[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/21/politics/21CLIN.html[/url]
Killings Increase in Many Big Cities
December 21, 2001
Killings Increase in Many Big Cities
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
Homicides have increased sharply this year in many large cities, a
development that troubles law enforcement officials and experts who fear
it may signal a return to rising crime rates after a large decline in the
1990's.
The rise in homicides was led by Boston and Phoenix, which had increases
of more than 60 percent through Dec. 18, compared with the same period
last year, according to police figures in a survey of 18 major cities.
Homicides jumped 22 percent in St. Louis, 17.5 percent in Houston, 15
percent in San Antonio, 11.6 percent in Atlanta, 9.2 percent in Los
Angeles and 5.2 percent in Chicago, the police departments in those cities
said.
However, even the sharp increases this year leave the big cities far below
the peak in homicide in 1991.
The rise in Chicago, which has had 644 homicides this year, compared with
612 in the same period last year, means that it will probably pass New
York for the first time as the city with the most homicides, though
Chicago has 2.9 million people and New York has 8 million.
New York is an exception to the big cities with rising homicides, with 617
through Dec. 16, compared with 651 in the same period last year - a drop
of 5.2 percent.
Several other cities also had small decreases, including Washington, with
a decline of 6 percent. But in most cities with fewer homicides, the
decrease was so slight that experts said it was not statistically
significant.
Homicide has long been considered the bellwether crime, the one that most
worries the public and therefore the one that police chiefs watch most
carefully.
A jump in homicides in the big cities led the crime wave of the late
1980's, and a homicide decrease in the big cities started an eight-year
decline in overall crime beginning in 1992.
Charles H. Ramsey, Washington's police chief, pointed to two possible
explanations for the increases this year: the downturn in the economy and
an increase in family killings after years of declines driven by greater
attention to domestic violence.
The economy is the best indicator of whether crime will continue to
increase, Chief Ramsey said.
"More pink slips mean more crimes," he said. "It doesn't take long before
you start seeing that impact at street level."
Chief Ramsey said he was especially concerned about the impact that a
prolonged recession would have on poorer neighborhoods and low-income
workers. "It reaches everyone; it just reaches them first," he said. "If
this becomes long term, believe me, you will see the difference."
Another factor in the increase in homicides, police officials said, is the
rising number of prison inmates being released, the flip side of the
prison building boom of the last two decades. The number of inmates
released from state and federal prisons is projected to reach 635,000 this
year, up from 474,300 in 1995, Alan Beck of the Bureau of Justice
Statistics said.