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- In the clearest evidence yet that recent efforts to
reduce
gun violence through new laws and police pressure are working,
an FBI report
released Sunday shows that a 7 percent drop in homicides
in 1998 was accounted
for entirely by a decrease in killings committed
with guns.
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- The report also indicates that a significant drop in
robberies
carried out with guns helped account for a 10 percent decline
in
robberies nationwide, the biggest decrease of any one category of
crime.
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- Overall, the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report found
that
violent crimes and property crimes each dropped 6 percent last year,
marking the seventh consecutive year serious crime has fallen and the
largest
single yearly decline in the 1990s. The national murder rate
has now fallen
to 6.3 per 100,000, which was the level in 1967, when
crime first exploded
in the United States.
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- Alfred Blumstein, a professor
of criminology at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the
most important news in the FBI
report was the evidence that the use of
guns in homicides and robberies
was declining.
-
- "These numbers suggest to
me that the efforts to
control the availability of guns, especially in
the hands of young people,
are having some effect," Blumstein
said.
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- Among these measures are increased efforts by the Bureau
of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to trace guns used in crimes; the tighter
federal restrictions imposed on gun purchases by the so-called Brady law
of 1994, named after James Brady, the former White House press secretary
who was wounded in the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan;
and new gun control laws passed by numerous states, like those limiting
purchasers to one handgun a month.
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- In addition, the police and
prosecutors in many cities,
including New York and Boston, have devised
innovative strategies to cut
off the supply of illegal handguns to
criminals and juveniles or make them
wary about carrying guns for fear
of arrest.
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- Another good sign in the report, Blumstein said, was
that the
percentage of homicide victims who were female dropped 11 percent
in
1998, suggesting that legal and social efforts to prevent domestic abuse
were working.
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- The report also found that the proportion of victims
who knew
their killers rose to 51 percent in 1998 from 48 percent in 1997,
meaning that there were fewer homicides in which the victims were
strangers.
This is another encouraging development, Blumstein said,
because the random,
violent street crimes that mushroomed with the
crack epidemic of the late
1980s were disproportionately committed by
young people against strangers.
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- The report said that arrests of juveniles for violent
crimes fell 8 percent in 1998, compared to a 4 percent drop in adult
arrests.
It was an increase in juvenile crime in the late 1980s that
caused crime
rates to soar.
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- Geoffrey Canada, the president of the Rheedlen Centers
for Children and Families, a nonprofit social service agency in Harlem,
said the drop in crime by young people was "a reality I
see."
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- While politicians and criminal justice experts have attributed
the decline in crime to tougher police tactics or longer prison sentences,
Canada said he believed much of the decrease was a result of a change in
the attitudes of young people in the inner cities.
-
- "The notion of the late
1980s and early '90s that
crime was an option for young people, a way
to get their sneakers or movie
tickets or buy an apartment building,
that whole way of thinking has changed
dramatically," Canada
said.
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- The
change has worked like a contagion in reverse, he
said: "The fewer
kids who do crime, the fewer will do it."
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- Another factor, Canada said, is
that prolonged prosperity
has finally provided more jobs in poor
minority neighborhoods, "so
people now see other people working
and they get the message that work
pays, crime doesn't."
-
- James Alan Fox, a
criminal justice professor at Northeastern
University, cautioned that
Americans might be becoming too complacent after
seven consecutive
years of declining crime.
-
- "What goes down will go up," Fox said.
"If
you don't continue to work hard at crime prevention, it's like
going off
a diet."
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- In fact, police in New York City reported in June that
the number of killings to that point this year had increased 6 percent
over the comparable period in 1998. Fox said that trend had
continued.
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- The new FBI report said there were 16,914 homicides nationwide
in 1998, of which 10,975 were committed with guns, down from a total of
18,210 in 1997 of which 12,346 involved guns. The reduction by 1,371 in
murders involving a firearm was greater than the drop of 1,296 in overall
murders.
-
- Similarly, the report said that robberies committed with
guns
fell to 38 percent of all robberies in 1998 from 40 percent in
1997.
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- Handguns were by far the most common weapons in killings,
accounting for 52 percent, while rifles and shotguns each accounted for
only 4 percent of all homicides, the report said.
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- The predominant role played by
handguns in homicide underscores
the belief, held by officials in the
28 cities and counties that have filed
lawsuits against the firearms
industry, that America's gun violence problem
is largely a handgun
problem.
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- As has been true for as long as crime statistics have
been
kept, the FBI report found that the South had the highest homicide
rate, 8 per 100,000, compared to 6 per 100,000 for the Midwest and West
and only 4 per 100,000 for the Northeast.
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- The FBI report is based on
police arrest reports. It
measures the violent crimes of murder,
robbery, rape and aggravated assault
and the property crimes of
burglary, motor vehicle theft, larceny and arson.
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- For education and discussion
only. Not for commercial
use.
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