Murder hits 40-year low

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.

• White criminals dominate among those executed and those waiting on death row. They most often commit serial or mass murders.

• The best way to prevent murder is to avoid arguments. They are the single leading factor that accounts for four of every 10 homicides.

As for the demographics of death, the federal official who analyzes the data finds them far too disparate to pick out a “typical” victim, or those who spark the most emotions.

“They all bother me. I work with it all the time, but you never forget the victims,” says Marianne W. Zawitz, the BJS statistician who lectures on techniques of researching homicide trends. “It’s troubling. I use examples from my work when I lecture on data presentation and these professionals are horrified by what I’m presenting to them.”

The homicide toll of 15,317 for 2000 was a dramatic decline from 1991’s all-time high of 24,495. Number-crunchers point out that 3,400 more homicides occurred in the study’s baseline year of 1976 than during 2000, when the nation had 80 million more residents.

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