The Curse of Violent Crime

By Ed Magnuson

A pervasive fear of robbery and mayhem threatens the way America lives

Day by day, America's all too familiar crime clock ticks faster and faster. Every 24 minutes, a murder is committed somewhere in the U.S. Every ten seconds a house is burgled, every seven minutes a woman is raped. There is some truth in the aphorism of Charles Silberman, author of Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice, that "crime is as American as Jesse James." But there is also something new about the way that Americans are killing, robbing, raping and assaulting one another. The curse of violent crime is rampant not just in the ghettos of depressed cities, where it always has been a malignant force to contend with, but everywhere in urban areas, in suburbs and peaceful countrysides. More significant, the crimes are becoming more brutal, more irrational, more random --and therefore all the more frightening.

The nation's top jurist, Chief Justice Warren Burger, warned last month about the "reign of terror in American cities" and bitingly asked: "Are we not hostages within the borders of our own selfstyled, enlightened, civilized country?" Some criminologists answer that the fear of becoming a victim of crime is greater than the actual risk, but no one denies that the fear is real. Proclaimed the Figgie Report, a privately funded study of crime in the U.S.: "The fear of crime is slowly paralyzing American society." Observes Houston Police Chief B.K. Johnson: "We have allowed ourselves to degenerate to the point where we're living like animals. We live behind burglar bars and throw a collection of door locks at night and set an alarm and lay down with a loaded shotgun beside the bed and then try to get some rest. It's ridiculous." The chief knows whereof he speaks; he keeps several loaded guns in his bedroom.

Attorney General William French Smith has declared that the Justice Department will place a new and high priority on fighting violent crime. He appointed an outside task force, headed by former Attorney General Griffin Bell and Illinois Governor James Thompson, to figure out what the Federal Government can do about what has traditionally been a local and state responsibility. Smith also cited, from a new Justice Department study on the prevalence of crime, a telling statistic that helps explain the growing public concern: roughly one out of every three households in the U.S. was directly affected by some kind of serious crime last year. Rare is the American who does not personally know at least one victim of violence.

In reaction to the spreading fear, Americans are arming themselves with guns as though they still lived in frontier days. "It's the Matt Dillon syndrome," says Jack Wright Jr., a criminologist at Loyola University in New Orleans. "People believe the police can't protect them." They are buying guard dogs and supplies of Mace. Locksmiths and burglar-alarm businesses are flourishing, as are classes in karate and target shooting. Banks have long waiting lists for vacated safety-deposit boxes. Many city sidewalks are a muggers' mecca at night; the elderly dread walking anywhere, even in broadest daylight. The fear of street crime is changing the way America lives.

But what is the reality that spawns the fear? Crime statistics have always been notoriously suspect. Many victims shun police, the courts or publicity and never report the violence or thievery they have encountered. While murders are almost always recorded, rape is understandably underreported. The FBI collects its Uniform Crime Reports from local police departments, which often have reason to juggle the figures. A proud chief may want his city to look under control, reflecting on the effectiveness of the force he commands. A bitter chief, angry at funding or manpower cuts, may blacken the statistics to apply pressure for more help. Recalls Patrick Murphy, president of the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C.: "When I was a rookie in the 72nd precinct in Brooklyn, no police commander worth his salt would admit he couldn't control crime--and he proved it by controlling crime statistics."

While the rate of increase in violent crimes (murder, forcible rape, aggravated assault and robbery) has varied through the 1970s, the trend in crimes per 100,000 people has been relentlessly upward. The FBI'S figures placed that rate in 1970 at 363.5; it was up to 535.5 in 1979, the last year in which the tabulation is complete. Of those four crimes, murder jumped to 9.7 per 100,000 in 1979. The record, set in 1974, was 9.8, but that figure, according to early estimates, apparently was passed last year. Roughly one-third of those killings were committed by someone the victim had never met-and it is the unknown marauder lurking in the shadows who contributes most to the climate of fear.

Some experts on crime argue that "victimization" studies, in which Justice Department researchers use scientific polling techniques to sample the population, are more reliable than the FBI's annual counts. The department's studies, in which people are asked to respond anonymously to their personal encounters with violence, show surprisingly little year-by-year overall variations in crime rates. The changes they do report, like a 13.7% increase in rape between 1973 and 1979, are hardly comforting. Notes Charles Kinderman, a researcher at the Bureau of Justice Statistics: "Our figures do not show a new crime wave-but they show there's a hell of a lot of crime." Predicts Harry Scarr, former director of the bureau: "Within four or five years every household in the country will be hit by crime."

Many local statistics support the widespread belief that violent crime is soaring. Figures for the first six months of 1980 showed that New York City probably had its worst year in history. Serious crimes ran some 60% above the national average, pushing it from fourth to second, behind St. Louis, in crimes per 100,000 people. New York topped the nation in its robbery rate and in 1980 had a record number of murders: 1,814. If the rate is unchanged, predicts an M.I.T. study, one out of every 61 babies born in the city last year can expect to die at the hands--or gun--of a killer.

Los Angeles recorded an increase in every violent category in 1980: murder up 27%, armed robberies 20%, burglaries 16%, rape 10%. Moans Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates: "It was the worst year ever in my 32 years as a police officer." Miami police, embattled by drugs, Cuban exiles and racial friction, admit they are losing the struggle against crime even with the addition of some 100 state troopers sent into Bade County to help. Homicides in Miami surged 60% in 1980; robberies rocketed 80% upward.

Atlanta's 60% black population has been terrified by the wanton and unsolved slayings of black children. President Reagan last week announced that the city's request for an extra $1.5 million, on top of nearly $1 million in federal funds already approved, would be granted to help carry on the investigation of the killings. Twenty bodies have been recovered, but the potential number of victims grew to 22 when the name of Joseph Bell, 15, who had been missing since March 3, was added to the list. Atlanta has a worsening problem in other crimes as well. The city's black police chief, George Napper, who has a Ph.D. in criminology, sees his job in grim cartoon-like terms. Says he: "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember your purpose is draining the swamp."

Houston and Dallas also are outdoing their brutal past, setting new violent crime records. Washington, D.C., suffered an 11% rise in homicides. New Orleans has replaced Houston as the nation's most murderous city, with a rate of 23 per 100,000 in the first half of 1980.

What scares much of middle-class America is that violence and stealing are breeding almost as fast in the suburbs as in the inner city. As more and more husbands and wives hold down jobs, their unoccupied homes make tempting daytime targets for burglars. The high price of silverware and gold jewelry adds to the lure. The thieves are often the unattended sons of working couples who, say police, steal to keep up with the rising cost of marijuana. Arrests for violent crimes in the suburbs climbed 7.4% in 1979.

Violent crimes in once tranquil rural areas also increased by 13% last year. "Many residents now live in fear of returning to an empty, isolated home," says Sheriff Robert L. Howard of Tompkins County in upstate New York. "The open-door policy of a decade ago is gone." The fact that almost everyone knows his neighbor has long been a protection in the countryside. Murders, muggings or shootings have not notably increased, but house break-ins and auto and farm-equipment thefts have risen dramatically. One definite trend: thieves from urban areas ranging hundreds of miles to loot rural homes.

In some of the small energy boomtowns of the West, crime rates are climbing wildly. Rifles hanging from the back windows of pickup trucks have become special targets for thieves. In Douglas, Wyo. (pop. 6,000), a four-year-old girl wandered from her house and was found stabbed and strangled. Said Douglas Police Chief Kyle Sowell: "People realize that murder is now something that just doesn't happen some place else. It was a crime against everyone. It's drawn the whole community together."

For each crime that creates those statistics there is a victim whose life has been ended, painfully altered or traumatically affected. No sampling can span the full range of outrage or reflect all the victims' agony, but here are some examples:

Burglary in the Country. Vivian and Al Weber lived in Battle Creek, Mich., working 6:30 a.m.-to-3 p.m. shifts in two different factories--and hating city life. In 1976 they realized what Mrs. Weber calls "our dream, our lifelong dream," moving to a 50-acre site near the tiny village of Burlington and commuting 35 minutes to work. "Everything we had, we put into this home," she recalls. One afternoon the Webers came home to find "glass all over. They'd smashed the window into the kitchen. Everything was gone through --every drawer, every room."

Mrs. Weber felt that their house had been sullied. "I scrubbed the walls. I took the curtains down and washed them. I would open a drawer to put on clean clothes and think about my personal things, 'Oh, God, I've got to wash them. I don't know who had their hands on them.' " She and her husband took different shifts so one of them would always be home. They started locking their doors, even if one of them was merely going out to the garden.

Eventually they decided to work the same hours again. Al got home first one day and met Vivian outside the door. He was white as a sheet. "Honey," he said, "we've been ripped off again." This time the burglars took some of the items the Webers had bought as replacements--and keepsakes as well. "They've got us timed," thought Mrs. Weber. "They know when we go and when we come home." She quit work and would not even go shopping unless Al was home. He gave up his annual hunting trips. They put deadbolt locks on all the outside doors, wired a back-room window with a siren, and even bought a third car to park as a decoy in the driveway if they could not avoid being gone at the same time.

The Webers placed their dream house up for sale, then reconsidered. "I have friends here who are more like family than friends," she explains. But their lives have changed. "I try to be normal, but I'm afraid. I have turned around and driven 15 miles back home because I had a funny feeling in my stomach. I feel watched constantly. I never feel safe."

Brutality in Phoenix. Suzanne Marie Rossetti, 26, a technician at a burn treatment center in Phoenix, had attended a performance of Dancin' at Arizona State University. On her way home, she drove into a grocery-store parking lot, and mistakenly locked her car with the keys inside. Two young white men helpfully unlocked the door, asked for a short lift--then forced her to drive to her apartment, where they beat and raped her for several hours.

According to Phoenix Police Detective Richard Fuqua, the men then drove 50 miles to an isolated desert area and hurled Suzanne off a cliff. They heard her moaning and climbed down to her side. She pleaded with them to leave her alone because, she said, "I'm dying anyway." The response was swift. "Damn right you are," one of the men said, and picked up a large rock and crushed her head to still her sounds.

Rape in Galveston. Marsha Walker, 30, asked a woman friend to stay with her while her husband, a doctor, was out of town. She heard her two dogs barking at 2:30 a.m. outside the Walkers' second-story garage apartment in a historic section of Galveston, Texas. She was not alarmed; there were three locks on the front door, there was no back door, and the apartment was 18 ft. above ground level. But as she went to check an open window, a bare-chested black man wearing an Arab-style kaffiyeh over his head pressed a knife to her throat. He ransacked the apartment, put pillowcases over both women's heads, and raped the friend.

After that night of terror, Mrs. Walker, a magazine editor, began carrying a .45-cal. pistol. She and her husband put new locks on their windows and set up lights around the yard. When alone, she slept with all the lights in the apartment turned on. A few weeks after the attack, she returned from a brief vacation to find a makeshift ladder at one of their apartment windows and the screens ripped. But the prowler, whom Mrs. Walker assumes was the rapist bent on another attack, was heard by a friend of the Walkers' and fled as police arrived.

"Victims don't stop being victims when the police leave," says Mrs. Walker. "Violence is disabling. It changes your life for years." The Walkers have moved from the apartment, and she says, "I will never set foot there again. The anger, the dread and the fear are receding. But the rapist is still in my head. I don't think he will ever go away."

Gang Shooting in Chicago. Steven Watts had everything to live for. A 6-ft. 3-in., 212-lb. lineman, he had been named the outstanding defensive football player in Chicago public high schools and had been given an athletic scholarship by Iowa State University. He was walking home from a Friday-night dance at Julian High with several friends when a car carrying three youths passed. The trio, who were members of a black street gang, apparently thought Watts and his friends, also black, belonged to a rival gang, and began shooting. Running for cover, Watts was hit in the back by one bullet and died before he reached a hospital. Said his coach, Gregory Brooks: "He was a kid who had worked hard all his life for something and was about to get it. Then it's all taken away by some fool with a gun."

Mass Murder in Los Angeles. A waitress was fired from her job at Bob's Big Boy Restaurant in West Los Angeles because she had made a false injury claim. A few months later, at 2:30 a.m., two of her friends arrived at the cafe with a sawed-off shotgun, a standard shotgun and a .32-cal. pistol. After forcing nine employees and two customers into a meat freezer and ordering them to kneel facing the wall, the gunmen began shooting. Three of the victims were killed; five were wounded. Franklin Freeman Jr., 22, Ricky Sanders, 25, and Carletha Stewart, 19, the fired waitress, all black, have been charged with the murders. Identifying the men as the killers at a pretrial hearing, Waitress Rhonda Robinson, 19, a survivor of the shooting, became incoherent; she is now under a psychiatrist's care.

Death in Detroit. Pretty, bright-eyed Keisha Jackson, who was 13 and black, swung her roller skates and laughed with a group of friends after a lively evening at Detroit's Wheels Disco Roller Center. A 16-year-old black boy watched the group go by and squeezed the trigger of his stolen .32-cal. handgun. Keisha fell to the sidewalk, a bullet in her brain, and died a few days later. The boy has not explained to the police why he shot at the happy party.

Fear in a Small Town. Strasburg, Va., is arguing with the U.S. Census Bureau that its official population count of 2,288 people is too low. But the Shenandoah Valley town has one resident it does not want: a ski-masked white man who has entered eight or more homes, usually just after the husband has left for work in the morning, and raped at least two women. Joann Orndorff, 33, white, was saved when her German shepherd-Labrador retriever, Tippy, attacked the rapist. Mrs. Orndorff, like a score of other Strasburg women, now owns a handgun.

A few nights after the attack, a man unknown to Mrs. Orndorff called her. "He asked me if I was scared and I said, 'Who are you?' " His reply: "You know me. Everyone knows me. I paid you a little visit the other night and I'm not done with you yet. No dog is gonna stop me the next time." Recalls Mrs. Orndorff, a mother of three: "That got me mad. I told him a .22 would stop him." She is sure there have been unreported rapes in Strasburg, explaining: "If I'd been raped, I wouldn't have told anyone. This is a small town and people run their mouths."

"Thrill Kills" in Pittsburgh. Michael Travaglia and John Lesko, both white and 22, have pleaded guilty to murder and face death sentences, but they show no remorse. In a five-day spree they kidnaped Peter Levato, 49, an unemployed security guard, in downtown Pittsburgh, attempted to drown him in the Loyalhanna creek, then shot him fatally. Next they abducted Marlene Sue Newcomer, 26, and shot her to death in their van; her body and the abandoned vehicle were found in a Pittsburgh parking garage.

Travaglia and Lesko met William C. Nicholls, 32, a church organist, at a downtown hotel. They commandeered his sports car and drove to Blue Spruce Lake outside Pittsburgh; they shot him, weighted him with rocks, and dropped him through a hole in the ice while he was still alive. Finally they sped past Patrolman Leonard Miller's squad car three times, until he gave chase and stopped them. They shot Miller dead at the side of the highway. After their conviction for his murder, Travaglia leaned over a courtroom rail and asked Prosecutor Tim Geary: "Are you happy? I'll be back to get you."

Terror in Birmingham. Ernest Nunnally, 80, a retired refrigeration mechanic, and his wife Perry, 76, both white, were sitting in their 57-year-old house in a blue-collar neighborhood of Birmingham when two young white men pounded on their door. "You come out here," one said to Nunnally. "We don't want the woman. We want you." Peering out, Nunnally thought he saw one of the men holding a rope or chain. As they pulled on the door, breaking its bolt, Nunnally grabbed a gun and fired through a curtained door window.

Next day Nunnally learned that his shots had struck John Allen Reeves, 20, and Walter Franklin Shook, 19. Reeves' wound was slight, but Shook was paralyzed from the chest down. He has filed a $1 million suit against the Nunnallys for the shooting, although the police have ruled it a justifiable act of self-defense. Now the Nunnallys are terrified; they sit up most nights with the lights turned off and wait in the dark with a .22-cal. rifle. They have thought of moving away. "But it's bad everywhere now, and we've got good neighbors," says Mrs. Nunnally. "We're close to the stores and the hospital. So where would we move?"

One response to this surge of mindless cruelty has been a spectacular and, in the view of most police officers, alarming increase in the purchase of handguns by fearful citizens. A few police departments, such as those in Moore, Okla., Hialeah, Fla., and suburban New Orleans, have bowed to the inevitable and are holding classes in how to use guns. They hope to decrease the chances that the members of a family with a gun in the house will themselves be shot rather than wounding an intruder--odds that now run against the family about 6 to 1.

Some experts argue that the profusion of handguns makes life easier for criminals. Guns stolen by burglars have often been used later in holdups and armed robberies. Moreover, many prosecutors warn that the law is not always on the potential victim's side. Careless and indiscriminate firing at a suspected intruder can be considered criminal. Still, insists Los Angeles Police Officer Loren Zimmerman: "I would rather be judged by twelve than carried by six." In any case, the arming of America is now out of control. One startling sign: making a spot check one recent night, private guards at a Memphis nightclub found 32 patrons carrying guns.

Women are crowding into classes on the use of tear gas, contained in tiny canisters that can be hooked on to key chains. One important lesson: how to use the gas before an assailant turns it against the victim. As Los Angeles Police Sergeant John McCarthy puts it: "Being aggressive is kind of hard for a lot of people." After attending one such class, Patricia Sherman, 29, a lawyer, complained: "I think this incites fear in people. I wasn't as scared before as I am now." But another class member, Phillip Heffernan, 30, contends: "If the crooks knew that 90% of people had Mace cans, I think they would go into other lines of work."

Neighborhood watch groups are springing up in most large cities, often with the enthusiastic support of police. These groups try to get to know who belongs in a neighborhood and who the chronic troublemakers are, and they keep an eye on suspicious strangers. Many have car patrols that stay in touch by CB radio. The watch groups usually avoid confronting a potential criminal but call the police.

There is little doubt that the police need help, particularly at a time when the fiscal crisis has caused manpower cutbacks. "Police officers feel embattled," says Sergeant Jim Moad, a 16-year veteran of the Los Angeles force. "We're getting it from all sides. The attitude is 'It's me and my partner against the world.' All every cop is trying to do is survive until he can retire." Detective Myron Ludvick of New York's harassed force admits that it is difficult to forget about his own survival. "You have to be able to tune that out. But it's there. It's there when you're at a funeral for one of your former colleagues." (Nine New York police officers were killed by criminals in 1980.)

Who are the increasingly brutal marauders responsible for random assaults and murders? Streetwise cops have no difficulty sizing up the psychology of their enemies. "They are mean, antisocial people with macho complexes," says Memphis Police Director E. Winslow Chapman. Observes New York's Ludvick: "They're people who are playing 'Can you top this?' They sit around and say, 'You stuck a guy up? Big deal. I got the bread, then to show him I wasn't just kidding around, I shot him three times.' And the guy next to him says, 'Well, you think that's bad? I took a shot and blew the dude's head off.' " Adds Atlanta Police Chief Napper: "There are a lot of young guys who just don't care, who go out and blow people away just for the hell of it." Chief Gates of Los Angeles takes a somewhat broader view. "We've lost a whole generation," he says. "Totally lost. No selfdiscipline. Total indulgence. Drugs. Lack of respect for the law. Lack of respect for values. A whole generation thumbed its nose at everything that was held sacred in this country. America has to take a look at its heart and its soul."

Criminologists agree that drugs contribute heavily to violent crime; some claim that nearly half of all street crimes are drug related. Drug users either rob and mug to get money to support their habit, or lash out irrationally under the influence of their narcotics.

There can be no blinking away the fact that blacks are disproportionately involved in violent crime-both as offenders and victims. Although blacks constitute only 12% of the U.S. population, they make up 48% of the prison population. Civil rights groups insist that the judicial system is racially biased, but the evidence is not convincing. In violent crimes committed by a single person, the victims in a quarter of the cases claim that the attacker was black. Most crimes involve victims and criminals of the same race. That is true of 83% of all assaults and 70% of all single-offender rapes and robberies.

What this means is that blacks suffer unduly from the rising crime rates, especially in big city ghettos. Murder is now the leading cause of death among black males 24 to 34. (For white males in that age group, it is car and motorcycle accidents.) Black men are eight times as likely to die in a homicide as are white men. Says Lynn Curtis, former director of the Interagency Urban Initiatives Anti-Crime Program: "The typical violent crime involves two young black males who know each other and get into trivial altercations, which lead to serious injury because they both have weapons."

Ironically, there seems to be less alarm about crime in high-risk black neighborhoods than in white areas where crime is lower. Contends Northwestern University Associate Professor Wesley Skogan: "Our studies show an inverse relationship between fear and levels of crime. People who live in the areas of least crime are often the most fearful."

There are few reliable statistics on Hispanics involved in crimes, since states and localities tend to classify them differently. Generally, they commit proportionately more crimes than do whites and fewer than do blacks, and they are victimized in this midrange too. In California, where 16% of the population are Hispanic, they constitute 19% of the prison inmates. Like other ethnic groups, they tend to join neighborhood gangs. In Hartford, Conn., so many newly arrived young teen-agers from Puerto Rico have become victims of gang warfare that some parents have sent them back to the island for their own safety.

Statistics also show that young people commit most of the violent crime in America. Fully 57% of all arrests for such offenses in 1979 were of criminals under the age of 25; one-fifth were under 18. Although the female prison population doubled through the 1970s, women account for relatively few violent crimes: about 11% of all such arrests in 1979.

For all the arguments among law officers and criminologists about what the statistics really mean, there is widespread agreement on one point: a large share of all violent crime is committed by a surprisingly small group of hard-core criminals. One study of repeat offenders in Washington, D.C., showed that 7% of the criminals arrested in a 4 1/2-year period had been apprehended four times-and this 7% accounted for 24% of all the serious crimes considered solved in those years. In one startling example, in suburban Evanston, Ill., the arrest of one burglar cleared up 163 break-ins. Says Evanston Police Chief William McHugh: "Eighteen hundred burglaries doesn't mean we had 1,800 burglars." The fact that the repeaters are released to strike again and again says a lot about the nation's system of criminal justice (see following story).

Increasingly, the vast majority of America's law-abiding citizens are being held hostage to the irrational acts of a relatively small cadre of career criminals. Declares New York Police Commissioner Robert McGuire: "Street crime is the most serious thing we face today. It has an enormous impact on the quality of people's lives. It determines where we walk, what time we walk, even whether we play bingo at night and whether we go to the theater." Sums up San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein: "Crime can be as paralyzing as any autocrat if, as it increasingly does, it imprisons citizens in their homes because they fear to venture outside."

But those who stand on the front lines of the battle against crime insist all Americans must break out of their fortresses and join the fight-not in a physical way, which is foolhardy, but in a search for solutions. Drugs can be slowed, guns can be curbed, the criminal justice system can be improved, they say, if enough citizens turn their fear and anger into the kind of public pressure that will make a difference. Above all, the experts argue, citizens must care about their neighbors' safety as well as their own. Perhaps for too long America has persisted in the pattern Alexis de Tocqueville noted so long ago: a nation where "each person, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest."

-By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Peter Stoler/New York and Evan Thomas/Washington, with other U.S. bureaus

With reporting by Peter Stoler, Evan Thomas

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