An Effective Response to Teenage Crime Is Possible - And Cities Are Showing the Way

Jack Levin
Northeastern University

Obscured by the sensational headlines about schoolyard snipers and child molesters on the loose, there is actually a bit of good news to report on the subject of crime, including crime among youth. For several years now, the rate of serious crime in localities around the country has been declining. Indeed, the homicide rate for the nation as a whole recently plummeted to a level that hasn't been seen since the late 1960's--according to the FBI, for example, the rate of murder dropped from 9.4 per one-hundred thousand in 1993 to 6.8 per one-hundred thousand in 1997. In explaining the reduction in adult violent crime, researchers have cited the maturing of the baby-boomers out of an age range in which that generation was more prone to take criminal risks. To explain decreasing teenage crime, studies have focused on a recent decline in the crack epidemic and its accompanying street wars. Zero-tolerance policing, greater handgun control, and other factors are also cited, and evidence suggests that all of those phenomena have helped reduce serious offenses committed by youngsters. But overarching all of these elements, I believe, is a far more important, incipient cultural revolution, a profound and pervasive change in how Americans perceive and treat children and teenagers.

There has been a gradual and long-term reduction in violent crimes committed by adults. During the '60s and '70s, when the members of the baby-boomer cohort were younger and more prone to take criminal risks, the crime rate soared. Then, after 1980, just as the boomers began to mature into their middle years and out of that risk-embracing age group, the crime rate fell. But the reduction in serious offenses over the last few years includes not only middle-aged Americans, but teenagers as well. This includes the homicide rate for youthful perpetrators, which had risen dramatically in the late 1980s and started dropping again in the early '90s.

Although we are hungry for good news, let's not forget that, despite the recent improvement, teen involvement in serious crime is still above the levels reached during the 1970s and early 1980s. Nevertheless, at long last, our teen crime statistics seem to be headed in the right direction--downward.

According to my Northeastern University colleague, criminologist James Alan Fox, the murder rate for perpetrators in the 14-to-17 age group declined to 16.5 per 100,000 in 1997, after having soared to 30.2 per 100,000 in 1993. Similarly, the homicide rate for young adults ages 18-to-24 rose to 41.3 in 1993, and then dropped to 33.2 in 1997. Criminologist Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon has suggested that the competition for crack and other drug markets, after a decade of unabated warfare between youthful dealers, has finally subsided. Many of the winners are, of course, still on the streets, peddling their trade. But the losers are no longer causing trouble for big city residents--they are dead or incarcerated, or have relocated to other communities. At the same time, a beefed up criminal justice system has taken many of the handguns off the streets and out of the hands of teenage predators.

This explanation is fine, as far as it goes. But there is more to the story. Youth crime directly related to the drug trade is not the only kind that has decreased over the past few years; young people have reduced their involvement in a broad range of serious offenses, even in neighborhoods and illegal activities in which crack cocaine has been virtually absent.

For example, hate crimes are an offense for which young people are usually culpable. For the year 1997, the FBI recorded an unprecedented decrease nationwide in assaults, threats, harassment, and vandalism based on hate or bias. According to the Anti-Defamation League, 1997 marked a continuation of a three-year decline in anti-Semitic hate incidents, following a protracted period of increase through the 1980s and early 1990s. The ADL also reports that in 1995, following a decade of increasing anti-Semitic acts, hate incidents on college campuses around the country finally began to drop.

Consider another example. Northeastern University sociologist Benjamin Steiner and I studied riots in which young people collectively looted, damaged property, and/or caused personal injury. We discovered that the number of such acts of disobedience in schools, at concerts, or on the streets of cities around the nation plummeted from 23 in 1990-91 to only nine in the years 1996-97. Moreover, most of the recent riots we did document could be regarded not as collective expressions of unbridled emotion, but as instrumental and rational acts of protest precipitated by a specific episode--for example, a perceived act of racism, an unjustified arrest by the police, or budget cutbacks with a major impact on a certain group.

School violence is also in decline. Notwithstanding several highly publicized cases, the American Association of School Administrators reports that violent deaths in schools nationwide fell last year by some 30 percent over 1997. Moreover, according to a study conducted by the Department of Education, the number of school shooting deaths around the country actually decreased during 1997-1998, in comparison to the rate five years earlier--55 shot and killed in 1992-93 vs. 40 in 1997-98. The recent spate of school shootings by teenagers has, by and large, occurred outside of major cities and large metropolitan areas. Instead, they have been limited to rural and small town America, where the crack cocaine wars have not--at least, have not yet--made their presence felt.

The depth and breadth of the recent turnaround in teenage crime begs for an explanation that includes, but goes beyond, crack, zero-tolerance policing, guns, and other important variables. In urban centers across the country, residents are re-establishing a sense of community as they begin to recognize that they can make the difference in the lives of local youth. At the grass roots level, parents, teachers, psychologists, religious and business leaders, social workers, college students, and the police are working together to repair the moral, social, and economic damage done to young people over the last 20 years and to take the glamour out of destructive behavior. Through a myriad number of new programs, adults are giving teenagers, especially, what they have lacked for more than two decades--supervision, structure, guidance, and some hope for the future.

Schools have been at the center of effective community efforts to reverse the scourge of teenage violence, often taking on responsibilities that previously were performed by the family. High school principals have increasingly adopted a zero-tolerance policy regarding students who carry firearms to school, making classrooms safer from the threat of gun violence. During the 1996-97 school year, there were 6,093 expulsions in schools around the country.

In addition, by means of effective conflict resolution programs built into the curriculum, many schools are teaching their students what parents used to teach: to have empathy for victims, to control their anger, and to manage their impulsive behavior. Finally, schools are providing what is lacking after the school day ends--adult supervision, guidance, and control. No wonder, then, that for most of our children and teenagers, the school hours are by far the safest hours of the day.

Schools are not the only institutions that have stepped forward to fill guiding roles. Churches run athletic and gun-buy-back programs, for instance. Municipalities have beefed up funds for community policing, with residents forming more partnerships with police. In Boston, which is seen as a model in dealing with teenage crime, the murder count plummeted from 34 teen offenders in 1990 to only 3 in 1998. The city has seen a proliferation of programs geared toward at-risk teenagers. Among them: the Thousand Black Men Basketball Mentoring Program, Teen Empowerment, Gang Peace, the Ten Point Coalition of urban ministers, the Boston Private Industry Council, Choice Through Education, Baker House, Summer of Opportunity, Operation Night Light, the Street Workers Program, Youth Violence Strike Force--the list goes on.

Not all localities have been as successful. While cities such as Boston and New York City have enjoyed great success fighting crime by youth and bringing down the murder rate, other cities--New Orleans, Detroit, and Baltimore, among them--have fared less well. They have a greater share of poverty, lack sufficient resources for law enforcement, and citizens there tend to regard crime as out of control and beyond grass-roots intervention.

New Orleans, for example, has a population close to that of Boston. But its median household income is $18,000, just more than half of Boston's $30,000. New Orleans police patrol the streets with 1302 officers, about half the number that Boston has. And New Orleans's murder rate--though improving somewhat from the early 1990s--last year was seven times greater than Boston's.

In Baltimore, where the body count has exceeded 300 for nine years running, widespread poverty prevents companies in the city from generating enough summer jobs to keep most local teenagers busy. In contrast, thanks to a combination of public and private contributions, Boston generates more than 10,000 summer jobs for teenagers, more than twice Baltimore's total.

Similarly, Detroit and New Orleans simply cannot afford to support a range of after-school programs which would give their teenagers healthy alternatives to violence between the hours of 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. during the school year. Moreover, when youngsters in these two cities get expelled for carrying a weapon to school, they are likely to walk the streets unsupervised. When Boston's violent students are expelled, they are more likely to be referred to the Public Schools Counseling and Intervention Center, an alternative school which last year alone worked with almost 6,000 youths.

In other words, while youth anti-violence efforts are a bargain, they are not free. And without sustained commitment, and adequate resources for civic programs for youth, the cultural revolution will leave too many young people behind. This is the challenge we face in the years ahead.

Prepared for The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7,1999; #35.