Murder hits 40-year low

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Murder in America has fallen into a historic slump, and that's a fact more people can live with. Murder rates have dropped to levels not seen since the mid-1960s, punctuating the end of a bloody 20th century where more than twice as many died in American homicides as U.S. troops did in wars.

"No one has a good theory that explains the drop," says David Baldus, a University of Iowa law school professor and recognized expert on murder prosecutions.

"Police take credit for it, but we don't know the answer," says Mr. Baldus, who is among several analysts citing a decline in drug-related shootings.

The picture of who is dying and who is killing, assembled by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), shows that in the past quarter century about three of every four victims were male and 10 percent of killers are females.

The 25-year total includes 1,912 police officers killed on the job and 94,142 slain young men ages 18 to 24 -- most killed in the kind of "gang-related" incidents that perplex big-city police chiefs.

Among findings in BJS' comprehensive examination of 507,681 murders from 1976 through 2000 (the last year in which the data have been analyzed completely):

• 2000 was considered a good year because criminals took "only" 15,317 lives, down by 9,000 from annual tolls just a decade before.

• Blacks make up 12.1 percent of the nation's population but commit most of the murders and are over-represented among homicide victims. They are six times more likely to be murdered, and seven times more likely to kill.