Violent Crimes by Juveniles Down First Time in 7 Years

Violent crimes by youths decreased last year for the first time in seven years, according to preliminary FBI figures based on nationwide arrest rates. But the Justice Department is taking scant comfort.

“These rates are still far too high,” Atty. Gen. Janet Reno told reporters Thursday. “I’m not claiming victory at all.”

The decline in juvenile crimes was unexpected because arrests for violent crimes among adults rose slightly last year after remaining constant for the previous two years. In addition, officials have cited population trends showing that the number of youths in their most violence-prone years has been growing significantly.

At her weekly briefing, Reno credited bipartisan efforts of federal, state and local officials with achieving a 2.9% drop for 1995 in the arrests of violent offenders between the ages of 10 and 17.

Violent crimes include murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. The FBI figures showed that among juveniles, the violent crime arrest rate for 1995 was 511.9 youths per 100,000, down from 1994’s figure of 527.4. The corresponding murder arrest rate last year was 11.2 youths per 100,000, compared with 13.2 for the previous year and 14.5 in 1993.

When murders are broken out as a separate category, the decline among juveniles is even more pronounced, officials said. The arrest rate for juvenile murders showed a 15.2% decline last year and dropped 22.8% compared with 1993; it had risen steadily since 1983.

Officials said that no breakdown on violent juvenile crimes by cities or regions would be available until later this year. But the new findings do reflect a pattern recently noted for California and Los Angeles County by several law enforcement agencies and researchers.

“It looks like the trends are in the same direction [as California] with homicides being down for a couple of years,” said Elaine Duxbury, chief of research for the California Youth Authority. “We may have turned the corner on the most deadly violence. But it is still a very high rate . . . and it is of concern.”

Matt Ross, a spokesman for Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, also said the report reflects what the state’s chief law enforcement official has concluded about juvenile crimes in California. “We are seeing something similar . . . we are seeing something positive in the juvenile crime trends,” Ross said.

Asked to explain the decline, Reno said, “I don’t think there’s one magic key.” But she said some successful government and community efforts involve two different strategies:

* Focusing law enforcement on “the truly violent offender,” including a trend throughout the nation toward trying such youths as adults.

* Utilizing community intervention and prevention programs to solve the problems of young first-time offenders, “like 12-year-old children with little supervision who are too often at risk in the late afternoons and evenings.”

Reno noted that the Clinton administration has advocated legislation “to give prosecutors more discretion to prosecute young offenders as adults, keep kids drug-free and keep kids away from guns.”

She added that “we’ve got to look at the programs that are working across the nation to prevent crime--mentoring programs, dispute resolution programs that teach children how to resolve conflicts without knives and guns and fists, [and] truancy prevention programs that get them back into the mainstream of school and keep them out of trouble.”

Among the community programs that seem to be effective is one by the Boston Police Department in cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said Walter J. Dickey, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and an authority on juvenile crime. The program traces guns used in crimes and involves follow-up efforts by prosecutors, probation officers and community workers to reduce illicit gun sales, he said.

California Department of Justice figures show that violent crimes by juveniles have declined each year since 1990, with the exception of 1994, said Michael Van Winkle, an information officer for the department. In 1990, the rate of juvenile arrests for violent crime was 655.5 juveniles per 100,000, he said. Last year, the rate was just under 622.

Times staff writer Greg Krikorian in Los Angeles contributed to this story.