The New Math On Crime
Murder is up, but alarms about a new surge in violence seem overstated-so far
Even before the fireworks launched from the French Quarter's Jackson Square, 2006 went out with a bang in New Orleans-a handful of them, actually. At 7 p.m. on December 31, several of those bangs felled a 42-year-old man, who was found inside his FEMA trailer with multiple gunshot wounds to the back of his head. At 8:45 p.m., another man was shot several times and left dead on the sidewalk. At 10:12 p.m., a third was killed inside his home.
The three men were some of the last murder victims in an unusually bloody 2006. The year is expected to snap a long stretch of relatively good news on the homicide front nationwide, moving questions about the causes of crime increases off the back burner they have occupied for more than a decade. Those questions have so far eluded satisfying answers, and many experts contend that fears of a sustained rise in murders have little foundation. But the numbers are causing more than a little alarm and getting more than a little attention-from the nation's police chiefs, from Congress, from the Justice Department, perhaps even from the president in his State of the Union speech later this month. Slowly but surely, violent crime is returning to the national agenda.
Nationwide murder totals for 2006 will not be available until the fall, when the FBI releases its annual Uniform Crime Report. But an analysis by U.S. News shows a substantive, if uneven, increase in homicide in the nation's 20 largest cities. The 19 cities for which data were available had 4,152 homicides in 2006, compared with 3,919 the previous year-a 6 percent increase. Phoenix, which could not provide a year-end number, had neared its 2005 total of 238 by the end of November.
Murder is considered the most reliable crime statistic because such a high percentage of killings are reported. So the numbers are always watched closely as an indicator of crime trends. The beginning of the crack epidemic brought soaring murder numbers-a 31 percent increase between 1984 and its peak in 1993. But as the drug's popularity waned, so did murder, falling to around 16,000 a year and staying there for the early years after the millennium. More recently, the plateau has ended. Homicide showed an uptick in 2005, and the FBI's preliminary numbers from the first six months of 2006, along with the yearlong data collected by U.S. News, suggest the increase continued last year.
Some cities were hit especially hard. Philadelphia's 406 homicides were the most in the City of Brotherly Love since 1997. Oakland, Calif., topped its 2005 homicide tally by more than 50, and Cincinnati's 85 homicides were literally unprecedented.
As the year's crime numbers come in, the Police Executive Research Forum has sounded the alarm. An October report from the police advocacy group, titled "A Gathering Storm," expresses concern that the increases signal the beginning of "an epidemic of violence not seen for years." Though not all cities have suffered a crime spike, PERF pushes for more federal cooperation with local law enforcement and more federal funding. "If the pandemic flu were to hit 20 cities in the United States, I don't think the Centers for Disease Control would say, 'Well, let's see how many other cities it hits,'" says Chuck Wexler, the group's director.
Anomalies. But there are plenty of caveats to the new numbers. New York City's nearly 10 percent rise in murders-to 590-doesn't look as bad after taking account of the city's unusually high number of "reclassified deaths," those resulting from injuries in prior years. And the city's number of homicides is still historically low; more than 2,000 people were killed in New York in 1990 alone. Houston neared its highest number of murders in a decade, but the increase largely matches the city's surge in population from Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
Several big cities, including Dallas and San Francisco, bucked the murder trend completely. Washington, D.C., ended the year 27 murders shy of its 2005 total. Los Angeles's historically undermanned police force saw its fifth straight year with a reduction of violent crime.
In fact, the 6 percent increase in murders in the country's 20 largest cities is lower than the 9 percent rise the FBI charted in the first six months of the year. And once smaller cities are included, the FBI recorded only a 1.4 percent increase in that time. On average, smaller cities actually showed dramatic declines in their number of homicides.
That is more variability than was seen in the '80s and '90s, when murders spiked and then plummeted almost everywhere. The inconsistency leads some experts to contend that this year's increase is more an idiosyncratic phenomenon than a national crisis. Even among criminologists, there's not a lot of agreement over what's happening-or why.
In his new book, The Great American Crime Decline, Franklin Zimring, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley law school and an expert on crime statistics, tackles the prevailing explanations for what causes changes in crime numbers and finds them wanting. "Any blip in homicide statistics is unnerving because we don't know why we've had this epidemic of good news," he says. "There are a hundred theories and no confirmations."
Yet even some experts who remain agnostic on the significance of the more recent rise in homicides point to factors that could have contributed. Alfred Blumstein, a criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, highlights a diversion of resources from traditional crime fighting to preventing terrorism and a reduction in social services to the poorest neighborhoods. He also notes the phasing out of federal money for the Clinton-era COPS program, which gives grants to put more police officers on the street. The PERF report, "A Gathering Storm," partially blames the loss of funds for shrinking police forces in many cities. "I must confess, I expected [murder] to go up two or three years ago," Blumstein says.
With the Dow reaching new records last year and relatively low unemployment, an economic explanation for the rise in violence would seem unlikely. But Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says the economy's strong finish in 2006 belied a volatile year, with concerns about fuel costs and the end of the housing boom. The lack of economic stability especially impacts the urban poor, who are most likely to turn to crime, he says.
That explanation doesn't convince Philip Cook, an economist and professor at Duke University who has written on crime numbers. He disputes the grim portrayal of the 2006 economy and also argues that the link between the economy and murder levels is unproven. Recall the '60s, Cook says, when the economy and murder numbers grew hand in hand.
Police departments have widely cited armed young people as the cause of their recent violence woes, and some speculate that the rise in murders is simply the result of a larger segment of the population entering the prime years for committing crime-generally thought to be ages 15 to 24. The claim is bolstered by FBI statistics showing that the number of murder offenders under the age of 18 and 22 both jumped dramatically in 2005. But the number of young people has risen for some years, with no discernible impact on crime before now.
Some experts suggest the country is suffering the fallout of its own "get tough" crime policies in the 1980s and '90s. The problem was explored in a 2003 Urban Institute study of Maryland, which suggested that the state will face increasing challenges in dealing with a growing population struggling to re-enter society after being incarcerated.
G-men. The uncertainty has not deterred federal eyes from turning back to the problem of urban crime. Under pressure from police groups, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced the Initiative for Safer Communities in October, a study of 18 areas with both rising and falling crime to analyze the most effective law enforcement methods. Last month, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein sent a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, urging the agency to "re-evaluate its priorities" and place a higher emphasis on investigating violent crime. And Bush administration officials say the president could make an anticrime effort part of his State of the Union address January 23 or put a new initiative in his proposed budget for fiscal year 2008.
Local officials are also rethinking their efforts. In Indianapolis, which saw homicides climb from 110 in 2005 to 137 last year, police have installed their own version of the increasingly popular Compstat system, which combines computerized crime mapping with management brainstorming sessions on how best to combat the latest local crime trends. Recommendations from a mayor's task force are also expected shortly. "We're very optimistic that we'll see a decrease in those numbers in 2007," says Police Chief Michael Spears.
But the year didn't start well. About four hours into 2007, 27-year-old Eric Munoz was found dead in the clubhouse of Indianapolis's Naptown Riders motorcycle club. For Spears, the homicide was humbling, a reminder of a police department's limitations. "If we had 10 officers on patrol outside that location, it wouldn't have prevented it," he says.
The news is worse in New Orleans, where at least seven people have been murdered since the New Year-six within 24 hours. One was 36-year-old Helen Hill, who was shot in the neck inside her home. When police arrived, they found her husband bleeding from gunshot wounds to his hand, arm, and cheek. He was holding the couple's 2-year-old son. The statistics may be ambiguous, but in many cities, the bangs are real.
With Carol S. Hook
This story appears in the January 15, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.