Don't believe the hype about murder

The real story of homicide in America is one of hope, especially for black men, who have long suffered the most.

By Jill Leovy

Read more: Los Angeles, FBI, Homicide, African-Americans, Murder, Centers for Disease Control, Opinion

Dec. 14, 2006 | LOS ANGELES -- Terell Waters died from wearing powder blue.

He had grown up in Compton, Calif., but until the age of 27, he had managed to avoid the risks of being a young black man in that part of Greater Los Angeles. He had no rap sheet and no gang affiliation, and had a job at a local youth center. Last week, Waters made one mistake: He wore a powder-blue shirt while visiting a friend near downtown L.A. A group of Blood gang members driving by took him for a rival Crip, and shot him dead on the sidewalk.

Waters' murder did not make the news in Los Angeles that week. Neither did that of 21-year-old Kevin Dinwitty, 19-year-old Raffik McClinton, 21-year-old Billy Grant Jr., nor of Marlon Luchien, 36, all killed the same week. The toll was typical for Los Angeles County, and I had only learned about the deaths of five black men in seven days because I cover homicide for the Los Angeles Times and I read all the coroner's reports once a week. There was no news in their deaths, just the same weary drumbeat Americans have grown accustomed to hearing -- that violent murder flourishes in the inner city, especially among blacks, and that things are generally getting worse.

The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for 2005 showed more than a 3 percent uptick in murders from 2004, and the usual laments accompanied its release. We are told that crime, supposedly vanquished in the '90s, is back. We are told that gangs are spreading coast to coast, that pointless argument killings are on the rise, that a perverse new youth culture of violence has flowered in the inner cities, complete with bloodthirsty rap songs and anti-snitching T-shirts.

Crime rises and falls, but this alarmist story does not change. This was the news in the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and now again today. I have been covering homicide in South Central Los Angeles for five years, and most of the people I interview about crime -- including police officers and prosecutors who should know better -- insist to me that gangs are more violent today, that the crimes are more senseless. It's part of the mythology of urban street violence, and it's too bad.

That's because the real story of murder in America is a story of hope. In particular, it is a story of hope for the group of people who have long suffered the most: black men.

That black men are a class unto themselves when it comes to homicide will not come as a surprise to most Americans. Black men are America's primary crime victims. Black men over 18 are only 4 percent of this country's population. Yet more are hospitalized for assault injuries each year than women and girls of all races combined. More black men died from homicide in 2004 alone than all the children aged 10 and under in the previous five years. Even domestic violence, which accounts for a fraction of homicides nationally, appears to have resulted in higher death rates for black men than for white women in recent years.

Nowadays, even after years of mostly falling or flat crime rates, black men still die from homicide at extraordinary rates. Black death rates from homicide in 2002 were almost six times that of whites. Black men 15 to 24 years old are most vulnerable -- some 85 per 100,000 died in 2004 from homicide, compared to a national average of six per 100,000.

But even these sky-high rates are lower than what they once were. The real story of black male homicide is that the historic disproportion between black and white death rates is shrinking, and it has been -- albeit unevenly -- for a long time.

The disproportion between white and black death rates reaches back deep into American history. Historians Roger Lane and Eric Monkkonen, for example, both found markedly higher homicide rates among blacks in analyzing data from 19th century American cities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Preventon began keeping statistics for blacks as a separate group only in 1950. The agency's count shows that homicide death rates for black men then were 28 percent higher than in 2003 and 12 times the white male rate. Spikes in these rates came in the early 1970s, around 1980, and again in the recession years of the early 1990s. Each spike was roughly as high as the last. But running through these spikes is a gradual long-term trend of lower rates and racial convergence.

This suggests we need to take another look at the widespread assumptions that urban violence is the byproduct of modern street gangs, single-parent black families, crack cocaine and the proliferation of handguns. These things matter. But so do deeper and more enduring factors. The reality is that blacks in 1976 were almost twice as likely to die from homicide as blacks in 2004, and the disparity between black and white rates was 20 percent higher than today.

This is not news to most older black men I've interviewed in L.A. who describe living in acute fear as far back as the 1960s, long before anyone had heard of Crips or Bloods. "I'd always have an escape route in my head in case the knuckleheads tried to corner me," said Myron Wilson, 57, talking of his days growing up in L.A.'s Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts. "A gang was the easy way out, your only defense."

Significant progress has happened very recently. Over the last dozen years or so, the nation has seen a startling crime drop that swamps the recent small rise in killings, and black rates have dropped especially steeply. Things can always reverse, of course, but so far this does not seem like the kind of brief, temporary downtick that drives news stories. It appears to be a steady, consistent trend that flies in the face of relentless pessimism about urban violence and undermines all the clichés about a senseless "cycle of violence" on the streets.

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