U.S. Crime Falls 8th Year in Row, Setting Record

Crime dropped nationwide for a record eighth straight year in 1999, with murders, assaults, robberies and other serious offenses falling 7% in what could prove to be the steepest decline in two decades, according to preliminary FBI figures released Sunday.

Orange County’s largest police agencies also recorded a 7% drop in total crime. But the FBI study found that total murders inched upward for the first time in six years in a potentially troubling trend mirrored in other communities around the country, including Los Angeles.

Never before has the FBI, which began compiling criminal data in the 1930s, reported a drop in crime for eight successive years, said Mary Victoria Pyne, a spokeswoman for the bureau’s Uniform Crime Reporting Unit.

“This is more good news for everyone,” she said. “Whatever people are doing, it’s working.”

The declines in Orange County were led by a hefty 16% drop in property crimes, such as burglaries and car thefts, and a 15% drop in robberies. Violent crime declined at a much slower rate in 1999, with the number of rapes rising and the number of assaults relatively steady.

Homicides in the county rose 7% to 60 last year. Anaheim, Garden Grove and Fullerton reported more killings in 1999, according to the FBI study, although total crime in the communities was down.

Santa Ana, which in 1994 had 74 homicides, recorded only 15 last year. Officials credited the continuing drop to a variety of factors, including aggressive crackdowns on gangs as well as “softer” tactics such as community outreach programs.

“It’s not just going in and pulling the bad weeds,” said Santa Ana Police Sgt. Raul Luna. “We prepare the neighborhood for reseeding, and we bring programs in while still maintaining the law enforcement watch in the area.”

Costa Mesa Police Chief David L. Snowden said crime prevention awareness has never been higher. Also, he said more police officers are on the streets because dozens of senior citizen volunteers assist with office tasks.

Snowden said anti-drug programs in schools are steering children onto the right track. “We’re not waiting for kids to become problems,” said Snowden, whose city saw a nearly 9% drop in crime last year. “We’re getting to them early to stay off drugs.”

He also believes the quality of police work keeps improving. “We are better trained than we’ve ever been, and we’re attracting better people to the profession,” he said.

While explanations of the historic drop-off vary widely, most criminology experts agree that a booming economy is the driving force because it has meant jobs and income for people who might otherwise be out on the streets and in trouble.

“Low unemployment has to be considered the major factor,” said Joseph McNamara, a former police chief in San Jose who is now a research fellow in law enforcement at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Experts point to a variety of other factors that might also help explain the safer streets, including more funding for local officers, greater emphasis on community-oriented policing, increased resources for drug treatment programs and youth intervention, more prison beds and tougher sentencing laws, such as California’s “three strikes” law.

But McNamara noted that there is widespread disagreement over what direct effect such programs have on crime. The decline in crime, he said, has swept all parts of the country, “regardless of what police are doing in one city versus another.”

Indeed, the FBI--using crime reports from about 17,000 city, county and state law enforcement agencies--found sharp declines in crime in all four major regions of the country. The Western U.S. led the way with a 10% decline, with drops of 8% in the Midwest, 7% in the Northeast and 4% in the South.

Likewise, the drop-off in crime held true for cities, suburbs and rural areas alike.

Among all types of violent crime, murder and robbery saw the sharpest declines at 8%, the FBI said. Among property crimes, burglaries had the biggest drop at 11%, while motor vehicle thefts fell 8%.

The figures released Sunday by the FBI reflect preliminary data based on a snapshot of major trends.

If the 7% overall decline holds up once the numbers become final in October, it would represent the biggest single-year decline since 1980, when crime fell 9.5%, Pyne said.

But the business of tabulating crimes can be an inexact science at best, specialists acknowledge.

Last year, for instance, the FBI also reported a 7% decline in crime in its preliminary findings, but that figure had shrunk to 5% by the time final figures were in.

And earlier this year, embarrassed officials at the Los Angeles Police Department discovered that the department had mistakenly listed six robberies in the San Fernando Valley as murders.

That reporting glitch brought the number of murders in 1999 to 424, instead of 430. There had been 426 homicides the year before.

The number of murders in the city “may in fact be leveling off. It’s too soon to tell,” said Los Angeles Police Cmdr. David Kalish. “But overall, we’re quite pleased with the reduction in crime in the last decade. A decade ago, we were averaging over 1,000 homicides a year. Obviously even one murder is too many, but we’re quite pleased with the drastic reduction.”

Several other major cities in the state and nation also saw their murder numbers level off or increase despite the national trend, including Long Beach, San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco, New York City, Denver, Phoenix and St. Louis, according to FBI figures.

Signs of a plateau in some types of violent crime are also evident in Orange County, which saw some of the biggest drops in crime during the 1990s and is considered one of the safest metropolitan areas in the nation.

Beside the uptick in homicides, the number of rapes rose 14% in Orange County last year to 331. Assaults stayed flat at 3,289, the FBI said.

Officials said that they expect crime to level off but that police and the community must stay vigilant.

“We can only go so low,” said Santa Ana’s Luna. “There will always be crime in our society. The key is not to let our guard down.”

LAPD’s Kalish said that law enforcement officials need to redouble their efforts to keep youngsters away from crime because demographic studies point to a sharp increase in the next few years in the number of young people entering the 15- to 24-year-old age range.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno voiced that same theme in pushing for toughened gun control measures and more youth intervention programs.

“No matter what [the statistics] show, we can’t become complacent,” Reno said. “My message is, let’s try harder.”

The eight-year decline in crime parallels Reno’s stewardship of the Justice Department. In a reign that began in 1993 with the Branch Davidian siege near Waco, Texas, and is nearing an end with months of preoccupation over the Elian Gonzalez episode, the sustained drop-off in crime likely will go down as one of Reno’s major achievements.