N.Y. Struggles to Make Sense of Rise in Killings

Long after the bodies of seven people were carried out of a Wendy’s restaurant, the victims of a shocking massacre, rage and anguish continue to roil the sidewalk out front. New Yorkers were appalled by the killings of five employees and the wounding of two others in the heart of Queens, and they have turned the site into a shrine--with hundreds of bouquets, candles and grief-stricken notes to the dead.

“People don’t get shot to death in this neighborhood; we don’t expect such things,” said longtime resident Margaret Bowers, gazing sadly at letters written to the victims. “This has been a very difficult thing for residents here to accept.”

Unfortunately and ominously to some, it’s part of a trend.

Like the killings of 11 livery cab drivers so far this year, the Wendy’s shootings are a reminder that New York’s homicide rate, along with those of cities across the U.S., is once again heading upward after a 69% decline over eight years. And just as criminal justice experts have been unable to agree on the precise reasons for crime’s precipitous slide, they are equally perplexed about New York’s 6% jump in homicides last year and the 8% increase so far this year.

There is no shortage of theories, ranging from arguments that police have become less aggressive because of political protests, to suggestions that many of the escalating killings are difficult for officers to deter, like domestic arguments indoors that turn violent. None, however, have fully accounted for the newest development.

“It just beats the hell out of me,” said Tom Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission. “There’s no pattern to this increase geographically or demographically; it’s up in one part of town but down in another, and we’re not clear if this is part of a new, long-range increase in murder or part of a trend that will once again recede.”

Gotham is not alone: Homicides increased last year in Denver; Jacksonville, Fla.; Honolulu; Milwaukee; Phoenix; Pittsburgh; Newark, N.J.; St. Louis; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Albuquerque; and other cities.

While Los Angeles’ homicide rate declined slightly from 426 to 424 in 1999, the number of homicides this year has increased 6.7% over a comparable period last year, from 149 to 159, according to police. Increases in homicides were reported during 1999 in Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, Long Beach and Riverside, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

Last year, New York recorded 671 homicides--up from 633--the year before, which was the largest total for an American city. There were 289 homicides in New York through May 28 of this year, which would put the city on track for more than 700 slayings in 2000. The homicide rate has almost doubled in the Bronx, compared to this time last year, and is also climbing in Brooklyn and Staten Island. It continues to decline in Manhattan and Queens.

To be sure, crime overall dropped 7% last year nationwide, continuing an eight-year downturn. Public officials from President Clinton on down have celebrated this, but the uptick in killings has many puzzled, especially in New York, where falling crime rates have practically become an expectation, a ringing confirmation of the city’s economic and psychological comeback.

Is the rise in homicides a momentary blip on New York’s radar screen, or a new fact of life?

“Homicide rates don’t decline indefinitely, and what goes down must go up,” said James Fox, professor of criminology at Northeastern University and an expert on national crime statistics. “There’s been a complacency in New York and other American communities that this unprecedented reduction in crime we’ve been experiencing will just go on forever.”

By contrast, New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir has urged residents to focus on New York’s dramatic reduction in violent crimes since 1993, rather than take a year-to-year perspective that loses sight of overall progress and can raise fears unduly.

Indeed, the May 24 carnage at Wendy’s in downtown Flushing might have been a more familiar event 10 years ago, when New York recorded 2,262 homicides. In the summer of 1990, then-Mayor David N. Dinkins and the rest of the city were obsessed with the seemingly intractable problem, and a memorable New York Post front page screamed: “Dave, Do Something!”

His response was to pave the way for the hiring of 5,000 additional police officers, and many urban experts believe that increase--in addition to a crackdown on “quality-of-life” criminals like squeegee men, subway turnstile jumpers and small-time drug dealers--helped turn the tide against crime. By adopting a “zero-tolerance” approach to crime, police say they trapped more hardened criminals, many of them carrying guns, in a wider net.

“We believe all these statistics, because New York City is a better place now and the numbers tell a good story,” said Major Goa, a Chinese translator who lives in Flushing near Wendy’s. “And then this murder happens. New York can be a paradise for people, but it can also turn into a hell.”

In the attack, two gunmen, one of them allegedly a former employee, entered Wendy’s just before closing on a Wednesday night, herding the manager and six employees into a walk-in refrigerator. All were shot execution-style in the head and the gunmen got away with $2,400. Two men have been arrested and police say they confessed to the crime. Two victims astonishingly survived, but the city has anguished over those, ranging in age from 18 to 44, who did not. They included men of Haitian and Pakistani origin, two African Americans and a Latino, reflecting New York’s rich diversity.

The Wendy’s has yet to reopen because the crime scene is still under investigation, and the crowds that have gathered in front are full of emotion. “I can’t believe I saw them bring out the bodies, one by one, dear God!” cried Juanita Sanchez, a clerk who works nearby. “The people who did this should rot in hell,” said Arthur Day, a pedestrian who taped a handwritten note of condolence to the boarded-up window.

The two men in custody, John Taylor and Craig Godineaux, both have criminal records and are being held without bail. Queens Dist. Atty. Richard Brown has not yet decided if he will seek the death penalty in the case, which has dominated the local media.

Asked why homicides are rising, a number of experts believe that the rise and decline of certain crimes is mostly a matter of demographics. The size of the group responsible for much of the rise in crime in the 1980s, juveniles with guns, began shrinking in the early 1990s, because many had either been killed, incarcerated or debilitated through use of crack cocaine, said Jeff Fryar, director of the Crime Prevention Institute at the University of Louisville.

A new generation of juveniles will soon come of age and increase dramatically over the next 10 years, “which could set the stage for an increase in certain crimes, like murder,” he noted. “By now, this pattern is very well-documented.”

New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has suggested that political protests last year over the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed street peddler, caused NYPD officers to “disengage” from their normally aggressive street policing patterns, allowing killings in the city to rise.

But some police officials contradict this, pointing out that the level of arrests this year--a barometer of police engagement--has been increasing. Still others say that certain kinds of slayings in New York, such as domestic disputes that turn violent and the killings of cab drivers, are by definition hard for police to prevent.

In a study of homicides last year, the Brooklyn district attorney discovered that more killings were taking place indoors, events which he said police cannot deter as easily as disputes that erupt on the streets. Esther Fuchs, a political science professor at Barnard College who has studied the criminal justice system, suggests that despite tough gun laws here, more guns on the street are responsible for the rise in homicides.

“The fact that these guys at Wendy’s had a gun, and it was easy to get a gun made it easy to commit murder,” she said. “And the fact that New York state has a death penalty obviously didn’t deter these lunatics from killing all those people.”

Despite impressive advances in battling crime, experts concede there is a limit to what the Police Department can do. The NYPD has developed a state-of-the-art computer system for tracking the incidence of crimes block by block, said Reppetto, and it enables officers to jump on the outbreaks of criminal activities in specific neighborhoods soon after they surface.

“But all the statistics in the world won’t tell you to put 30 officers in front of Wendy’s at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night,” he said. “The police can’t work miracles.”