Arrest Rates for Violent Juvenile Crimes Decline

For so long, the grim numbers had risen as surely as our hopes had fallen.

Year after year, more and more kids arrested for violent crimes. Teenagers. Even preteens. Arrested for acts of brutality, including murders, that left us aghast.

But even before U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno announced last week that the nation’s arrest rates for juvenile violence declined last year for the first time in almost a decade, some law enforcement officials and criminologists in California said they had witnessed a similar drop in violent crimes by youths in the state and Los Angeles County.

“It certainly jibes in terms of homicides decreasing over the last couple years and the same with violent juvenile arrest,” said Elaine Duxbury, chief of research for the California Youth Authority.

Matt Ross, a spokesman for California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, said: “Right now, we see a positive trend. But we are not where we want to be” in lowering the rates of juvenile violence.

California Department of Justice figures show that violent crime by juveniles in the state has declined each year since 1990, with the exception of 1994, said Michael Van Winkle, an information officer for the department. Last year, he said, the arrest rate for violent crime for 10- to 17-year-olds was just under 622 per 100,000. Six years ago, the arrest rate was just over 655.

Nationally, preliminary FBI crime figures released Thursday showed that juvenile arrest rates for violent crime dipped 2.9% in 1995, while the arrest rate of juveniles for homicide fell the second year in a row, by 15.2%. The FBI will not have a breakdown of juvenile arrests for crime by cities or regions until later in the year.

But trends have been charted in California and Los Angeles County by a UC Irvine researcher who reviewed the past 20 years of juvenile arrest figures reported by the state Department of Justice. The analysis by Mike Males, an author and doctoral student, shows that the rate of violent crime committed by juveniles has dipped since 1990 in California as a whole, and declined more dramatically in Los Angeles County.

Even if the rates of violent crime remain higher than in most of the nation, the analysis of California crime also reaches one more startling conclusion--that the patterns of violence by adults and juveniles have risen and fallen almost in tandem.

“The press and criminologists have created this impression that there is this enormous problem called youth violence, and what I am saying is there is not,” Males said. “It is the same problem as adult violence.”

Specifically, he said, his review of state and local arrests for violent crime since 1975 shows the following:

* While per capita arrests for California’s juveniles and adults are near a 20-year high, the rate has dipped since 1990. The rate of violent crime between 1990 and 1994 dropped 1.8% for juveniles and 1.4% for adults after a staggering increase between 1985 and 1990--when arrests for murders, rapes, robberies and assaults rose almost 64% for juveniles and 70% for adults.

* The per capita homicide arrest rate in California for juveniles and adults has been declining since 1990. In Los Angeles County, a dramatic drop in homicide arrests between 1990 and 1994 was recorded for juveniles, while the per capita rate for adults also declined, but not as significantly.

* The rate of arrest for violent crime for Los Angeles County adults and juveniles remains far above that of adults and teens in the four surrounding counties of Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. But the per capita arrests have been dropping in Los Angeles County while the rates of arrests for violent crime in suburban counties has been steadily rising.

“Why is it coming down in L.A. County but going up in four other metropolitan counties?” Males asked. “Is poverty increasing faster in the suburbs? Are gangs moving to suburbia? Those are questions that need to be answered. Whatever the reason, L.A. County is benefiting.”

Still, in the urban core of America’s biggest counties, including Los Angeles, juvenile violence remains at frightening levels. A recent report showed that four cities, including Los Angeles, accounted for about a third of the juvenile arrests for homicide nationwide in 1994.

And on the front lines of law enforcement, Los Angeles police detectives who work with children said they have seen little evidence that local youths are becoming less violent. In fact, detectives in some parts of the city said violent crime in their areas seems to be on the increase. “Violent crime on the part of juveniles is up,” said Det. Craig Rhudy, a veteran juvenile investigator who works in the LAPD’s Van Nuys Division. “There has been some decrease in juvenile property crime, but not violent crime. And the types of crimes that juveniles are involved in are more and more violent.”

Other LAPD detectives echoed that sentiment, adding that the level of youth violence tends to be highest in areas of the city where gangs are strongest, police divisions such as Hollenbeck and 77th Street.

For some time, crime experts have cited a number of reasons for the nation’s long, steady rise in juvenile violence, beginning in the late 1980s. Leading the list has been the availability of guns--studies show that homicides by juveniles by all other means have remained almost flat in the United States for the past 20 years while handgun-related killings have soared.

In addition, some criminologists have cited other factors including demographics, noting that the nation’s population of teenagers has fluctuated. In that regard, Reno expressed caution in announcing the dip in juvenile violence, noting that the nation’s number of teenagers is expected to grow significantly in the next 15 years. So even if the crime rate stabilized or continued to dip, the total number of crimes could increase.

While experts suggest that there are many reasons for the leveling off--or even decline--of serious juvenile crime, Ross said Lungren has been particularly interested in statistics suggesting that felony arrests may be dropping because of a marked increase in arrests for so-called “status offenses” such as truancy and curfew violations.

Between 1985 and 1990, Ross said, arrests statewide for felonies involving juveniles rose almost 12% while arrests for status offenses dropped 17.5%. But when authorities redoubled efforts to halt truancy and other status offenses around the beginning of the decade, those arrests rose 18% while arrests for felonies dropped 16%.

“It would seem to suggest,” Lungren said in a recent speech on the subject, “that law enforcement can curtail more serious juvenile crime by seriously enforcing lower level violations and sending the message to young delinquents that the criminal justice system is serious about criminal behavior.”

Meantime, some who have tracked the issue of juvenile crime in California say a far more important factor may be how it mirrors the trends of violence by adults.

“Youth crime has for the most part moved in lock-step with adult crime, and that is not surprising because children basically follow the lead of adults,” said Lisa Greer, a juvenile specialist with the Los Angeles County public defender’s office. “And so to focus on youth crime in a manner that isolates it from adult crime, or from race and poverty trends in America. . . tends to somehow reinforce the notion that today’s kids are more evil and depraved,” said Greer, part of a statewide legislative task force examining juvenile crime in California.

“The truth is not that children are depraved. It is that we have never neglected our children more . . . and the treatment of children in our state and nation is the worst in this century, certainly since the child labor laws were passed.”

Times staff writer Jim Newton contributed to this report.