9/11 cuts both ways on crime

In Baltimore, Police Commissioner Edward Norris says violent crime has jumped because beat cops are "distracted" by counterterrorism efforts.

In Philadelphia, officials say reassigning officers to security detail - checking suspicious packages for anthrax or bombs - is to blame for a jump in crime.

But Boston and New York officials say many violent crimes are down thanks to community watchfulness and, perhaps, to heightened sensitivity in homes where domestic violence loomed.

Across the country, moves to counter terrorism are affecting crime rates in some subtle and surprising ways.

Ordinary Americans have become more vigilant. But police are suddenly stretched thinner as terror probes compete with traffic patrol.

Criminals, too, face a new environment. Tighter borders have crimped illegal drug supplies, for example, fueling turf-war violence in some areas.

Together, these changes add uncertainty at a time when some experts believe a decade-long decline in violent crime is drawing to a close. Murder rates, for example, are up this year in 7 of 10 large US cities surveyed by the Monitor.

"We are entering an era of general good will and good feeling, which has all the promise of contributing to a drop in crime rates," says Al Blumstein, a University of Pittsburgh criminologist. "At the same time, we are seeing police restricted into other missions than their usual street patrols.... How this plays out depends in large part on how Americans themselves pull apart or together."

Most crime experts caution about making too much of the upward or downward shifts of specific crime rates in isolated American cities since Sept. 11 - or jumping to early conclusions as to their causes.

Still, reports from city police officials offer clues about new factors at work as police add antiterror alerts to their traditional beats.

In Philadelphia, for instance, there was a 28 percent increase in murders during the four weeks from Sept. 14 to Oct. 11 in comparison to the previous four weeks. Robbery and auto theft were also up, by lesser amounts. Officials there say as many as 60 calls a day reporting suspicious packages, bomb threats, or anthrax concerns have taken hundreds of officers away from high-crime neighborhoods.

"While cops are being redeployed for undercover work to protect high-rises and bridges or government buildings, they are taxing the rest of the personnel they leave behind," says James Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. "Some of their highest-crime neighborhoods are being relatively unpatrolled."

But in New York, the site where the main terrorist attacks occurred and where police have been taxed to the limit, murder has dropped 11 percent over the same period. Other crimes, such as auto theft and assault, have dropped as well. Observers say this is the result of greater community vigilance but also can be attributed to intangibles such as fewer visitors and fewer parked cars.

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