Despite a welcome decline in violent Crime rates
nationwide, African-American males are still dying from criminal
homicides at an alarming rate. According to statistics from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), violent Crime in the United
States has fallen since 1991.1
Politicians of both parties have hailed the news of this recent
decline, but violent Crime rates remain unacceptably high and
continue to be well above levels experienced before the
1960s.2
To
measure the extent of the progress that has been made in the fight
against violent Crime over the past decade, and to get some
perspective on the progress that must still be made, Heritage
Foundation analysts examined the data for one of America's most
vulnerable groups--young African-American males who reside in eight
of the nation's largest urban communities. The jurisdictions
examined were Baltimore, Maryland; Brooklyn, New York; Chicago,
Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; Los Angeles, California; New Orleans,
Louisiana; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Washington, D.C.3
The
analysis of 1991 and 1997 homicide data from these communities
finds that, despite some progress, urban black males continue to
face a high risk of dying from homicide, even after accounting for
the recent fall in homicide rates.4
Based on 1998 data for the eight communities studied,5 a 15-year-old urban African-American male
faces a probability of being murdered before reaching his 45th
birthday that ranges from almost 8.5 percent in the District of
Columbia to just under 2.0 percent in Brooklyn, New York. By
comparison, the probability of being murdered by age 45 is 2.21
percent nationally for all U.S. black males and 0.29 percent for
all white males.6
A
Ray of Hope
Despite these grim findings, there are encouraging results
from the analysis as well. Between 1991 and 1998, African-American
males in all of the jurisdictions the Heritage staff analyzed,
apart from Baltimore, experienced a drop in the risk that they
would be murdered. The most spectacular decrease occurred in
Brooklyn, New York, where the risk of death by homicide for black
males in 1998 declined by more than two-thirds from the risk in
1991. Over the same period, African-American males in Los Angeles
County experienced a 50 percent decline in the risk of
homicide.
The
widely uneven pace of the decline in murder rates in Brooklyn, Los
Angeles County, and other cities strongly suggests that city- and
county-specific factors, such as criminal justice and policing
policies, may play a key role in driving down Crime rates. For
example, during the mid-1990s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police
Commissioner William Bratton implemented sweeping managerial
reforms in the New York City Police Department.7 Based on the empirical evidence over
time, it would be possible for policy analysts to examine the role
that these relatively new policies may have played in the
faster-than-average decline in Brooklyn's murder rate.
Measuring the
Probability of Homicide
Analysts in The Heritage Foundation's
Center for Data Analysis (CDA) used data on homicide deaths from
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control (CDC) to examine the continuing impact of high
murder rates on urban minority communities during the 1990s.
To
begin measuring the human impact of homicide within these
communities, the Heritage analysts calculated the average
probability that a 15-year-old black male would be murdered before
reaching his 45th birthday in the eight above-listed urban counties
with large African-American populations.
Despite the recent reductions in Crime
rates across the nation, African-American males in each of these
eight urban areas continue to face an extremely high probability of
being killed before they reach middle age. (See Chart 1.) For
example:
-
Based on 1998 murder rates, approximately
one in every 12 black 15-year-old males who live in Washington,
D.C., can expect to be murdered before reaching age 45.
-
For Brooklyn, the major urban community
with the lowest 1998 homicide rates for young black males, roughly
one in every 53 black 15-year-old males will die from homicide
before reaching their 45th birthday.
- By contrast, based on the 1998 murder
rates, the average 15-year-old U.S. male faces a very low
one-in-185 probability of being murdered before reaching age 45.
Nationally, a similarly aged black male faces an average
probability of one in 45 that he will die from homicide before
reaching age 45. An average white male faces a one-in-345
probability of being murdered before reaching age 45.
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Methodology
The data used in this Heritage analysis
are based on information from U.S. records of deaths collected for
1991 and 1997 by local and state governments. These data are
compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and are available
for individual counties and states.1
To measure the impact of high murder
rates on African-American communities during the 1990s, the
analysts collected mortality data for the 20 U.S. counties that had
the largest absolute number of black residents in 1998.2 For seven of these counties, sufficient
numbers of death records were available for both 1991 and 1997 to
calculate age-specific homicide rates for black males aged 15
through 44 that, according to CDC criteria, are deemed to be
statistically reliable. In addition, CDC state-level mortality data
were used to calculate 1991 and 1997 homicide rates for the
District of Columbia.3
For the purposes of CDC county
mortality data, Baltimore City is treated as a county, separate
from and independent of suburban Baltimore County. The murder rate
for the New York borough of Brooklyn is calculated using the data
for Kings County, which geographically shares the same borders.
Chicago-area homicide rates are calculated on the basis of data for
Cook County, Illinois. Orleans Parish data are used to calculate
homicide rates for New Orleans, and Philadelphia County data are
used to estimate Philadelphia City murder probabilities. Detroit
homicide rates are measured by data for Wayne County, and
statistics for Los Angeles are taken from CDC mortality data for
Los Angeles County.
The homicide rates for 1991 and 1997
are estimated using data from records of deaths compiled by local
and state governments for public health purposes.4 These CDC cause-of-death data are collected
independently from the two traditional sources of Crime data. The
first traditional source is the number of reported crimes recorded
by police agencies (i.e., the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports
statistics-gathering program). The second traditional source of
data is a collection of random surveys of households that typically
are not large enough to provide reliable information for individual
communities (i.e., the U.S. Justice Department's National Crime
Victimization Survey).5 In other
words, the estimates contained in this study offer new evidence
(independent of traditional data sources such as police reports)
that the homicide rates for black males have fallen in many of
America's large urban communities.
The data for this analysis are based on
combining death rate data for four specific age groups (15-19,
20-24, 25-34, and 35-44). The method used to calculate the homicide
risk takes into account changes in the share of the population in
each of these age categories. As a result, the estimates of the
risk of death from homicide in this analysis are controlled for
changes in the age structure of the African-American male
population in each community.
Probabilities of dying due to homicide
are calculated using mortality data for the calendar years of 1991
and 1997 and 1998. The results of this analysis are shown in Chart 1.
1. U.S. Centers
for Disease Control, Compressed Mortality Files for 1991 and
1997.
2. U.S. Bureau
of the Census, Population Estimates Program, Population Division,
"Counties Ranked by Black Population in 1998" (Table CO-98-16),
September 15, 1999.
3. Due to its
small population size, the estimated homicide rate for D.C. black
males aged 35 to 44 in 1997 was judged statistically "unreliable,"
according to CDC criteria. However, the 1997 homicide death rates
were judged to be statistically valid for black males aged 15 to
34, and the estimated rate for ages 35 to 44 was used as an input
in calculating a total homicide risk for the 15-to-44 age range.
Based only on the statistically "reliable" rates (i.e., data for
the 15-to-34 age range in 1997), the risk of being murdered faced
by a black male living in Washington, D.C., was 9.07 percent. In
1997, the total homicide risk faced by a D.C. black male during the
20 years between ages 15 and 35 is higher than the risk faced by
black males over a 30-year period (between ages 15 and 45) in the
seven other communities in this study. In other words, the
inclusion of data for D.C. black males for the 35-to-44 age range
has no bearing on the District of Columbia's ranking.
4. While the
estimates of the probability of dying as a result of homicide for
1991 and 1997 are calculated directly from the CDC's Compressed
Mortality Files, these data are not currently available for
years after 1997. However, to take account of the change in murder
rates between 1997 and 1998, CDA analysts combined data from the
FBI's latest Uniform Crime Reports for 1997 and 1998 with
the rates derived from the 1997 CDC mortality data to produce a
preliminary estimate of the impact of 1998 murder rates on
African-American life expectancies.
5. The National
Criminal Victimization Survey is conducted annually by the Bureau
of Justice Statistics in the U.S. Department of Justice.
|
A Risk Worse than Military Combat? An analysis of historical
data shows that, despite different time spans, serving in the U.S.
military during wartime may be preferable to living in some urban
communities today.8
Strictly speaking, these military death
rates are not comparable to the rate for young black males in urban
communities because they were endured over much shorter periods of
time; but they do illustrate the magnitude of the risk faced by
African-American males in these eight communities today.
Uneven Rates
Although the overall U.S. male homicide rate declined by
almost 35 percent from 1991 to 1998, not all U.S. cities benefited
to the same degree from this general reduction. (See Chart 2.)
During the 1991 to 1998 period, black males between the ages of 15
and 45 in the District of Columbia and the New Orleans area still
faced particularly high probabilities of dying from homicide.
-
From 1991 to 1998, the homicide mortality
rate fell from 10.2 percent to 8.5 percent in Washington, D.C., and
from 10.4 percent to 7.1 percent in New Orleans.
- Most dramatically, while Baltimore City
had the second lowest homicide rate for black males in 1991 among
the eight communities in this analysis, by 1998 its murder rate had
actually risen to the second highest rank behind Washington,
D.C.
The experiences of these eight communities can be divided into
three broad groups:
Group 1. In two communities (Brooklyn and
Los Angeles County), black males experienced large reductions in
their probability of being murdered (by 67 percent and 50 percent,
respectively). The black male homicide rate in Brooklyn fell at
almost twice the rate achieved in total U.S. male homicide rates
between 1991 and 1998.
Group 2. Black males in five communities
(Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.)
experienced moderate to substantial reductions in their homicide
risk. Within this group, percentage reductions in the probability
of a black male's dying from homicide between the ages of 15 and 45
ranged from 11 percent in Philadelphia to over 40 percent in
Detroit.
Group 3. Finally, Baltimore
African-American males experienced a substantial increase in their
homicide rate. Between 1991 and 1998, a 15-year-old black male
living in Baltimore saw his risk of being murdered before reaching
45 soar by a factor of 38 percent (from 5.3 percent to 7.3
percent).
These stark differences in the experiences
of African-American males in these eight cities suggest that
factors specific to communities (such as differences in local
policing and criminal justice policies) likely play a very
important role in shaping the differences in their respective
murder rates.9
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HOMICIDE AND LIFE
EXPECTANCY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
One of the most vital signs of an area's socioeconomic health is
the life expectancy enjoyed by its inhabitants. Indeed, social
scientists often cite longevity as the "gold standard" indicator to
measure differences in the level of social development across
countries and over time.1 In March
1998, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimated that life
expectancy at birth during the 1989 to 1991 period for black males
in the District of Columbia was 57.5 years,2 the lowest in the nation and just over six
months longer than life expectancy at birth in 1990 for a male born
in India.3 (See Chart 3.)
However, if the homicide rates for D.C. black males in 1989-1991
had been reduced to the level experienced by D.C. white males
during the same period, life expectancy at birth for African-
American males would have been raised by 3.35 years.4 This 3.35-year increase in life expectancy
would be slightly greater than the entire gain in longevity
experienced by all U.S. black males during the entire 20-year
period between 1974 and 1994.5
In fact, if effective anti-crime policies could reduce the
homicide rate faced by black males to the same levels enjoyed by
white males, the result would cut the gap between black and white
life expectancies in the District of Columbia by over 24 percent.
In short, urban minorities are the largest stakeholders in local
policies that can fight Crime successfully in the District of
Columbia.
1. Robert Fogel, "Economic Growth,
Population Theory, and Physiology: The Bearing of Long-Term
Processes on the Making of Economic Policy," American Economic
Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (June 1994), pp. 369-395.
2. National Center for Health
Statistics, U.S. Decennial Life Tables for 1989-1991, Vol.
II, State Life Table No. 9, March 1998.
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census,
International Data Base, Table 010, at .
4. This calculation is based on
differences in the homicide rates for black and white males at all
ages.
5. G. K. Singh, K. D. Kochanek, and M.
F. MacDorman, "Advance Report of Final Mortality Statistics, 1994,"
Monthly Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 45, No 3 (1996),
Supp., p. 19. This report is published by the National Center for
Health Statistics.
|
Case Study: New York City
Innovative policing may explain reductions
in homicide rates. In New York City, for example, recent history
after changes in criminal justice policies were made may suggest
reasons why Crime rates dipped so dramatically from 1991 to 1998.
Previously, many criminal justice experts and practitioners
believed that proactive efforts by the police to prevent Crime were
unwarranted, since police could "fight" Crime only by responding to
reported incidents. This once-prominent "reaction only" policing
strategy is fading quickly as a result of academic research
detailing the effectiveness of targeting Crime where it occurs and
the adoption of "broken windows" policies.
The
social science research on police tactics that aggressively target
Crime offers empirical evidence that police crackdowns and
targeting Crime "hot spots" do reduce Crime in those areas.10 For instance in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
the police conducted an experiment that targeted "hot spots" in
1988 and 1989. This effort resulted in a statistically significant
reduction in Crime of 13 percent in areas that received the
intervention, compared with a control group.11
At
the forefront of the use of innovative policing methods that built
on the Minneapolis experience has been the New York City Police
Department (NYPD). Beginning with policies first put in place under
Mayor David Dinkins on the transit system and later expanded
citywide under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, New York City dramatically
reduced its level of crime. Its success changed the city's
long-standing reputation as an urban center riddled with Crime to
the distinction of being one of the safest large cities in the
country. The probability of an African-American male between the
ages of 15 and 45 dying of a homicide in Brooklyn declined by 67.2
percent from 1991 to 1998, compared with a national decline of 36.9
percent for all African-American males.12 This welcome decline occurred during
the period that the NYPD was intentionally being transformed into
an innovative and proactive crime-fighting force.
Current Police Commissioner Howard Safir
and his predecessor, William Bratton, used a three-pronged approach
to reduce Crime:
- Target quality-of-life nuisances.
Traditionally, big-city police departments would overlook minor
quality-of-life offenses (such as aggressive panhandling, public
drunkenness, or menacing behavior) in order to focus their efforts
on major crimes. Bratton and Safir took a more balanced approach,
which recognized that once a community tolerates quality-of-life
nuisances, more serious crimes often follow--a "broken windows"
approach to policing.13 When a
neighborhood is besieged with social disorder, its residents often
withdraw from community life, exposing the community to an influx
of even more social disorder and waves of crime.14 Breaking this cycle in New York meant
taking quality-of-life offenses seriously.
One notable example was the focus on
subway "fare beating." The police found that in some
subway-entrance neighborhoods, as many as one fare-beating arrestee
in 10 carried an illegal weapon or had an outstanding warrant for a
felony violation.15 By targeting
small crimes, the police were able to remove more serious
offenders, who would have continued perpetrating their crimes had
there been no intervention, from the streets. The "broken windows"
strategy sent a clear message to New York's criminal subculture
that deviant behavior, and the fear and disorder it causes, would
not be tolerated.
- Use crime-mapping technology to target
violent crime. Commissioner Bratton introduced crime-mapping
technologies that fundamentally changed how the NYPD operated,
allowing the police administration to focus resources specifically
where most Crime was occurring.16
The technology's potential for helping police is extraordinary:
Research shows that over half of all Crime occurs in less than 3
percent of the addresses in a city, and that Crime at these
addresses is clustered around certain days of the week and times of
the day.17
To target Crime more effectively, the NYPD
wanted a system that enabled it to identify the "hot spots" and
rapidly deploy officers to those areas. The NYPD implemented the
Compstat (for computer statistics) crime-mapping system, which
analyzes geographic and temporal patterns of crime. The statistics
it provided allowed precinct commanders to increase their presence
in those hot spots and prevent the incidences from escalating while
also removing perpetrators more quickly from the street. Further,
the NYPD gave precinct commanders the authority to shift resources
and redeploy officers based on the data Compstat collected. Police
departments across the nation are copying this approach and
integrating crime-tracking systems similar to Compstat into their
organizations.18
- Bring accountability back into policing.
Along with the increased discretionary power the NYPD gave its
precinct commanders came a widespread demand for accountability.
Each week, the NYPD reviewed precinct commanders' responses to
Crime reports and judged their results. According to Bratton, "As
far as the department has been concerned, [before this] statistics
were not for use in combating Crime, they were only for keeping
score at the end of the year."19
So he decentralized the organization from an "unfocused,
inward-looking, bureaucratic organization" to one that recognized
its "precincts are the primary unit of policing."20 Bratton used Compstat not only as a
crime-fighting tool, but also as a way to hold his precinct
commanders directly accountable for their performance.
Although fighting Crime should be the
primary mission of the police, this mission cannot allow police
practices to compromise constitutional protections against
unreasonable search and seizure and the use of excessive force. In
this context, the new aggressive style of policing adopted by the
New York City Police Department has not been without controversy,
especially in the wake of the February 1999 shooting of Amadou
Diallo. Critics have accused New York City police officers of
exercising excessive force and violating constitutional protections
against unreasonable search and seizure.21 For example, a December 1999 study
carried out by the Office of the Attorney General of New York State
found that, "In roughly one out of every seven 'stops' conducted by
the NYPD, the facts that the police officer articulates for making
the 'stop'...fail to meet the legal threshold of 'reasonable
suspicion.'"22
However, the degree to which the
allegations of excessive force and illegal search and seizure are a
product of the reforms implemented in the NYPD after 1994, or
merely reflect factors already in place before the reforms were
instituted, is not clear. For example, from 1993 to 1994, the rate
of citizen complaints against the New York police per 100 officers
increased by 29 percent, but complaints between 1994 and 1999
dropped by 22.8 percent to the 1993 level.23 An even more important indicator of the
NYPD's record is the substantial decline in police shootings.
Between 1993 and 1999, the total number of shootings by police
officers in New York City fell by 66.5 percent, even though arrests
have increased by 95.8 percent from 1993 to 1999.24 While it is probably premature to reach
a final conclusion, the available evidence does not support the
claim that the NYPD reforms led to an increase in excessive force
and civil rights abuses.
Conclusion
Though the national death rate from
homicide faced by young African-American males has fallen
dramatically since 1991, it remains alarmingly high in absolute
terms. In eight of the largest urban African-American communities,
teenagers face probabilities of being murdered before they reach
age 45 that range from one in 53 in Brooklyn to one in 12 in
Washington D.C. The crushing burden of these high murder rates not
only is a human tragedy for America's urban communities, but also
hinders economic and social development by frightening businesses
out of these areas and disrupting social and family life.
Despite this gloomy picture, the
large-scale reductions in black homicide rates achieved in
Brooklyn, New York, have undercut an older academic prejudice that
fighting violent Crime is somehow beyond either the competence of
public authorities or the capacities of the police. While this
report does not draw definitive conclusions about why homicide
rates have declined, the evidence does suggest that sound law
enforcement policy changes may be effective in reducing the tragedy
of high homicide rates. The urban communities analyzed in this
study face some of the highest homicide rates in the nation and so
are the biggest stakeholders in the decisions of local governments
in fighting crime.
Gareth G. Davis is
a former policy analyst in the Center for Data Analysis,
and David B.
Muhlhausen is a senior policy analyst, at the Heritage
Foundation.
Appendix
Estimation of Homicide Probabilities for 1998
The
estimated homicide mortality rates for 1998 were based on the
percentage decline in total homicide rates between 1997 and 1998
for each jurisdiction in the study. The percentage change in
homicide rates was taken from homicide and population data obtained
from Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports
for 1997 and 1998 and U.S. Bureau of the Census 1998 population
estimates for the jurisdiction involved. Specifically, this
analysis used homicide rates for all demographic groups to
calculate the estimated drop in homicide probabilities for black
males aged 15 to 44. The 1998 estimated figures were obtained by
multiplying the percentage change in homicide rates with the
homicide mortality rate for 1997 from the U.S. Center for Disease
Control's Compressed Mortality Files.
(1997-1998 percentage change in
homicide rate
per 100,000) X (homicide mortality rate calculated
for 1997) = (1998 estimated mortality rate)
Probabilities of death by homicide were
calculated for 1991 and 1997 using age-specific homicide death
rates for black males taken from the CDC's Compressed Mortality
Files.25 These death rates
were converted to probabilities, and these probabilities were then
used to calculate the period cumulative probability that a black
male in each jurisdiction would suffer death from homicide between
the ages of 15 and 44.26