Homicides Fell in Major Cities in ‘96, Survey Shows

Major cities across the nation experienced sharply fewer homicides in 1996, hitting 30-year lows in some cases and driving an overall drop in violent crime that began five years ago and now appears to be accelerating.

Each of the nation’s 10 largest cities and many smaller ones showed decreases in the numbers of slayings this year compared to 1995, according to a survey of large city police departments conducted by the Washington Post over the past several days. The District of Columbia was among the few prominent exceptions to the overall decline, with the number of homicides in the nation’s capital up nearly 10% over last year.

New York City appeared likely to finish the year with fewer than 1,000 homicides for the first time since 1968. With the exceptions of Chicago and Philadelphia, which registered more modest declines, all of the nation’s 10 largest cities saw the number of homicides drop by at least 15% over the previous year.

These statistics mark some of the sharpest and most widespread decreases in urban murders recorded in recent years. Big cities have a substantial impact on the entire nation’s homicide rate, so government experts and academic researchers expect that complete crime reports for 1996, when they are published later this year, will show an exceptional overall decline in murders.

No one cause explains the decline in homicides. Instead, criminologists and government experts cite a variety of factors.

The aging of the overall population, for example, has meant that the number of people in the most violence-prone age groups, the teens and twenties, has declined in recent years. In addition, the illicit drug trade has become notably less violent than it was when crack cocaine was first becoming a major street drug in the mid-1980s.

“After a while, a lot of drug dealers have found other means of dispute resolution and either explicitly or implicitly acknowledged each other’s turf. We saw the same sort of process with the Mafia,” said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gang violence has declined in many cities, partly because of the activities of community gang intervention organizations and police programs that target street gangs--especially efforts aimed at enforcement of gun violations.

In addition, police departments around the country have boosted the number of officers on the streets, and community policing has put officers in closer contact with ordinary citizens and in a better position to prevent violent crime. Still, criminologists note that the reasons behind the drop in homicides are open to interpretation and no one can say for certain what is driving the trend.