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.