Decreasing Crime Rate May Not Last, Lockyer Says

Despite a decrease of 15% in California’s crime rate last year, the state’s growing population of young men portends a rise in crime in coming years, state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said Tuesday.

In the attorney general’s annual address on the state of public safety, Lockyer said the strong economy has kept many crimes on a downward trend since 1993. But a factor out of law enforcement’s control--demographics--has been linked directly to a rise in crime in the past.

“We know with respect to crime that the majority of it is committed by young men [ages] 18 to 30, and you can figure out how many people there are in that cohort in your state and almost directly predict the amount of crime that you’ll have,” Lockyer said.

“Those numbers right now are at a low ebb. But they start to increase dramatically in a year,” he said, warning that the state could see a return to the high crime rates of the early 1980s unless renewed efforts are made in prevention and apprehension.

In the first nine months of 1999, violent crime fell 9.7% compared with the same period in 1998, and property crime decreased 18%. Overall, crimes such as homicide, rape and robbery tallied in the California Crime Index fell 15%, from 339,425 to 288,391.

“The fact that the economy is still robust obviously has an impact on how many burglaries there are,” Lockyer said. “People who have a job at a good wage are less likely to commit a crime.”

The Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department report decreases slightly smaller than the state rate: a drop of 12.6% in violent crime and 11.8% in property crime.

Spending more money to serve the 250,000 outstanding felony warrants would help keep the crime rate lower, Lockyer said, as would tooling up crime labs to better take advantage of new technologies, such as DNA “fingerprinting.” The ability to catalog DNA is especially important to rape investigations.

Lockyer pledged tougher enforcement of gun laws and better cooperation among law enforcement agencies, and called for more youth programs aimed at prevention.