Crime Rate Plateaus After 8 Years of Decline

After eight straight years of record-setting improvements, the nation’s battle to rein in crime appears to have stalled, with crime in Los Angeles and other major cities edging back up, according to FBI data released Monday.

The nation’s crime rate, which dropped by as much as 6% or 7% a year through much of the 1990s, was virtually unchanged for the first half of 2000. Nationwide, serious crime declined by a negligible 0.3%, with slight increases in rapes and assaults.

Some of the country’s biggest cities--often a harbinger of criminal trends nationwide--saw significant upturns in murder and less serious types of crime, including Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, New Orleans and Philadelphia.

“What is clear,” said David Kennedy, senior researcher in crime policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, “is that the time of steep and steady declines in crime has probably reached a natural end.”

Criminologists are still searching for explanations to understand the trends. Some say that it is not altogether surprising because crime was bound to bottom out eventually after so many years of unchecked decline.

Another possible explanation may be that many hard-core convicts who were imprisoned during the crime wave of the 1980s and early 1990s are being released after doing their time, only to be rearrested, many scholars suggest.

But they warn that if police and lawmakers become too complacent, the nation may be headed for the kind of huge upturn in violence seen in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack drug market swelled.

“If in fact we’re seeing a leveling off in crime rates, we’re going to need to look for new solutions,” said Garen Wintemute, a gun expert and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis. “It’s important not to assume that what we need is more of the same old ideas.”

For the first half of 2000, the FBI’s preliminary data collected from law enforcement agencies nationwide showed that violent crime and property crime were each down 0.3% compared with June 1999.

Showing the biggest drop-off among particular types of crime were arson, with a decline of 2.7%, and robbery, down 2.6%. But several crimes began to edge upward, with motor vehicle thefts increasing 1.2% and rape and aggravated assault each increasing 0.7%.

The crime rate was essentially flat for all regions of the country. Of the four geographical quadrants broken out by the FBI, Western states reported a slight increase in violent crimes, 0.6%, and a slight decrease in property crimes, 1.1%.

In California, several major metropolitan areas continued to show encouraging declines in the overall crime rate, with particularly significant decreases in Fresno, Long Beach, Oakland, San Diego, San Jose, Santa Ana and Ventura.

But there were troubling signs in the state as well. Overall crime rates for the first six months of the year crept up in San Bernardino, Riverside and Pasadena, while murders rose significantly in Long Beach and Oakland.

And in Los Angeles, where police officials have begun to mobilize officers in response to a disturbing spike in crime in some pockets of the city, crime was up 3.4% for the first half of 2000, while the number of murders soared 26%--from 196 to 247.

Los Angeles was one of more than half a dozen major cities that saw noticeable rises in murders in the first half of the year.

Murders also went up 38% in Jacksonville, Fla.; 36% in New Orleans; 33% in Boston; 23% in Dallas; 10% in Philadelphia; and 3% in New York.

Rural areas, meanwhile, reported a 7.1% jump in the number of murders.

The most likely explanation for the flattening crime rate, experts say, is simply that crime could not keep going down forever after reaching its lowest levels since the 1960s and enjoying the longest sustained decline since federal officials began keeping such records in the 1930s.

“The crime-drop party is over,” declared Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. “It’s the criminal-justice limbo stick. We’ve reached an extremely low level of crime--as low as we’ve had for 30 years--and it’s just very difficult to improve upon it.”

The goal of law enforcement officials in the upcoming Bush administration, said Fox and other scholars, should be to ensure that crime rates do not bounce back up to the levels of a dozen years ago.

“There’s been a little too much complacency with people who think crime isn’t an issue anymore. Crime rates can bounce back up if you’re not careful,” Fox said. “If we don’t take it seriously, we will be blindsided by another wave of crime and we’ll look back on the 1990s and say those were the good old days.”

Kennedy at Harvard said he believes that strengthening gun laws, expanding drug treatment for chronic users and focusing on community policing programs must all be priorities to avoid an upsurge in crime. “Doing better is going to mean more work,” he said.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said she is happy to see crime continue its decline, if only slightly. But she echoed the need for the nation to redouble its efforts to fight crime because of indications that crime is edging back up in some areas.

“We must remain vigilant in our efforts to identify these trends and continue to implement innovative programs that will keep our communities safe well into the future,” she said.