City’s murder rate dropping once again despite burgeoning growth

Wednesday, Dec. 9, 1998 | 9:02 a.m.

Las Vegas police say the number of homicides has dropped dramatically for the second straight year.

With only 22 days left in the year, the number of killings investigated by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department stands at 117. That's a drop of 21 percent from 1997's total of 149, and a 30 percent drop from 1996, when 168 people were slain.

The last year that fewer people were killed was 1993, when the number was 104.

While the total is likely to edge higher by New Year's Eve, homicide detectives are pleased with the numbers.

"It's been a much-needed break here," homicide Lt. Wayne Petersen said.

Petersen said his detectives still have one of the heaviest workloads in the country, but the slowdown has given them more time to spend on cases.

"The cases the past couple of years were just coming too quickly to devote the time to some of them that we wanted," he said.

At one time, Clark County's phenomenal growth rate seemed to be the answer for those wondering why killings here kept increasing while they declined in other parts of the country.

But with the population growth rate remaining strong, crime experts can't easily explain the downturn.

"The economy, harsher sentencing, an aging population, community policing - all those factor into it," Petersen said.

Law professor Paul Cassell, an expert on criminal justice at the University of Utah, echoed Petersen's summary. He agrees that longer prison sentences have helped to take dangerous people out of the population. And new police techniques, such as community policing and a "broken window" policy - focusing on less serious offenses that, left unchecked, lead to larger problems - also seem to be helping.

But Cassell, a strong capital punishment supporter, doubts Nevada's death penalty has much to do with the decline, because the punishment has been in place for years. He also doesn't believe that the right to carry concealed weapons has had much effect.

Nationwide, he said, "nobody has figured out what the one single cause (for the decline) is."

The cause for the various killings this year ran the gamut from bad drug deals to domestic disputes.