By ANDREW RYAN
Associated Press Writer
BOSTON- The execution-style slayings of four young men in a basement music studio this week cast a spotlight on a crime wave that has pushed murder in Boston to a 10-year high.
While the murder rate nationally has dropped over the past decade, some cities _ such as Boston and Philadelphia _ are seeing it spike. In Boston, the number of slayings has more than doubled in the past several years, climbing from 31 in 1999 to 71 so far this year.
Criminologists blame the increase in part on a decrease in funding for neighborhood policing because of the war on terrorism; a demographic bubble of teenagers and young adults; and the scaling back since the late 1990s of after-school and anti-gang programs, such as midnight basketball leagues.
“The great successes we had a decade ago is gone. We let down our guard,” said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University and author of five books on violence and homicide. “The situation is not yet lost, but it could get much worse.”
Across the country, there was an increase of almost 500,000 people between the ages of 15 and 30 from 1990 to 2000, census numbers show. The largest concentration of those young adults _ more than 20 million _ are now between the ages of 20 and 24.
“In 1999, they predicted this demographic bubble that we see in the youth population,” said Chris Sumner, the executive director of Boston’s Ten-Point Coalition, a group of churches working to fight crime. “I don’t think we anticipated how violent it would be, not just in Boston but throughout the country.”
“Our babies are dying by the bucket,” Sumner said.
On Tuesday night, four young men were shot to death in a home in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood. It was the bloodiest crime in Boston in a decade. The four, ages 19 to 22, had attended high school together and were members of a local rap group called Graveside.
No arrests have been made, and police have refused to discuss a motive.
Police blame the rise in murders in Boston on guns and gangs. They have targeted hot spots, sweeping through neighborhoods in a search for fugitives and guns.
“I don’t think these are the bad old days,” said Jack Levine, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. “We still have half the homicides that we had in 1990, when we had more than 150 murders.”
That year, the bloodiest in Boston’s history, there was a killing every three days: A high school student stabbed a classmate to death. An ex-con gunned down a man on a Dorchester street with an AK-47. A pack of teenagers raped and murdered a woman in a housing project.
In Philadelphia, there have been 365 homicides so far this year _ up from 330 in 2004. Baltimore has seen 259 killings, which is down from 276 in 2004, but up from 253 in 2002.
In some larger cities, murders continue to drop. New York, which in recent years has seen its murder rate plummet to levels seen during the 1960s, had 508 killings through Dec. 11, a drop of about 6 percent from last year.
“We don’t solve the crime problem, we only control it,” Fox said. “And we were controlling it until we let it get out of control.”