By FRANK GREVE
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- A new generation of brutal and remorseless teens was about to savage the nation, leading authorities on juvenile crime warned a decade ago. Millions of Americans believed them.
Conservative criminologist John DiIulio called the fearsome horde “super-predators.” He estimated that they would number nearly 200,000 by now. Attorney General Janet Reno foresaw violent crime doubling among kids.
It never happened. Instead, Americans are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. Schools today are as safe as they were in the 1960s, according to Justice Department figures. Juvenile homicide arrests are down from 3,800 annually to fewer than 1,000, and only a handful of those homicides occur in schools. Arrest rates for robbery, rape and aggravated assault are off a third since 1980 for kids ages 10-18, according to the Justice Department’s 2006 National Report on Juvenile Offenders and Victims, due out this month.
“Kids now are less violent than you were,” James Rieland, director of juvenile court services in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County, tells new prosecutors.
Criminologists say the real question is what went right in the long period of relative peace that dawned in the mid-'90s. Their hope is to prolong the amity -- or at least know what works the next time juvenile crime goes up.
As it is, teen crime declines leveled off in 2002 and 2003, the latest years for which solid numbers are available. Simple assaults are up, especially among girls, according to the Justice Department report. Teen drug arrests, while off their peaks, never fell as far as violent and property crimes. That’s the bad news, said criminologist Franklin Zimring of the University of California,Berkeley School of Law.
“The good news is that juvenile crime overall is staying at the lowest level it’s been in 36 years,” he said.
The rise and fall of crack cocaine was the biggest factor, most juvenile-crime experts agree. Others include an inner-city influx of relatively peaceable Hispanic families, a thriving economy, improved strategies for dealing with real and potential delinquents, more adult imprisonment, smarter policing and better school-parent partnerships.
Most likely, these and other factors all worked together in complex ways, said Melissa Sickmund, senior researcher at the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh. No social change as big and broad as teen crime’s fall has only one cause, she said. “This isn’t medicine,” she added.
According to criminologist Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, teen crime’s decline is largely the result of a rise that started in the mid-'80s, when kids took over drug gangs from adult dealers who had been imprisoned under toughened state and federal laws. The teens needed guns “because crack was a street market, and you had to protect yourself,” Blumstein said. “And they didn’t have the restraint that older folks do.”
Jeffrey Seals, a school security guard, watched it play out at Montgomery Blair High School in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. It’s a big, ethnically diverse school whose students in those days included drug-dealing Jamaican posse members.
If you sold crack back then, recalled Seals, 46, “you went to jail, you got deported, you got killed or you got smart.”
Many got smart, Blumstein said. “Kids saw what crack was doing to their siblings, friends and parents and turned away from it.” At the same time, he said, “reasonably aggressive policing took the guns from the kids.”