A more gated union

...the economy concerned only 3 percent...

...Finally, a study released last year by John Lott of the University of Chicago claimed that the proliferation of right-to-carry gun laws over the period 1977 to 1992 had dramatically decreased rapes and murders in America...

...In 1994, the New York City Board of Education released a report indicating that 5,000 violent incidents (gang fights, weapons offenses, rapes, acts of vandalism) had taken place in city schools during the latter half of 1993...

...What is going on here...

...Over a dozen states, including California, Florida, and Michigan, have suburban-majority populations...

...All told, reported crime in the Big Apple has fallen by nearly 40 percent since 1993, accounting for roughly a third of the drop in reported crime nationally...

...And the survey does not count serial victimizations...

...In California alone, an estimated 500,000 people lived in gated communities in 1996, and it is thought the numbers are growing rapidly...

...From 1995 to 1996, murders rose in Washington, D.C...

...With consumer-price inflation under control and a jobless rate of 4.8 percent, the public's relative calm about the economy seems entirely reasonable...

...After being challenged on the numbers by then-chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, the board issued a revised report indicating that closer to 6,700 incidents had occurred, or 34 percent more violent acts than city school principals had initially allowed...

...In a Yankelovich survey for CNN-Time magazine conducted in May, 14 percent of the respondents said so...

...It worked—until the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action suit to stop the sweeps...

...First, the shrinking crime denominator may also be an indicator of shrinking civic compassion for the inner-city poor...

...For example, if a woman is raped and beaten black and blue by a man who then steals her car, only a rape is recorded...

...But it does not count crimes against children age 12or younger, even though studies indicate that one in six rape victims is a child and over half of all violent crimes committed by state prisoners against children were against pre-teens...

...About half of all Americans now live in suburbs...

...Over the last two decades many middle-and upper-middle-class elderly Americans have moved "inland" by retiring to suburbs and CIDs...

...The way local police count crimes can also be quirky...

...How can crime be both going up and going down...

...Unable to contain the ACLU, Mrs...

...The proliferation of privately governed communities validates some of Charles Murray's concerns about the rise of "custodial democracy...

...An entire generation of big urban and suburban shopping malls has been designed or reconfigured by security experts...

...A motivating reason for the ongoing flight from the cities to the CIDies is the CIDs' virtual guarantee of greater safety from crime: No criminals need apply, strangers are stopped before entering, and troublemakers are easily evicted...

...But then, given the FBI figures, isn't the public's continued concern about crime more reactionary than rational...

...And even when they try to make things better where they are, they find they lack the political and legal clout necessary to eject troublemakers from public-housing complexes, erect concrete barriers on city streets where drug-trafficking takes place, and keep their children from harm during the school day...

...Liberal criminologists who spent their careers arguing that neither more cops nor more prison cells could cut crime because poverty causes crime are chasing grants to explain the changes in New York, Houston, and other cities where poverty rates haven't dropped but policing tactics have changed and sentencing laws have been toughened...

...An America in which crime is partially conquered by millions of citizens' moving or locking themselves away from the rest of society while over 5 million criminals are in custody on any given day may be the best we can do for now, but it is hardly a state of affairs deserving of celebration...

...But crime also has a "denominator"—the daily supply of potential crime victims, young and old, who are not protected by whatever means from being victimized...

...estimated that "each additional reported crime is associated with a one person decline in city residents," with the "migration decisions of high-income households and those with children . . . much more responsive to changes in crime than other households...

...In 1996, however, the city followed the method and both categories of crime "fell...

...The urban poor can't get themselves away from crime the way the middle class does because they simply cannot afford it...

...To put it another way: There are fewer potential victims of crime because the potential victims are making it more difficult for criminals to prey on them...

...Even as reported crime has decreased over the last half-decade, sales of home-security systems have increased by about 10 percent a year...

...In parts of the Southwest, a third of all new homes are being built behind security walls...

...According to the FBI's method, only the most serious offense in any given crime incident is recorded...

...Amid all the euphoria over the crime decline— Contributing editor John J. Dilulio Jr...

...Americans may simply be giving up on those of their fellow citizens left behind in parlous and frightening circumstances...

...First, the latest crime statistics undercount serious crime, ever more of which is committed by juveniles...

...And it's not simply a matter of "white flight," either...

...Some 54 percent of Philadelphia residents report that they or members of their families have been victims of a major crime...

...Finally, what does the proliferation of gated communities tell us about the people who have chosen the security of life behind iron barriers and high walls...

...The image of New York City as a blood-soaked menace has given way to hucksterish front-page good-news stories and editorials about the Big Apple's transformation into the "safest big city in America" thanks to more aggressive wall-to-wall policing of everyone from subway-turnstile jumpers to street gun dealers...

...But the number rose to 150,000 by 1992 and could reach 225,000 by the year 2000...

...The FBI undercounts crimes reported to the police because it uses what is known as a "hierarchical counting method...

...Even advocates of community-based crime-prevention strategies who couldn't get the time of day from anyone now go on television to recount how this or that crime-infested park, housing project, or neighborhood has become crime and drug free...

...Even so, the American people continue to identify crime as the main problem facing the country today...

...Besides, however it's measured, crime, and in particular murder, is not down everywhere, and violence is not down significantly among juveniles...

...And, of course, police can't count crimes that go unreported, as an estimated 65 percent of all crimes do...

...If you don't go near the ocean, you won't drown in the ocean...

...They got the Chicago Public Housing Authority and local police to conduct random, unannounced drug and gun sweeps, hoping "to capture the perpetrators who were turning neighborhoods into hell holes and apartments into prisons...

...Murder showed the greatest decline (11 percent...

...Today as many as 50 million people are living in CIDs...

...The depopulation of cities is a trend that has been accelerating throughout the postwar period...

...Partly as a result, between 1974 and 1990 the rate of violent crime against persons age 65 and older fell by an estimated 61 percent, and by the early 1990s rates for personal theft and household crime among the elderly hit all-time lows...

...A 1995 survey found that 43 percent of the city's residents wanted to move to the suburbs (only 38 percent wanted to stay in the city...

...The answer is to be found in what I call the "crime denominator...

...much of it deserved—it is important to sound two notes of caution...

...In his award-winning 1994 book on the rise of such "privatopias," political scientist Evan McKenzie estimated that in 1964 there were fewer than 500 CIDs nationally...

...Or, if two cars and two houses are broken into, and police suspect the crimes were committed by the same perpetrator, only the single crime deemed the most serious offense committed during the four-crime spree is counted...

...In a recent paper on crime and urban flight, economists Steven D. Levitt of Harvard and Julie Berry Cullen of M.I.T...

...In various essays published over the last several years, Murray has warned that America could well become a "caste society" with "utter social separation" of the middle and upper classes from the lower classes and the poor...

...Philadelphia has lost a quarter of a million residents in the last quarter-century...

...More and more Americans, he has warned, could come to view crime-ridden cities as disorderly, dangerous, and dysfunctional places for which they have no civic or moral responsibility...

...Earlier this month Americans heard good news about crime for the fifth consecutive year: The FBI reported that in 1996 crime dropped another 3 percent, including a 7 percent decrease in violent crime...

...For example, if an old woman in a high-crime neighborhood can't recall precisely how many times she was mugged or how often her apartment was vandalized, the survey counts just one crime...

...People who aspire to be ex-urbanites don't need regression equations to trust such findings...

...A privately gated, guarded, and gun-toting America may be a safer America, but there are at least three reasons to keep the champagne corked...

...Two intellectual straight-shooters, Harvard's Levitt and Carnegie Mellon criminologist Daniel S. Nagin, are among the many experts who have challenged Lott's statistical model...

...Randolph and her fellow residents are now begging the governor to send in the National Guard...

...But nearly 400 of the city's 1,100 schools, including many schools in high-crime neighborhoods, reported not a single violent incident...

...Even in America's juvenile street-gang capital, Los Angeles, homicides fell by 16 percent, dropping from 849 in 1995 to 709 in 1996...

...By 1992, for example, an estimated 32 million Americans, or 12 percent of the population, lived in common-interest developments (CIDs)—condos, coops, gated communities, elderly-only villages, and so on...

...Second, crime is being contained because private citizens have been getting away from city street thugs—getting away to secure buildings, gated communities, and low-density suburbs and investing in private security...

...Ding, dong, the witch of crime is dead...

...I am trying to envision," he has written, "what happens when 10 or 20 percent of the population has enough income to bypass the social institutions it doesn't like in ways that only the top 1 percent used to be able to do...

...Their number-one reason...

...The BJS survey measures both reported and unreported crimes...

...But over the same period the city has suffered a 17.5 percent increase in crimes committed by kids referred to family court, continuing a decade-long rise in juvenile robberies (up 155 percent), sex offenses (up 126 percent), and total felonies (up 119 percent...

...In 1996 FBI-recorded crime was up 2 percent in the South...

...One poll found nearly two-thirds of all Americans would prefer to live in such secure settings...

...last wrote for The Weekly Standard about preachers working with urban youths...

...The survey also does not count crimes against adults in jails, public hospitals, or homeless shelters, settings where, on any given night, lots of crime victims cluster...

...Nationally, how many school-site crimes are kept off police blotters is anyone's guess...

...This scholarly scrap is far from over, but nobody doubts that Americans, including more and more women, have become increasingly well armed, largely in response to anxieties about urban crime...

...Barras tells the tale of Artensa Randolph, a wheelchair-bound black woman in her 70s who organized with other residents of her Chicago public-housing complex...

...Most serious debate about crime trends concerns the "crime numerator"—the daily supply of street criminals, juvenile and adult, who are not stopped by whatever means from finding victims...

...There is reason to believe that big-city public high schools are especially reluctant to report crime...

...Beyond any reasonable academic or ideological doubt, the crime denominator has been shrinking...

...Second, liberals who are quick to make arguments about fairness and equity when it comes to household income have been slow to make them when it comes to public safety...

...361 to 397), Atlanta (184 to 196), Miami (110 to 124), and many other cities...

...An estimated two-thirds of all "sworn officers" in this country are private security, not public police...

...To get away from crime...

...Jonetta Rose Barras offers a sobering account of this problem in the summer edition of the American Enterprise magazine...

...And who can blame them...

...And even small-store owners have increasingly resorted to open surveillance of shopping areas and hired rent-a-cops...

...In 1995 Philadelphia police did not follow the FBI's hierarchical method, and burglaries and robberies "went up" by 15 percent over 1994...

...Today about three-quarters of all blacks who live in major metropolitan regions do not live in central city districts...

...What of the cold sweats they experience when they forget to switch on their alarms, the fear that makes them nervously check and re-check their car-door locks when driving through devastated neighborhoods, the spirit of siege that leads many of them to purchase and carry guns for the first time in their lives, and feel the only way to teach their children to guard themselves from harm is to scare them within an inch of their lives about what might happen to them out there...

...The city, with only about 14 percent of the state's population, has had over 40 percent of its criminal violence...

...In New York, murders fell again last year (1,177 to 986...

...The other major national crime barometer, the annual victimization survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is a better source of information, but hardly definitive...

...After all, consider what they have heard over the past year or so...