Get a Clue on Youth Violence

Justifiable horror at isolated tragedies such as the school massacre in Littleton, Colo., should not obscure the fact that leading authorities, from the U.S. Department of Justice’s James Alan Fox to Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona, have fed the American public a steady barrage of inflammatory misinformation about “youth violence.”

Fox charges that today’s adults are fine, but teenagers are more violent than ever. Carona argues that the “vast majority of crimes are committed by males between the ages of 16 and 25”; thus, the growing youth population portends a new crime wave. These claims, though echoed by other crime luminaries, are flatly contradicted by the best FBI and California Criminal Justice statistics.

Despite intense media attention focused on school killings and other teenage crimes, the claim that “youth violence” has risen is largely a misnomer. Among white teenagers of both sexes and female teenagers of all races, murder rates are lower today than 20 to 25 years ago. California white youths are about 30% less likely to kill today than in the 1970s. In Orange County, 15 white teens were arrested for homicide in 1979; no year since has even approached that peak.

During the last decade, when youth violence was supposedly exploding, the violent (including gun) death rate among California’s white teenagers plummeted by an astounding 45%. Middle and upper class kids are safer than ever from violent demise.

The increase in murder and violent crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a socioeconomic, not youth, phenomenon. It occurred only among poorer young men in communities stressed by gang warfare over crack cocaine and other drug markets. White youths are far less likely to be poor than blacks, Latinos, or Asians, but poverty also affects whites. For example, for each race and age group, Fresno County’s poverty rates and violent crime arrest rates are uniformly double those of richer Orange County’s.

Second, adults are not doing fine. In a bitter irony, the burgeoning demand for hard drugs among middle-aged Californians, especially aging white baby boomers, contributes to the gang violence in inner cities and decaying suburbs that kills many young, dark-skinned men. The explosion in heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and alcohol addictions among adults in their 30s and 40s has spawned Orange County’s and California’s real crime epidemic.

Every hour of every day, household violence involving weapons is reported to law enforcement in Orange County--8,000 cases last year, including thousands in posh suburbs where “these things aren’t supposed to happen.” In the late 1970s, an average of 3,500 residents over age 30 were arrested for felonies every year; in the late 1990s, 13,000 per year, a tripling in serious crime and doubling in per-person rate.

Amazingly, today’s teenagers as a generation do not seem to be copying their parent generation’s hard-drug and crime woes. In the 1970s, an average of 7,000 Orange County youths were arrested for felonies every year; today, around 4,500. As crime and drug abuse have erupted among adults over the last two decades, the teenage crime rate has plummeted by 40%.

The upshot is that Californians will spend $2 billion (more than the state spends on the entire university system) to cage the record 26,000 new offenders over age 30 sent to prison in 1997 for their terms. Today, 60% to two-thirds of crime is committed by persons over age 25. The state’s fastest-growing felon and prison population is white adults over age 30--exactly the age group and class that conventional crime theory holds is the least likely to offend.

Perhaps the Colorado tragedy finally will force reexamination of politically warped crime policy that has ignored two decades of skyrocketing rates of adult drug abuse, household violence, and crime while indulging diversionary pop-fictions blaming violence on teenage hormones, pop culture, and “kids and guns.” As long as authorities refuse to discuss the fact that three times more children and youths are murdered by adults than by other youngsters, or that more American kids die from violent abuses in their homes in a week than in school killings in a year, understanding “why” a few youths go berserk will remain elusive.

Whether motivated by deranged racism, deranged isolation, or just derangement, the youthful killers in Colorado (like their adult counterparts whose mass slaughters bloodied the Orange transit yard, the Edmond, Okla., post office, the San Ysidro McDonald’s restaurant, the Oklahoma City federal building, and on and on) are not symbols of their generation. Fear-mongering authorities who push their agendas by depicting a few killers as typical of “kids today” damage reasoned policy and malign what, in reality, is our most law-abiding youth generation in decades.