Behind the bloodcurdling headlines about a firebombing on the No. 4 train, a drive-by shooting on the Brooklyn Bridge and the killing of a police officer in a botched bicycle store holdup, behind the back-to-back campaigns that elected a new Mayor vowing to improve the quality of life in New York City and a new Governor committed to bring back the death penalty, lies an often-overlooked fact.
Crime in New York City is dropping. And dropping fast.
Murders, which had been falling gradually over the previous three years, dropped sharply, by nearly a fifth, in 1994. Over all, 350 fewer people were slain in 1994 than in the year before, and 650 fewer than in 1990, when murders, many of them fueled by the crack epidemic, reached a peak.
Shootings dropped by more than 15 percent, the latest police statistics show.
And virtually every type of reported felony declined in frequency last year, with auto theft, grand larceny, burglary and robbery all dropping by better than 10 percent.
True, violent crime remains a constant menace of city life. The nearly 1,600 homicides that were committed in 1994 are still about four times the 390 killings that the city recorded in 1960. And a growing number of crimes are committed by teen-agers, whose vicious and often random acts of violence have raised fear to a level that statistics cannot overcome.
But coming after the staggering increases in crimes through the late 1980's -- a lethal period that culminated in mid-1990 with a string of senseless killings and a tabloid headline plea to Mayor David N. Dinkins to "Do Something, Dave" -- the latest figures show a surprising reversal.
The changes, which are mirrored in many cities across the country, have mystified criminologists. They offer a number of theories, from intensified police efforts to demographic shifts to a growing number of criminals behind bars, but no single explanation for the phenemenon.
"It's possible it is due to a fluctuation in the age of the population, with fewer people in the crime -committing ages of 16 to 23," said Joan McCord, a Temple University professor and past president of the American Society of Criminology. "It's possible that the increasing concern people are showing about crime is helping to define better values as people speak more loudly on the issue.
"As far as advances in policing go," she continued, "there are so many experiments around the country that it's hard to tell which ones are effective."
Even Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who took office with a pledge to crack down on street-level drug dealing and a variety of "quality of life" offenses, says his policies and the aggressive tactics of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton can explain only about half the decline in crime rates.
"Nobody can be sure exactly what is going on," he said in an interview last week.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that in a variety of neighborhoods across the city -- rich, poor and in between -- reports of serious crime fell significantly in 1994, according to preliminary Police Department figures for the first 50 weeks of the year. The Upper East Side reported a 18 percent decline in robbery, and the West Village logged a 17 percent drop in auto theft.
Burglary was down 27 percent in Borough Park, Brooklyn, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, and reports of grand larceny were down 24 percent in Spanish Harlem.
The trend is also evident in some of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods.
In East New York, Brooklyn, which in 1993 had the most homicides of any neighborhood, with 126, murders fell by more than a quarter. In Washington Heights, which in 1993 had 75 murders, the most of any neighborhood in Manhattan, killings fell by a fifth.
"There's less violence altogether," said Maria Luna, the vice chairwoman of Community Board 12 in Washington Heights. "We don't see the shootings we saw before. You can walk in the streets. You don't feel like something is going to happen to you."
Similar trends can be found across the state and nation. Suburban and upstate New York communities with populations between 100,000 and one million reported decline of 8.1 percent in felonies for the first six months of the year.
Over all, 22 of the nation's largest cities have reported at least modest declines in felony crime for 1994 -- with San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, El Paso and San Antonio reporting even steeper drops than New York for the first six months. Hartford reported a 11 percent drop in reported felony crimes the first half of the year, but by the end of the year the number of homicides had reached a record, 53.
Per capita, many of those cities still have worse crime problems than New York. In the first half of 1994, New York ranked 22d in reported crime, falling from 18th in the same period the year before.
The Fears Favorable Data Are Not Enough
Should people really feel safer? Could the drop in reported crime perhaps reflect a greater cynicism and fear among victims who are no longer reporting their misfortunes?
And given that reported incidents of violent crime in New York City fell to 135,000 in 1985 from 157,000 in 1981 before rocketing again to 175,000 by 1990, is there any reason to believe that the decline can last?
Most criminologists call the drop in reported crime significant, even though as many as half of all assaults and rapes are never reported. Burglaries are usually reported, and homicides are almost always reported, they say. And since murders are often a result of bungled crimes -- like the fatal shooting of a police officer during the robbery of a Brooklyn bicycle shop in December -- the decrease in homicides is a rough barometer for decreases in other felonies.
But in many neighborhoods people have their doubts. In parts of Brooklyn, although serious felonies have declined appreciably, gang activity is increasing, intimidating some victims from reporting crime and giving parents ever more reason to worry about their children. There are also scattered pockets, like sections of Staten Island and Woodside, Queens, that saw a surge in drug dealing, robbery and shootings.
Even in places with big declines in crime, or those where crime has not been a major problem for years, there is almost disbelief that the situation is improving. Brigid McGinn, a 33-year-old Brooklyn graduate student, still worries about her family's safety, even though her tree-lined block in Park Slope did not record a single violent crime in 1994.
"I'm still very much on guard when I walk out the door," said Ms. McGinn, who has two young children. "Maybe I'm beginning to feel safer, but it's harder to take down your guard when it's been up so long."
And although Ms. Luna, the community board member in Washington Heights, says she feels more secure, she realizes that the security is fragile. "I'm still concerned that anything can happen at any time," she said.
Mark H. Moore, professor of criminal justice at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, warned that too much can be read into statistical decreases in crime when they are not matched by a decline in fear.
"The important story," he said, "is that any movement in reported crime rates fails to capture what are the real aims of any anti- crime effort, namely reducing fear and helping create an environment where a sense of solidarity can be fostered in a neighborhood or city."
As one measurement of the public's feelings of security, a New York Times-CBS News poll last June found that about two-thirds of New York City residents thought crime was as bad as ever or growing worse. On the other hand, at least one possible gauge of public perceptions -- subway ridership -- rose by 4.2 percent in 1994, an increase that transit police officials attribute to reports of declining crime.
Some sociologists and criminologists say many people's fears stem less from the numbers of crimes committed than from the types of crimes and their viciousness -- especially those committed by teen-agers.
In fact, experts note that while crimes committed by people over the age of 35 are plunging, teen-age crime remains high. And those crimes are typically more unpredictable and spontaneous than those committed by older criminals.
The police also hope the public will grow more secure as the department's new crime -fighting strategies take hold. So far, they say, preliminary monthly figures show a link between the new crime -fighting efforts and the crime rates.
Compared with the like month in 1993, homicides fell by 14 percent in January, 2 percent in February, and 0.6 percent in March before rising 7 percent in April. And after the Police Department's new anti-drug and anti-gun strategies took effect around May, homicides fell substantially month after month: by 28 percent in May, 11 percent in June, 16 percent in July, 14 percent in August, 32 percent in September, 48 percent in October, 28 percent in November, and 37 percent the first half of December.
"We have made more progress than I even expected in one year," Mr. Giuliani said last week.
But experts wonder how long the trends can be sustained.
"It's possible the decreases in crime will accelerate," said Michael Smith, president of the Vera Institute, a law-enforcement research group based in Manhattan. "But the wheel of fortune turns against that possibility."
The Strategies Smaller Arrests To Avert Big Ones
As other families in the Astoria Houses project in Queens were brewing coffee, showering or resisting the frigid December dawn by staying in bed, the Rodriguez household was in for a rude morning call.
"Police!" cried Lieut. Joseph Goodrich as he knocked with a sharp crack of his knuckles. "Answer the door!"
Three officers were looking for Carlos Rodriguez, a scrawny 45-year-old heroin addict who had skipped a court date after being arrested several weeks earlier in a car theft. As his daughter sobbed deliriously and his wife pulled up his pants, Mr. Rodriguez was handcuffed and taken to the 114th Precinct station for questioning, along with nine other residents of the housing project who the police said had violated parole or probation or ignored court summonses.
In the past, Mr. Rodriguez would almost certainly have got away with stealing a car, a crime the Police Department considered a low priority until Mr. Bratton took over.
But now the police are plucking low-level offenders out of rap clubs, bars and pool halls, clogging the justice system but also interrogating them for information that has led to hundreds of arrests of more violent criminals involved in gun trafficking, robbery and murder. Through the first 50 weeks of 1994, the department made 40,000 more arrests than the nearly 200,000 arrests in the same period the year before.
Using pin maps and data bases to track crime patterns, precinct commanders under Mr. Bratton have taken an approach to fighting crime that is more akin to a military campaign, viewing every street and public housing tower as a battlefield.
For the first time in a generation, uniformed neighborhood police officers are being encouraged to arrest drug dealers and gun traffickers, rather than waiting for specialized narcotics or gun teams. The increased use of dawn warrant sweeps (like the one that scooped up Mr. Rodriguez), bicycle patrols and undercover operations -- like dressing male and female officers as prostitutes -- has added speed and stealth.
Mr. Bratton has attracted much attention by ordering a crackdown on graffiti and aggressive panhandling, on the theory that such minor disruptions, when tolerated, breed more serious crimes.
But at the core of his strategies is the view that a relatively small number of people commit most crimes, and that they are often loosely affiliated or come in contact with one another buying guns or drugs or selling stolen goods. With aggressive detective work, the theory goes, one arrest should lead to others.
"Relentless follow-up investigation is the key to driving down crime, " said Jack Maple, the Deputy Police Commissioner for crime control strategies. Comparing crime -fighting to stringing a necklace, he added, "You take all the pearls and put them together."
In case after case, the strategy has worked, officials say. A patrolman who stopped a motorcyclist in lower Manhattan for not wearing a helmet arrested him when he found two loaded pistols. A search of his apartment uncovered an arsenal of automatic handguns and grenades.
In September detectives questioned a suspect in the theft of a fax machine from a car parked in Manhattan. That led to the arrest of the manager of a midtown hotel who was buying jewelry stolen from tourists.
"The strategies work," Mr. Bratton said in a lecture to a class at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice in November. " Crime will go down. I guarantee it. Fear, that's more nebulous. I can't be sure."
The Theories Older Population, But Not for Long Criminology is an inexact science at best, and theories about why crime is declining run the gamut.
"Mayor Giuliani deserves a lot of credit, but crime is not going down just because of what the Police Department is doing," said Richard H. Girgenti, the state's departing Director of Criminal Justice. "There are a whole host of reasons. We had a peaking of crime in the mid-80's with the emergence of crack, so at some point it had to level off. Things do work in cycles."
Numerous factors, or combinations of factors, are having an impact. The growing use of Federal racketeering laws to attack street gangs has been credited by some experts with the destruction of a notorious drug gang and a 50 percent drop in homicides in the South Bronx. The boomlet in construction jobs may be one reason reported robbery fell 17 percent in Brooklyn.
More effective security devices have helped reduce auto theft by 15 percent across the city, experts say.
And a significant drop in shootings in Washington Heights and other drug-infested neighborhoods suggests to some experts that many of the turf wars over lucrative street corners have been settled. Dead men can't talk, or shoot.
Other experts suggest that drug organizations are learning to do business less violently, in part to improve relations with their communities, much as organized criminal groups did after binges of violence in the 1920's and 1930's.
"Maybe some of the street gangs are getting more sophisticated and are reducing the level of violence like the old Mafia mobs did during an earlier era," said Patrick V. Murphy, who was New York City Police Commissioner in the early 1970's and now studies national crime trends for the United States Conference of Mayors.
"That's one theory," he added. "There is another theory: that so many violent people have been convicted and imprisoned in recent years that you have a declining number of those willing to murder." The New York State prison population increased 112 percent between 1983 and 1993, to 64,569.
Mr. Giuliani, criminologists and police officials credit innovations in police work nationwide. They say that as crime peaked about 1990, David N. Dinkins and other mayors encouraged their police to shift tactics away from the quick-response model, which emphasized high-speed radio car chases after crimes were already committed.
Under the new community-policing approach, police departments have returned to old-fashioned street patrols, where the beat cop collected information from sources he nurtured at the corner store and broke up fights before they got out of hand.
Another popular theory holds that crime is dropping in cities across the country in part because the population is aging. Simply put, the number of people between the crime -prone ages of 16 and 24 is gradually declining. But if that theory is true, the decline in crime may be short-lived.
"What's happening is the numbers are returning to some norm," said James Alan Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. "The bad news is we've had several years of increases in juvenile crime. And the really bad news is the worst is yet to come: in the next 10 years, offspring of the baby boomers will reach adolescence and by the year 2005 there will be 23 percent more teen-agers between the ages of 15 and 19."
