In the new calculus of American crime, you have a higher statistical chance of being murdered if you live in Memphis, Tenn., or St. Louis than New York. Though the pattern is erratic, crime rates are skyrocketing in many midsize cities nationwide (chart). The FBI says the number of murders and other violent crimes jumped 16 percent last year in cities with populations of 500,000 to 1 million. That is double the rise recorded in the largest U.S. cities-and beyond anything that factors such as population growth can explain. In Milwaukee, for example, where the homicide count has leapt 126 percent in five years, the 1991 tally is up an additional 43 percent.
The capricious brutality of big-city crime has metastasized to smaller communities long envied for their relative safety and civility. Too often the public response ranges from denial to myopia. In Minneapolis last month, police were stunned by an incident reminiscent of New York’s infamous Kitty Genovese case. A visibly pregnant woman was beaten until she lost consciousness, then raped. As her assailant pulled her down a street she screamed into houses and begged for help. No one even bothered to call the police. “The level of cruelty in street crime is definitely rising-and so is the level of apathy,” says Minneapolis Police Lt. Robert Collins. “People just want this to go away.”
Tougher law enforcement in big cities explains much of the shift. As drug dealers encounter higher costs of doing business in places like New York and Los Angeles, smaller venues are becoming a magnet. “Many drug organizations have found [midsize cities] very attractive,” says Ronald Allen, a criminal-justice specialist at Northwestern University. “You have a spread of criminality driven by very understandable market forces.” Police in smaller cities, less experienced and outgunned by the automatic assault weapons that inevitably accompany drug traffic, have struggled to meet the challenge.
The tide of drugs and guns has brought smaller communities face to face with the kind of juvenile violence long endemic to big cities. Police are encountering offenders who are younger and more prone to hair-trigger violence than ever before. “These are kids who are growing up in much tougher circumstances with much less supervision and much less hope,” says Glenn Pierce, director of the Center for Applied Social Research at Northeastern University. By tapping a special database, Jacksonville, Fla., cops can instantly check whether an apprehended youth is on their list of serious juvenile offenders. Those on the roster average 16 years of age-and 14 arrests.
Shocked by crime and carnage, many midsize cities are searching new solutions. How three cities are coping with their problems:
Charlotte, N.C., gleams with the trophies of an ambitious city coming of age. The 60-story NCNB Corporate Center is soaring to completion, adjacent to a new $50 million performing-arts center. Should the NFL grant the expansion franchise the city craves, a new stadium will go up as well. Yet despite robust economic growth-and a quality of life that prompted NEWSWEEK to dub it one of America’s “hot” cities two years ago-something is unraveling in Charlotte. Crime has come of age here as well. For many it hit home after an evening football game at Myers Park High School last Aug. 24. Two youths exchanged words in the school parking lot. One of them, a 16-year-old, pulled a semiautomatic pistol and shot the other in the leg. A 17-year-old nearby who heard the shots pulled a rifle from a car and opened fire. Several hundred terrified students fled for cover, including 15-year-old Marcus Grier. He died minutes after a rifle shot hit him in the head.
Grier’s death was a defining moment in the city’s most violent year. He was one of 93 homicide victims in 1990, more than double the toll for 1988. Fifteen were teenage or younger. The majority were black males. This year may be worse: at the weekend police had already recorded 42 homicides. In one 36-hour stretch last month detectives investigated five killings, including a domestic bloodletting that left one man dead, two of his brothers charged with murder and the family’s home destroyed by an arson fire. The violence–especially gunplay in the schools-shattered what some see as complacency about a crime problem that has incubated for years. “The attitude was, ‘Oh, that can’t happen in Charlotte’,” says Mayor Sue Myrick. “Well, it has happened in Charlotte.”
Like other midsize cities, Charlotte has scrambled to stem the violent surge. Last November Mecklenburg County voters approved a bond issue that will provide $122 million in additional jail space. Some prescriptives smack of panic: Myrick received little support for a recent proposal to deploy plainclothes military personnel in troubled schools. That and other initiatives are “desperate efforts to deal with the image side without dealing with the substance of the problem,” says city council member Ann Hammond.
The crime wave has triggered a widespread debate about priorities in a city some boosters envision as a nascent Atlanta, its envied regional capital. Community leaders say downtown office towers and new professional sports teams can’t eclipse the woeful litany of unmet needs that feed juvenile crime. A coalition of 30 local agencies that provide services to children warned in a report last month that Charlotte risked becoming a “fortress city” unless it made a commitment to reclaim its young with more funding for programs like Head Start, day care and parent training. But officials say the recession and heavy outlays for flashier projects have left voters with little appetite for more big spending. “I think we have some screwed-up priorities,” says Garinger High School principal Richard Cansler.
Grass-roots leaders are trying to step into the vacuum. Last fall former city councilman Ron Leeper founded Save the Seed, an organization that provides adult male mentors to African-American children. Fighting Back, a fledgling drug- and alcohol counseling group funded by a private grant, hopes to expand its presence in troubled west Charlotte. The alternative, says director Ahmad Daniels, is what he saw early one morning last month at the county jail, where he was invited to observe the morning routine: long lines of young prisoners, broken and blank-faced, filing out of the holding pen. “They don’t mind dying. They don’t mind going to jail,” Daniels says. “There’s no fear in their hearts.”
Late in 1986, crack cocaine hit the drowsy port city of Jacksonville. Soon open-air drug markets sprang up by the dozens; at one storefront operation, clerks brazenly rang up crack sales on a cash register. Shoot-outs involving a faction of the notorious Miami Boys drug ring and a vicious band of immigrants from Guyana sent the murder count soaring. As the pace of funerals quickened, Sheriff Jim McMillan, head of the unified city-county police force in Jacksonville (population: 673,000), faced another nightmare: his officers were unprepared for the onslaught.
McMillan fought back. Within three years a new narcotics squad had largely driven the drug trade underground. By tailoring its major drug cases for federal prosecution–rather than steering them to state courts, where penalties are lighter-the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has put away several major dealers for life. Some investigations have been so efficient that federal agents, who often run roughshod over local police, played second fiddle.
But getting drugs off the street didn’t halt the bloodshed. The carnage once tied to trafficking has been supplanted by a new wave of violence that’s proven more difficult for cops to curtail. “Now we have growing numbers of kids settling trivial disputes with deadly force,” says Gary Higgins, the department’s research director. “It’s immature frivolity that has nothing to do with business.” Last year violent crime in Jacksonville jumped an additional 16 percent; the murder count rose to 177. The city’s poorest neighborhoods brim with guns. Ironically, police have confiscated firearms from youngsters whose frightened parents bought them for protection at the height of the drug wars. A sheriff’s department that arrested two or three juvenile killers each year captured 12 in 1989–and 26 in 1990. “We can try to reach kids early,” says Capt. William David, citing a variety of police outreach programs. “What we can’t do is give them a new neighborhood.”
Federal prosecutor Michelle Heldmyer says the imprisonment of drug kingpins who kept a semblance of order in some neighborhoods has unwittingly freed younger warriors to act out their rages. Christine Rasche, director of criminal-justice programs at the University of North Florida, says the trivial origins of today’s street killings–battles over gym shoes or sweat shirts-may make them as difficult for police to prevent as domestic homicides always have been.
Circling his brick church, Mayor Emanuel Cleaver ticks off the casualties. Infants he lovingly baptized in the early years of his Methodist pastorate now roam the neighborhood as teenage criminals. Down the block, two murders have occurred in recent months. Cleaver’s frustrated congregation has purchased two ramshackle drug houses–one from a slain dealer’s widow–to halt some of the lawlessness. Cleaver has his own chilling memory of a noon-hour invasion at his pastoral office inside St. James Paseo. A discerning crackhead stole his wedding ring but rejected his less valuable wristwatch. With a gun barrel against his head, Cleaver prepared to die. Unexpectedly, the robber stepped out of the room. Cleaver tugged a telephone to the floor where he lay and desperately dialed the Kansas City police.
Cleaver’s current predicament is only slightly less dicey. In April he became the first black mayor of Kansas City, Mo. (population: 435,000). But as Cleaver himself admits, rising crime rates, including a recent rash of brutal beatings and robberies, threaten to derail his broader agendas for improving an attractive city famed for its fountains and boulevards. And while race played only a muted role in the mayoral campaign, it looms over the crime problem. Cleaver knows that serious crime occurs disproportionately in black neighborhoods. But he bristles at whites who assume blacks are tolerant of violence; the same people, he says, “think I’m a good dancer.” In truth, Kansas City’s criminal element is a bright mosaic. “I can stand on my front porch and watch the United Nations drive through my neighborhood for drugs,” says Alvin Brooks, a former police detective who heads an anticrime group. “Black, white, Hispanic, you name it.”
Cleaver would like to add 100 officers and two more police helicopters to speed response time. Hoping to get youngsters off streets that too often crackle with gunfire, he wants to open several neighborhood schools for night tutoring and athletics. He also plans to launch “Back to the Future,” a blend of low-interest loans and other inducements to draw black and white homeowners into still-salvageable neighborhoods. But much of this will lead nowhere, Cleaver admits, if his city’s poor remain racially isolated. “There’s a close relationship between fighting crime and stopping social problems that contribute to it,” Cleaver says.
Cleaver is still chagrined by his failed attempt at counseling a 17-year-old drug dealer who cut him off by saying, “So what? If I die at 21, I’ll have lived more than most 50-year-olds.” Twenty years ago Cleaver was a militant civil-rights activist. From those battles, he says, he learned a patience that the coming months will put to a test. “Back then we thought our only opponent was bigotry,” he says. “Now our most diabolical opponent is crack–crack and the crime that comes with it.” It’s a lesson grimly heeded in smaller cities all across America.
In the last five years, the murder rate in many cities with populations under 1 million has skyrocketed–often surpassing surges in big cities. By comparison, Detroit’s murder rate actually fell 2 percent over the same period. How smaller cities rate:
City Percent increase in murders, 1985-90 Milwaukee 126%
New Orleans 101%
Jacksonville, Fla. 84%
Memphis 71%
Charlotte 60%
Baltimore 43%
Kansas City, Mo. 38%
Cleveland 23%
ALL DATA FROM CITY POLICE DEPARTMENTS
With violent crime increasing 10 percent last year, and with rape and murder at a five-year high, few in Washington dispute the need for some kind of stepped-up federal response to the police problems of the nation’s big and little cities. The real issue is what to do-and this year, as usual, the search for solutions to the national problem of violent crime has bogged down in a stylized, largely partisan debate that is long on promises but arguably short on measures that will produce real world results. The war on crime, at least in Washington, is a hardy perennial that seems to flourish on the eve of an election year. That may be the reason George Bush and the GOP have made it their top priority for the current session of Congress-and why Democrats are struggling to find some way to one-up the president.
Bush last week renewed his challenge to Congress to take quick action on his 1991 crime bill. “America wants real, comprehensive action against crime,” he said in a speech at the FBI academy in Quantico, Va. “America wants it done right, and it wants it done now. And I assure you, so do I. " But the House and Senate are unlikely to approve any crime legislation before fall, and there are still huge controversies over the thrust and content of every version of the bill-the administration bill, or any of the several alternatives now being pushed by Democrats. Some issues, such as the debate over the federal death penalty, have been going on for years and still divide the Democrats internally. Others, like handgun control, divide both parties more or less equally and also pose the risk of a members’ revolt.
None of this bodes well for the 1991 crime bill-but it is fair to ask just how much that actually matters. The crimes that Americans fear most–mugging, burglary, rape and murder–are almost entirely the concern of state, not federal, law enforcement. They are investigated by outmanned local police forces, prosecuted in overburdened state and local courts and punished in overcrowded state prisons. The solution to crime in the cities, in short, is money–lots of money. Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last April, Kansas City, Mo., Police Chief Stephen Bishop testified that a $1 billion increase in federal aid to state and local law enforcement was “an absolute ‘must’ for us.”
The problem for local cops is that Washington is going to be hard pressed to come up with the bucks. Some Democrats are trying:. Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has drafted a $3.1 billion omnibus bill that would include $1 billion in federal aid to state and local police. But the Bush administration sternly opposes such generosity. “The purpose of the federal justice assistance program,” Attorney General Richard Thornburgh wrote recently, “is not to foster a dependency of state and local law enforcement on continuing infusions of enormous quantities of federal cash.” That message-don’t come to us-was reminiscent of the famous New York Daily News headline 15 years ago-FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. The difference, this time, is that some people actually will.
BOB COHN in Washington
