Youth Crime Declines Continue as Polls 
Show Public Fear of Youth Remains High

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Washington, DC: As the Justice Department releases new juvenile crime data for 1999 showing a decline in crime by youth for the sixth straight year, a substantial majority of Americans continue to feel that youth crime is increasing and that youth commit a higher portion of crime than they actually do.

Early next week, at the annual conference for the department's juvenile branch-the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention-researchers will release new youth arrest data for 1999, the latest year available. While the new OJJDP report will confirm the continuing decline of juvenile crime, researchers at the Justice Policy Institute have documented the disconnect between declining youth crime and the public's fear of the younger generation.

"The good news is, America's kids are acting more responsibly, and committing fewer crimes than they have in three decades," says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "The bad news is, this good news does not seem to be making onto the front page, or into the public consciousness."

Youth Crime vs. Public Opinion.

1. Kids Commit Less Crime, but public fear remains.

In a poll of 2,000 adults conducted in 1998 by pollsters Beldon, Russonello and Stewart for the Building Blocks for Youth Initiative, 62% of respondents stated that they believed youth crime was on the increase. The National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the US Census Bureau and released by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that, in 1998, youth crime was at its lowest rate in the 25 year history of that survey (started in 1973). The youth crime data to be released next week will show more than a two-thirds decline in youth homicides arrests between 1993 and 1999.

Ironically, today's youth are considerably less criminally inclined than their parents. Yet opinion surveys show that those same parents are apt to believe that their kids are more prone to delinquency than they were.

2. Adults think kids commit more crime than they actually do.

Sixty-percent of respondents to a 1996 survey of Californians (conducted by Fairbanks, Maslin, and Associates for the California Wellness Foundation of 1,000 likely voters) reported that they believed youths "committed most crime nowadays." In reality, 16.9% of arrests in California in 1996 were of people under age 18, and more than 8 of 10 arrests were of adult offenders.

3. School crime seen on the rise, when America's schools are the safest places for kids to be.

In a 1999 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of 1,004 interviewees, 71% of respondents indicated that they thought it was "likely" that a school shooting could happen in their community. Yet according to the data tabulated by the National School Safety Center, in the 1998/9 school year, there was a one in 2 million chance of being killed in one of America's schools. 4. Public Perception of Crime Comes from the Media. Seventy-six percent of respondents to a 1996 ABC news poll reported that they form their opinions about crime based on the media, more than three times the number who related that they form their opinions about crime from personal experience (22%).

"In almost every crime category, except the notable exception of gun crime, today's youth are much better behaved than we baby-boomers were at their age," Schiraldi said. He added, to the extent that gun crime has risen over the last three decades, this sad reality probably has more to do with gun availability than any quantifiable difference in today's youth population.

The Justice Policy Institute is a non-profit research and public policy organization based in Washington, DC. The compilation of this data was funded by a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. For a full list of citations and credits for the above statistics, please contact the Institute at (202) 737-7270.