Youth Crime Rate Plunges, Justice Dept. Study Says

Juvenile crime has plummeted nationwide in recent years, with the arrest rate for murders dropping 68% since 1993 to its lowest level in more than three decades, according to a new federal analysis released Thursday.

Crime is down across the board among juveniles in the last several years, from violent crimes such as murder and rape through less serious and more common offenses such as vandalism, truancy and drug-related crimes, the new statistics from the U.S. Justice Department show.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who has made youth violence a top priority in her nearly eight years in office, said the numbers reflect the fact that it’s now more fashionable for politicians to talk about topics such as after-school programs and youth crime prevention.

“When I got here [to Washington], people said, ‘She sounds more like a social worker than attorney general.’ I don’t hear that much anymore,” she told a conference of youth crime specialists Thursday who honored her work on behalf of children.

As President-elect George W. Bush prepares to take office, one question that policymakers in Washington and California are asking is whether his administration will continue the Clinton administration’s aggressive stance in funding and expanding youth intervention programs.

Riverside County Dist. Atty. Grover Trask, who headed a statewide task force on juvenile crime, said that regardless of who is president, he sees momentum to carry on a two-pronged approach to the problem--cracking down on the most hard-core juvenile offenders and providing more intervention programs for other at-risk youth.

“My sense is that there’s strong support among the law enforcement communities around the country and in California who believe this is the way to go,” said Trask, a backer of Proposition 21, which expanded the power of state authorities to prosecute some serious juvenile offenders as adults. California voters passed the measure in March.

Statistics Show Encouraging Trend

The findings from the Justice Department offered encouraging statistics on a number of fronts regarding trends in crime among those ages 10 to 17:

* Property crime, which had seen little change for most of the 1990s, dropped 23% from 1997 to 1999.

* Weapons law violations--a subject of rising concern in the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado last year and other recent school attacks--fell 39% from 1993 to 1999.

* Drug abuse violations--which rose through the early 1990s--fell 13% from 1997 to 1999, and the rates for curfew and loitering violations also fell sharply in that same period.

* Murder fell to its lowest level since 1966, while overall violent crime dropped 36% from 1994 to 1999, reaching its lowest rate since 1988.

Although overall crime rates have dropped nationwide for the last eight years, the decline among juveniles has outpaced that of the adult population, officials said.

“When you look at a 68% drop [in the murder arrest rate for juveniles since 1993], that’s truly remarkable,” said John J. Wilson, acting administrator of the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

“The other thing that’s truly remarkable,” he said, “is that arrest rates are down in every single category of violent crime. This is clearly not just an aberration.”

Minorities’ Crime Rate Troubling

Wilson said he believes the biggest explanation for the drop may be a change in attitude.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as youth crime rose significantly, “many kids really felt that adults didn’t care about them very much--not necessarily kids in trouble or poor kids, but just kids who felt disconnected from the larger society,” he said. “We’ve seen a real change. We’ve made kids part of the solution. They feel adults really care.”

But there are still areas of concern.

One area that authorities said worries them is the disproportionately high number of minorities among juvenile offenders. While the juvenile population in 1999 was 79% white (including Latinos), 15% black and about 5% other races, white youths reflected 57% of the juvenile arrests for violent crime and black youths were at 41%, the new statistics showed.

For murder, the figure for black youth was even higher, at 49%.

In California, separate statistics collected by the state Justice Department show that felony and violent arrests for juveniles also have gone down significantly since 1993, although misdemeanor arrests are up slightly over that same time period.

Some major cities around the country, including Los Angeles, have seen a noticeable spike in murders overall in the last few months.

Los Angeles Police Department officials said Thursday they assume that a 25% jump in murders this year may mean that youth crime is on the upswing, although they have not yet done a statistical breakout on the ages of the offenders.