Study Finds Murder Rate at 30-Year Low

The nation’s murder rate in 1997 fell to its lowest level in three decades, thanks in large part to recent declines in drug-related youth violence in Los Angeles and other large cities, the Justice Department reported Saturday.

While celebrating the lowest U.S. murder rate since 1967, leading crime experts warned that the encouraging downward trend could reverse itself in coming years as the population of teens and young adults grows beyond current levels. The murder rate is highest among 18- to 24-year-olds.

Law enforcement officials watch homicide rates closely because they are considered a reliable gauge of all violent crime.

Indeed, the Justice Department reported last month that the number of all violent crimes fell almost 7% in 1997 to the lowest level in 24 years. Since 1993, the violent crime rate has fallen more than 21%, and the property crime rate is down 22%, the department said.

The nation’s murder rate in 1997 was 6.8 per 100,000 population, the lowest since the 6.2 per 100,000 recorded in 1967. In 1950, the rate was 4.6.

The biggest drops occurred in the largest cities--those with populations exceeding 1 million--where the rate decreased from 35.5 per 100,000 population in 1991 to 20.3 per 100,000 during 1997, the most recent year for which national figures are available, the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reported.

As Crack Trade Eases, So Does Murder Rate

Most of the big increases in the late 1980s and earlier this decade in homicides nationwide were the result of the flourishing crack cocaine trade and an accompanying growth of gun violence among juveniles and young adults, the department said.

As the illegal drug business has eased in recent years, so have youth homicides, the bureau said.

In Los Angeles in 1997, there were 576 murders, down from 711 in 1996. In the early 1990s, the totals topped slightly more than 1,000, according to Marianne W. Zawitz, a co-author of the report.

The Los Angeles Police Department recorded 414 murders in the city as of Dec. 28. They were not able to provide 1998 totals on Saturday.

“Los Angeles is one of the cities where the numbers have gone down quite a bit, but it’s also one of the cities where it went up [in earlier years], . . . and what goes up must come down,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston and the report’s other author.

The White House hailed the new figures, attributing the decline to a strong 1994 anti-crime law supported by the president.

Among older groups, the numbers long have been encouraging; homicides among adults 25 and older have been steadily decreasing for 20 years, the department said.

“There’s been good news for adults for a long time that we missed because of this surge in youth violence,” Fox said. “Home used to be the most likely place for homicides to occur, but no longer. We took the ‘home’ out of homicide.”

Much attention has been focused on the drug market, which “attracted lots of teenagers and young adults into the deadly, competitive drug-selling business, which was much more deadly than the heroin market had been,” Fox said.

Effect of Gun Use Among Youths Cited

“Guns were purchased and distributed, and they started to spread through much of the larger youth population in the late ‘80s, with easy gun availability, turf and gang battles--and that started an unprecedented rise in teen homicide,” Fox added. “Now that the crack markets have subsided and crack-related markets are a thing of the past, rates have gone down.”

He credited stricter gun laws, better policing and a rise in the number of after-school and athletic programs targeted toward young people as also helping.

But he cautioned that, despite the drops since 1991, the rates are still higher among youths than they were before the huge hikes.

Also, the youth population is expected to grow during the next 15 years, he said.

The 1997 murder rates, especially for homicides involving guns, were higher than the national average in the South and on the West Coast, while rates were lower than average in New England, the Rocky Mountain states and the Midwest, the bureau said.

According to the bureau, males are the most common victims and the perpetrators of homicides--they are more than nine times more likely than women to commit murder, and offenders of both genders were more likely to target men.

Among the report’s other findings:

* From 1976 through 1997, 85% of white murder victims were killed by whites, and 94% of black victims were killed by blacks.

* During the same period, blacks were seven times more likely than whites to be murdered, and eight times more likely than whites to commit murder.