Juvenile Arrests in U.S. Decline, Belying Fears

As crime continues its record-setting decline, FBI figures released Sunday show that arrests nationwide are dropping even more quickly among juveniles than among adults--despite a wave of public concern over a barrage of violent episodes in U.S. schools.

Juvenile arrests for serious and violent crimes fell nearly 11% from 1997 to 1998--doubling the 5.4% decline for adults, according to the FBI’s annual statistical report on crime. Robbery showed the steepest decline among serious juvenile arrests, plummeting nearly 17%, while drug violations, weapons charges and other offenses saw substantial reductions as well.

The decline is even more impressive given that the juvenile population--classified by the FBI report as those under 18--has continued to grow, now numbering about 70 million.

“This is more good news, no doubt about it,” said Shay Bilchik, who heads the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

“You have a horrific incident like the Columbine shootings, and that paints a picture of a continuing problem that has not gone away. But people are shocked when you try to tell them that juvenile crime is actually going down.”

The gruesome assault at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., five months ago was just one of more than a dozen deadly school attacks by gun-wielding students in the last two years. Other high-profile crimes--such as allegations in Minneapolis three weeks ago that an 8-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by seven boys, ages 6 to 13--have fanned fears that society is raising a new “Lord of the Flies” generation, ever more prone to violence and crime.

Amid such concerns, many states have pushed for tougher sentencing laws for juvenile offenders in the last several years, and California voters will consider a statewide initiative in March that would make it easier to prosecute those as young as 14 as adult offenders.

Juvenile crime experts say, however, that Sunday’s figures from the FBI confirm that the country has made impressive strides toward reducing crime among youths, with double-digit declines in most areas of serious and violent crime arrests.

The decline mirrors the pattern seen in Los Angeles County, where the juvenile arrest rate dropped 13% from 1997 to 1998, compared with a 7% decline among adults, according to separate figures from the California Department of Justice. Statewide, juvenile arrests dropped 7% and adult arrests fell 6%.

Juvenile specialists said a combination of factors may help explain the trend, including a booming economy that provides more jobs for youths, tougher gun control measures such as trigger lock mandates, and increased attention to juvenile delinquency. Federal aid to states for delinquency prevention and intervention has soared 500% in the last five years, with $550 million in funds this year, Bilchik said.

Sunday’s FBI study reports that the number of arrests nationwide of those under the age of 18, including for less serious offenses such as vagrancy and vandalism, fell 4.2%, from 1.8 million to 1.725 million. Arrests for murder fell 11.6% to 1,429, motor vehicle theft dropped 15.1% to 36,477, drug abuse violations declined 3.4% to 138,054, and weapons charges fell 8.3% to 30,745. The number of runaways, meanwhile, dropped 14.9% to about 44,000.

There were some troubling exceptions to the trend, however. Perhaps most notably, the number of juvenile arrests for driving under the influence rose nearly 13% to 12,782. And arrests for white-collar crimes that have been largely the domain of adults--including embezzlement, fraud and forgery--all saw jumps among children under the age of 15.

Riverside County Dist. Atty. Grover Trask, who headed a statewide task force on juvenile crime, said the figures suggest that high-profile episodes such as the Columbine shootings “have been taken out of perspective,” by the media.

“The reality is that these offenders represent a very small percentage of our juvenile population,” he said in an interview.

As encouraging as the statistics appear, however, Trask said the key test in California will come in the next five years, when the number of children in the state from 12 to 17--the age group often most susceptible to being lured into crime--is expected to soar.

Federal estimates project that California will have the biggest growth rate in the nation in its juvenile population, with a 34% increase by the year 2015.

“What kind of effect will that have on crime? That’s really the million-dollar question, and that’s why we need to view these numbers with some caution,” Trask said.

As the FBI first reported in its preliminary findings in May, Sunday’s expanded report confirmed that serious crimes fell nationwide last year for the seventh consecutive year--the longest continuous decline since the FBI began collecting crime data in 1930.

The report also confirmed a 26% overall drop in murders for Los Angeles, to a 28-year low of 426. Serious crimes in the city dropped 10.2%, to 183,706.

But the revelations on juvenile crime, which has been dropping steadily since about 1993, prompted federal officials to say this is the most significant decrease in recent years--and the widest gap between declines in youth and adult arrests.

The rate of all violent crime last year fell to its lowest level since 1985, with 566 incidents per 100,000 residents, for a total of 1.5 million violent crimes, the FBI found. When factoring in other serious property crime, such as burglary, arson and motor vehicle theft, there was a rate of 4,616 offenses per 100,000 residents, a decline of 6% from 1997 and 20% from 1989.

Western states were slightly above that combined national rate of violent and property crimes, whereas the South recorded the highest level of the four national regions and the Northeast the lowest.

The murder rate--six offenses per 100,000 residents, for a total of about 17,000 murders--fell to its lowest level since 1967, and the 93,000 forcible rapes represented the lowest total in a decade, the FBI said.

President Clinton said that although the statistics show that the nation “can indeed turn the tide on crime,” he is committed to putting more cops on the street and fighting for toughened gun-control legislation that has become mired in Congress.

“Even as crime falls, we must not let down our guard,” Clinton said in a statement.

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Times staff writers James Gerstenzang in Washington and Jack Leonard in Orange County contributed to this report.