control group were detected and resulted in a return to prison, there may have been a net gain in public safety. For another thing, “intensive” supervision was in many cities not all that intensive--in five cities, contacts with the probationers only occurred about once a week and for all cities, drug tests occurred, on average, only once a month.

Los Angeles now has a Drug Court with the authority to assert much tighter controls over drug-involved probationers. Perhaps it and the LAPD, working together, and with some money from the federal crime bill, can make ISP really intensive and therefore effective.

Much crime is opportunistic: idle boys, usually in small groups, sometimes find the opportunity to steal or the challenge to fight irresistible. Deterring present-oriented youngsters who want to appear fearless in the eyes of their comrades while indulging their thrill-seeking natures is a tall order. It is easier to keep them from idling about in the first place. To do this, many cities are beginning to enforce truancy and curfew laws.

In Charleston, S.C., for example, Chief Reuben Greenberg instructed his officers to return all school-age children to the schools from which they were truant and to return all youngsters violating an evening curfew agreement to their parents. As a result, groups of school-age children were no longer to be found hanging out in the shopping malls or wandering the streets late at night. Burglaries and larcenies declined. There has been no careful evaluation of these efforts, but the rough figures are impressive--the Charleston crime rate in 1991 was about 25% lower than the rate in South Carolina’s other principal cities and, for most offenses, lower than what that city reported 20 years earlier.

Patrols directed at loitering truants, late-night wanderers, probationers, parolees and possible gun carriers, all in addition to routine investigative activities, will require more officers. Just how far behind police resources have lagged can be gauged from this fact: In 1950, there was one violent crime reported for every police officer; in 1980, there were three violent crimes reported for every officer.

Obviously, we need more cops (and courts and cells). But we also need something else--practical tests to see if any of these ideas, or others, will actually work. The new federal crime bill is filled with untested ideas. The challenge to Los Angeles is not only to try some things, but to have outsiders evaluate them to see if they make a difference.