Hed: Crime Down and Up
It would be hard to dismiss 1997’s dramatic drop in the number of murders in Los Angeles even though there are many questions and considerations behind those statistics.
As of mid-December, there were 566 people murdered in L.A., which shapes up to be a 20-year low (although a number of late entries could bring the final figure for 1997 over 1977’s 574 mark).
More striking than the actual number, however, is L.A.’s homicide rate per 100,000 population. In 1970, it stood at 14.01 and then spiked up to about 35 in the early ’80s. In 1997, it is projected to be 16.48.
Asked to explain the drop, Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Martin Pomeroy said, “It seems that society has gotten tired of so many murders. People may finally be weary of all the violence.”
With all due respect to Deputy Chief Pomeroy, such feel-good explanations are better suited to Hollywood fairy tales than the real world.
Unfortunately, even the more scholarly reasons cited for the falling crime rate leave something to be desired. For much of the past year, criminologists, sociologists and others have rolled out the catch-all factors: an improved economy, better policing tactics, stricter sentencing laws especially here in California an overall decrease in the age groups most likely to commit crime, and a more stable drug market.
But there are obvious gaps in these and other explanations.
The economy, for example, had been booming for several years in the ’80s and early ’90s when violent crime was on the upswing. Moreover, the LAPD has been too busy in recent years with its own internal squabbles to claim credit for improved police tactics. Stricter sentencing clearly has been a help in some cases, but the chronic congestion of the courts still leads to revolving-door justice.
Perhaps the numbers defy any one explanation and instead are based on an amalgam of factors some easily identified, others more elusive. Figuring out the puzzle is not merely an exercise for the academics. The answers can help all of us determine whether the declines are just short-term flukes or long-lasting trends. If they’re the former, knowing the whys and wherefores will be important in gathering the resources necessary to stem the next wave of crime.
We should also point out that while attention is now focused on the drop in violent crime murders, assaults, robberies, etc. another kind of lawbreaking goes on unabated: It’s the catch-all category known as white collar crime.
Credit card fraud, securities fraud, electronic theft there are any number of illegal activities that have proliferated in recent years, largely out of the public eye. They proliferate in part because law enforcement has nowhere near the manpower required to crack down on these crimes.
But another key factor is the unwillingness by the victims often banks, credit-card companies and other businesses to cooperate with investigators. It’s too time-consuming, they argue, to get involved with a case in which the money is probably lost anyway.
With reasoning like that, it’s clear that crime is not about to take a holiday.
