Rise in homicides reverse of LV trend

Keith Paul

Thursday, May 31, 2001 | 11:06 a.m.

Las Vegas is bucking a nationwide trend that shows violent crime in 2000 remained relatively the same as the previous year, halting an eight-year downward trend, according to FBI figures released Wednesday.

Last year Southern Nevada was far below those national figures, showing a dramatic decrease in homicide, from 113 in 1999 to 95 in 2000. It was the first time there had been fewer than 100 homicides in the Metro Police Department's jurisdiction since 1990.

So far this year the trend has dramatically and dangerously reversed. Metro detectives have investigated 66 homicides, compared with 41 at the same time last year.

The Las Vegas Valley's two other cities have similarly deadly starts this year. North Las Vegas has had 12 homicides so far this year, most attributed to gangs, after totaling 10 slayings in all of 2000. Henderson has four so far this year, half of last year's total.

"A downward trend can't continue indefinitely, and most particularly in homicides," said Alfred Blumstein, a criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Nationally the amount of reported violent crime and property crime rose a combined 0.1 percent, according to preliminary data collected by the FBI for its yearly Uniform Crime Report.

The data, based on crimes reported from 17,000 city, county and state law-enforcement agencies, showed national declines from 1999 of 1.1 percent in murders, 0.7 percent in robberies, 2.1 percent in burglaries. But forcible rapes increased by 0.7 percent, aggravated assaults by 0.4 percent, motor vehicle thefts by 2.7 percent and larceny thefts by 0.1 percent.

Skeptics have cautioned for years against using data from the FBI survey as the sole measure of crime in the nation, because it tracks only those crimes reported to police. Some crime-victimization studies estimate that fewer than half of all violent crimes are reported to police, and that the reporting is worst in poor areas where the most crimes occur.

Still, the FBI survey provides the most complete measure of crimes reported to law-enforcement agencies and is closely monitored by criminologists and sociologists.

Blumstein said larger cities started to show a bottoming out of the downward trend in crime in 1999, and other cities are starting to experience the same slowdown.

He cautioned against comparing this year's homicides in Metro's jurisdiction to last year, which could have been the bottoming out of the downward trend.

"Your basis of comparison shouldn't be the wonderful statistics of last year," said Blumstein, director of the National Consortium on Violence Research.

This year's increase in homicides in Las Vegas and unincorporated Clark County was attributed in part to an increase in gang-related slaying and domestic violence -- two areas officers have strived to reduce with programs in recent years, Lt. Wayne Petersen of Metro's homicide unit said.

"Throughout history there have been peaks and valleys, and it doesn't mean the increase is going to last all year," Petersen said. "While we have seen an increase, I don't think it signifies we are less safe."

The homicides that cause people to feel uneasy involve random violence, where people in the wrong place at the wrong time are killed -- such as in 1999, when Zane Floyd walked into a grocery store and killed four people. But many slayings occur between people in high-risk lifestyles such as drug dealers and users, criminals, gang members and prostitutes, Blumstein said.

The statistics of a single year should not be used as a measure for feeling safe, he said.

The FBI's classification of crimes have also been criticized as antiquated by some law enforcement officials and criminologists. Forcible rape, for example, only takes into account a man attacking a woman and does not include sodomy.

The FBI statistics list 532 forcible rapes in 1999 and 443 in 2000 for Metro's jurisdiction, however Metro's statistics lists 742 reported sexual assaults in 1999 and 663 in 2000. Sexual assault takes into account various sexually related attacks regardless of gender or type of rape. The category, however, does not take into account child sexual abuse.

Police also realize sexual assaults are probably the least reported crime by the victims, Lt. Tom Monahan of Metro's sexual assault unit said.

Scripps Howard News Service

contributed to this story.