Ups and downs in urban crime

"It's not getting better, it's getting worse," says Brenda Rose, as she waits to get her hair done at Sarafina Hair Braiding on the city's west side. "I won't get on no bus anymore, because of the crime."

In fact, Ms. Rose's neighborhood, the Harrison Police District, has led the city in homicides for years, but last year saw one of the most impressive declines - more than 50 percent. Still, it had 25 homicides.

"It's a little safer," says Melvin Andrews, a salesman and father of a six-year-old, who also lives in the neighborhood. "The police are patrolling the streets more often, like they need to be. But the drug rate still bothers me.... The police try, but there's still work to be done. I don't want my son to grow up and be another statistic."

While Chicago celebrates, other cities are seeing a less encouraging trend. Baltimore's homicide rate is the highest it has been since 1999: 278 murders last year, although as elsewhere, the numbers are still lower than they were a decade ago. "We have gone up for the past few years, but we are way down [from the 1990s]," says Matt Jablow, a Baltimore Police Department spokesman.

The problems facing the city include drugs and a glorified thug culture, says the Rev. Willie Ray, a longtime activist who has been reaching out to urban youth for 35 years. He also blames city leadership and clergy who, he says, have abandoned the city. "The leadership and clergy don't see Baltimore as a mission ground ... they see it as a war zone," he says.

Reverend Ray is challenging city churches to "adopt" a street corner and take it back for the community, and to provide a safe haven for drug addicts and troubled youths. "Their church is the corner, that's where they congregate," he says.

The police, meanwhile, are following the lead of places like New York and Chicago in targeting high-crime neighborhoods and flooding them with officers. A new program focuses on repeat offenders, and the police department has created an organized-crime division to track the city's drug trade. Last year, 71 percent of homicide victims had drug-arrest histories, as did 57 percent of suspects.

Other cities, meanwhile, joined Chicago in registering declines. Washington recorded fewer than 200 murders in 2004 - the first time it's crossed that threshold in nearly two decades, and a 20 percent drop from the year before. In a more disturbing trend, 24 of the victims were 17 or younger, twice the number from 2003.

And New York, once infamous for muggings and gangs, continued its steady decline in murders. The city's 571 homicides were the fewest in 40 years, and a far cry from the 1990 peak of 2,245.

Much of the credit goes to the groundbreaking and much-imitated CompStat program, which holds precinct commanders more accountable for the crime in their area, and provides them with real-time information. A new program, Operation Impact, also allows precincts to request more officers during crime sprees.

The system "allows precinct commanders to ... dictate where manpower will have the greatest effect," says Detective Walter Burnes. "No one knows a precinct better than the commander."

Still, even as police departments celebrate progress, they acknowledge the work that remains. "On the bright side, there are 150 families that didn't have to bury somebody," says Chicago's Camden. "But there are 448 families that did. One homicide is one too many."

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