Statistics say that violent crime is declining, yet many Americans still feel threatened. The anxieties are stoked by politicians, the police, the security business and the media. A look at why we are . . . : Living in Fear

By BETH SHUSTER

Aug. 23, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

They are on the news almost nightly: carjackers, sexual predators, workplace gunmen, follow-home, takeover and home invasion robbers, killers enraged on the road.

By the numbers, there are fewer and fewer of them. Yet fear of them has held steady. That fear has overwhelmed reality, causing many Americans to feel more threatened by crime even as the nation has become a safer place in which to live.

The reasons for that disparity are complex, and sometimes shockingly deliberate. Police stoke fear in part because they take crime seriously, but also to prime their budgets; politicians feel deeply about the issue, but also manipulate it to win votes. News organizations amplify fear by ratcheting up their crime coverage, even as crime declines, because it helps ratings. Security companies, theft detection manufacturers and others tap into deeply held fears and end up turning a profit.

In some respects, the merger of profit and political advantage has turned the crime business into the domestic equivalent of what President Dwight Eisenhower once described as the “military-industrial complex.” In that incarnation, the fear of Soviet adventurism was real and the enemy a dangerous one. But in their desire to combat it, military contractors, politicians and Pentagon brass congealed into a self-sustaining system.

In the new version, prison guard unions, burglar alarm companies and others, in effect, cooperate with politicians and police to perpetuate public fear of a domestic enemy, in this case crime. It too presents real dangers, but even as those dangers have waned, fear has persisted.

Competition for bigger and better weapons against crime proceeds at a frantic pace. Burglar- and car-alarm sales are rising. Security services are in hot demand. Gated communities spring up across the country. Self-defense classes are jammed. Pepper spray canisters hang from key chains.

Crime rates notwithstanding, who today feels safer?

“The fear of crime is highly irrational and reflects a very deep culture of ignorance of risk factors and safety,” said Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington. “We’re a nation of 230 million people. Much of the country is perfectly safe. Crime, particularly violent crime, is very highly concentrated . . . and yet that feeling of fear lasts.”

The effect of such persistent fear is subtle but profound. It can color political choices, favoring the efforts of politicians who promise to fight crime and hurting those who argue for social solutions. It can contribute to vigilance, and to tighter community links through such programs as Neighborhood Watch. But it can also lead to empty streets, barred doors and suspicion.

Where the fear of crime has ebbed perceptibly, such as in New York City, the sense of newfound freedom of movement has helped spark an urban renaissance. But elsewhere, where fear persists out of proportion to crime, the potential benefits of that kind of turnaround are elusive.

Crime Continues Its Statewide Decline

There is no single reason for declining crime rates. Theories abound as to whether stiffer penalties and more aggressive policing have led to the drop or whether sociological and demographic forces should get more credit. Some argue that soaring prison populations have taken criminals off the streets and that drugs and violence have killed many more. Others point to a drop in the number of young people, traditionally the most crime-prone group, and shifting drug preferences.

Whatever the reason, violent crime--defined by the FBI as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault--fell more than 5% last year in the U.S., from 1.68 million offenses to 1.59 million. That drop was the latest of the 1990s, during which crime has steadily tapered off, particularly in the largest cities.

Statewide, the statistics show similar reductions. Last year’s crime decline marked the culmination of the biggest sustained four-year drop in state history. Today, crime in California is at its lowest level since 1967.

And, locally, violent crime also made marked declines. In the first half of 1998, according to newly released Los Angeles Police Department data, homicides were down 34% in the city--from 271 to 180. Overall violent crime dropped 13% in the first half of this year.

Homicides last year dropped to the lowest level in 20 years. In 1997, there were 590 slayings in the city; at the beginning of the decade, more than 1,000 Los Angeles residents’ lives each year ended at the hands of killers.

But at the same time, Gallup polls have begun to discern a marked increase in concerns about violence.

Tallying responses to the question, “What is the most important problem facing the country today?” the Gallup Organization found several years ago that crime and violence had begun to surpass such other critical issues as international tensions, unemployment and high taxes.

To be sure, the poll’s crime responses could also reflect the diminution in this decade of some of the nation’s more troubling crises, such as the Cold War and the recession. People who are jobless, for example, could be more inclined to rate unemployment as their most pressing concern until they find jobs, when crime becomes a higher priority.

But a Los Angeles Times poll taken last year also found high numbers of people whose sense of security had been sorely shaken. The poll found that nearly three-fourths of residents surveyed believed crime in their neighborhoods to be about the same as it was five years ago or worse. Seventy-seven percent said they felt less safe or about as safe as they did five years ago.

Nationally, an ABC News poll conducted last year found that 51% of respondents were more afraid of crime than they were five years ago; only 7% were less worried about crime. And the Justice Department, in its regular reports, has found no decline whatsoever in the fear expressed by Americans throughout the 1990s.

Violence Lingers in Public’s Mind

Criminologists note that, to some extent, a sense of security will lag behind reality because fear preys on memory.

Even long after crimes occur, the names, even faces, of victims linger. Twelve-year-old Polly Klaas is kidnapped from her Petaluma bedroom, then raped and murdered. Three-year-old Stephanie Kuhen is shot to death in a Cypress Park alley. South-Central teacher Alfredo Perez is shot in the head in a school library by a gangster’s stray bullet. Six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey dies of strangulation, and her parents are not ruled out as suspects in the crime, which occurs in the tidy town of Boulder, Colo.

“While memory fades over time, it gets kicked up every time you hear about a new crime that allows you to identify with the victim,” said Alfred Blumstein, a criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. “Polly Klaas could have been any of our daughters, and that murder stirs up all of our concerns for our daughters.”

Police Keep Sense of Threat Alive

And those memories allow the institutions invested in crime to benefit from fear.

For example, although police departments often take credit for falling crime, they rarely serve to calm the public. Indeed, they often take the opposite tack, warning of danger even as crime subsides.

“Our business is crime,” said former LAPD acting Police Chief Bayan Lewis. “Our business is not to go to Neighborhood Watch meetings and say, ‘Don’t worry about it anymore.’ Our business is to maintain a strong Neighborhood Watch, encourage people to get to know their local community police officers.”

Although that may serve the political interests of police, it also helps to distort the reality of declining crime.

“It’s a two-edged sword,” Lewis said. “We have convinced the public to support three-strikes laws [lengthening prison sentences], to make judges tough on criminals. . . . Now we can’t say, ‘OK, great, we don’t need all that now.’ You have to be cautious about that.”

Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, who has boasted about crime declines and asked to be judged on his ability to fight crime, surprised top city officials last month when he announced that he will need at least 1,000 more officers over the next five years. The reason: an ever-present threat of crime.

In addition, police officials such as Parks and Lewis say it’s not prudent to cut back on tough sentencing or a national police buildup, because law enforcement authorities believe they are largely responsible for declining crime. If police told people they could relax about crime, the argument goes, violence would rebound, and the public would increasingly be in real danger.

If playing on fears is what it took to convince the public to invest in more police, then it has not been without a return. Experts generally agree that the increase in police has made some impact on crime, particularly in cities such as New York.

In that city, where overall crime dropped nearly half from levels of five years ago, business and tourism are booming--in large part because there is a perception that the city is safer.

“The reduction in crime has improved New York’s quality of life, bolstered job growth and increased investment throughout the city,” said Bernadette O’Leary, a spokeswoman for the New York City Economic Development Corp. “I think the crime decline has been very significant in the city’s revival.”

Tourism in the city has set records each year for the last several, and investors are sinking money into developments and businesses. Earlier this month, developers announced plans for a $66-million retail and entertainment complex. Not in Times Square. In Harlem.

“Big business isn’t afraid to invest in the city anymore,” said Colleen Roche, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s spokeswoman. “It’s not just that crime is down, but [that] the whole quality of life is better.”

Giuliani’s emphasis, a tougher version of a program touted by Mayor Richard Riordan for Los Angeles, has been to rid the city of aggressive panhandlers, even the so-called squeegee-men who would run up to cars and begin washing windshields for change.

“The extra dollars for the increased police presence and the no-nonsense attitude on prosecution has made people feel safer and made more people want to come to the city,” said Mark Jaffe, executive director of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. “That’s the word on the street.”

Public Is Still a Hard Sell

In New York as well as Los Angeles, some say declining drug sales in neighborhoods have led to fewer violent confrontations on city streets. Gang members are receiving stiffer penalties, as are other criminals, taking them off the streets and reducing their opportunities to claim new victims.

Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn points to those efforts and others as part of the reasons for the declining crime rates. But he also sees a “skeptical public” that is hard-pressed to believe these efforts are working.

“Trying to sell this big drop in crime is not an easy task,” Hahn said. “That message seems to be in direct conflict with everything else they’re hearing.”

Although prosecutors and police believe they are helping to improve communities and allay fears, some observers warn that anti-crime efforts can actually breed fear even as they thwart crime.

“There are constantly new categories of violence,” said Barry Glassner, a USC sociology professor who is writing a book about the culture of fear. “For a while, it was carjacking. . . . Now, it’s road rage. . . . The effect of it is that the public hears a lot about what they think is this new pressing problem. You wouldn’t have panicked three months ago, but there’s more of a reason to panic now.”

Crime Always Safe as a Campaign Issue

If police and prosecutors heighten fear for their own reasons, politicians bring another level of anxiety.

Crime frequently becomes a campaign issue as politicians routinely tap into the public’s fear. In 1993, Riordan won the mayor’s office in part based on his slogan, “Tough enough to turn L.A. around,” and his campaign’s vivid imagery of a decaying, dangerous Hollywood. Riordan’s literature did not mention that the city already was experiencing a drop in crime.

Similar techniques are used nationally by both Democrats and Republicans. In 1988, George Bush hammered Michael Dukakis for releasing criminals into the community. In 1992, Bill Clinton won office in part based on his pledge to put 100,000 more police officers on the nation’s streets.

“Crime is always safe,” said Joe Cerrell, a Los Angeles political consultant. “It’s good for the political routine, for the political roadshow. I put this right up there with motherhood and apple pie: the fear of crime. Who’s going to say we don’t need a few damn more cops?”

Sterling, of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, agreed, saying that politicians who pronounce their tough attitude toward crime are rarely attacked by opponents or, more important, voters.

“This is one area where they will offend no constituents, no special interest,” Sterling said. “If I’m running for office and I want to show how tough I am, I point to crime. The rhetoric simply serves political objectives.”

But why not let a candidate boast about crime drops, about increasing numbers of officers on the streets? About safer neighborhoods and schools?

The answer: That message is not as sexy and has much less impact.

And that is nowhere more true than on television, where the adage “If it bleeds, it leads” has become the catch phrase for national and local news.

TV News: The Murder du Jour

Indeed, some experts and media critics point to television as the main reason for the public’s rising fear of crime. To be sure, they also criticize tabloids for sensationalizing crime--such as the JonBenet case and others--but they say television appears to have broader impact.

On national and local TV news broadcasts, crime stories have soared. From 1990 to 1995--a period when the FBI reported a 13% drop in the homicide rate--network news coverage of murder increased a whopping 336%, and that did not even include coverage of the O.J. Simpson case, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington-based nonpartisan, nonprofit group that monitors the media.

“I think this is the best example I’ve seen of media images driving public perception in the face of contradictory facts,” said Bob Lichter, president of the group. “The reality is going one way, the media images are going another and the public perception follows the images rather than the reality.”

Lichter’s study of crime stories on the news found some other startling results: Crime was the leading television news topic in the 1990s, far outpacing international and national news--even presidential campaign coverage. During 1995, for example, the three networks aired 2,574 crime stories, more than triple the total three years earlier.

“It’s one thing to see an interview with an unemployed worker and another to see a blood-splattered crime scene,” Lichter said. “That holds your attention.”

Television news executives, who are somewhat weary of the criticism and defensive about their crime coverage, say the current trend is to add more balance to their broadcasts. But they readily acknowledge that a “good” crime story with video does grab viewers, and that means higher ratings.

“Do I think there are too many crime stories on television? Yes,” said Pat Casey, managing editor at KCBS-Channel 2 in Los Angeles. “But it’s not nearly what it was or what it could be. . . . Every story needs to be judged on its merits. I think that’s our responsibility.”

Local television stations have ever more vivid ways of covering crime. With the rise of freelancers who shoot nighttime crime video and then sell it to the stations, as well as the use of news helicopters, stations could rely solely on crime news for their broadcasts if they wished.

“In Los Angeles, the thing you need to watch is stringer tape [the nighttime video] and helicopters,” Casey said, adding that the station has cut in half the number of freelance video pieces it buys. “In any afternoon in Los Angeles, you could find death and destruction to fly over.”

Fear of Crime Is Good for Business

The fear of crime also has spawned whole new areas of research for criminologists, sociologists and others. At Florida State University, Ted Chiricos, a professor in the criminology and criminal justice school, said he has conducted several large-scale surveys on that issue.

In his most recent study, the impact of local television crime news on residents’ fear levels was significant, regardless of whether the residents lived in high-crime areas.

“People living in places with lower crime rates and people with high crime rates all had the same levels of fear,” Chiricos said. “Local news is definitely related to higher levels of fear.”

The Times Poll, which surveyed 1,143 city residents with a margin of error of 3 percentage points in either direction, found similar results. In that poll, 80% of city residents believed that media reports of violent crimes increased their personal fear of crime, with more than half saying it increases fear “a lot.”

The same poll found that a majority of the residents--58%--did not know anyone who had been shot, stabbed or seriously wounded in Los Angeles.

But crimes, particularly violent ones such as assaults or rapes, leave a legacy of fear in victims. For those people, declining crime statistics are nearly meaningless. Once the crime occurs, victims often say, it shatters whatever sense of security they once had.

As a result, the message put out by some police and politicians confirms victims’ perceptions of crime.

Fear not only helps police and politicians, it also is good for business.

The Correctional Corp. of America, a publicly held company that builds private prisons, has looked at California with relish: The state needs to build new prisons to accommodate the 25,000 more inmates expected by 2000. The prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., has become one of the most powerful lobbies in Sacramento--in part because it donates huge sums to political campaigns.

The security industry is booming. Americans spent an estimated $14 billion on professionally installed electronic security products and services last year, and more than one in five homes in the United States and Canada had electronic alarm systems by the end of the year.

Experts say these companies, not unlike campaigning politicians, use the public’s fear of crime to sell the latest home- and car-alarm systems and other protective devices.

Aside from their television and print ads--which can be graphic in depicting lone motorists securing their cars--some security, alarm and lock companies regularly promote products by manipulating crime data so crime appears to be worse.

For example, at the end of a recent release issued by a lock company, officials said that “in the time it has taken you to read this article, another nine property thefts have occurred. . . . Theft is a crime of opportunity; eliminating the opportunity eliminates your chance of becoming a victim.”

One security alarm company sent out notices listing burglars’ “likes and dislikes,” including these: “Burglars prefer homes near highways and homes with privacy fences and large shrubs. . . . Their favorite time to operate is during the day, when no one is home. Deterrents for burglars include security systems and dogs.”

Those who work in the industry defend their practices.

“I think we are part of the solution,” said Dave Saddler, a spokesman for the National Burglar and Fire Alarm Assn. in Bethesda, Md. “The steps people are taking to protect their communities themselves are working. I think it’s the random nature of crime--that it can happen any time, anywhere--that keeps people afraid.”

Perhaps, as some suggest, reasons to be fearful are so prevalent that residents can’t help but be afraid.

“If I’m watching a cop show at 10 and then the news comes on at 11 with the latest murder, it all just blends together,” said Sterling of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. “That’s reality, and I see it every night. It’s counterintuitive to think of the actual crime rates.

“The data is boring, it’s numbers and it’s irrelevant,” he said. “This is what I’m seeing: another atrocious crime being committed. And that is still attention-grabbing.”

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The Series at a Glance

Sunday: A decade of falling crime has not left Americans feeling safer. One reason for that is a coalition of self-interest--politicians, media, police and security companies--that exploits the fear of crime in order to gain from it.

Monday: The Los Angeles Police Department is committed to reducing “the fear and incidence of crime.” It has succeeded in one mission but failed in the other.

Tuesday: In one Los Angeles County neighborhood, fear outruns reality, leaving residents uncomfortable in their community even though the statistics suggest that they should be enjoying a sense of security.

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More Worry, Less Crime

Annually, the Gallup organization asks Americans the question: What is the most important problem facing the country today?

For much of the 1990s, the highest percentage of respondents cited crime and violence as their greatest concern.

* Researchers attribute the 1994 jump in concern over crime to the national debate over the federal crime bill.

During a decade in which fear of crime has remained steady or grown, reports of serious crime actually have declined:

Actual incidents of violent crime (in millions)

‘97: 1.59

Source: Uniform Crime Reports, 1990-96. 1997 figures is an estimate drawn from the preliminary report issued in May

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THE TIMES POLL: Safety Check

From a 1997 Times poll