For the fifth consecutive year, reports of major crime in Illinois declined in 1999, with the crime rate in DuPage County dropping by nearly 10 percent.
The downturn comes on the heels of steady, incremental decreases throughout most of the 1990s, and the cumulative effect is dramatic: The number of serious crimes reported in the state has dropped by more than 20 percent since its peak in 1991, even as the population grew by nearly 6 percent.
The downward trend, reflected in the newly released 1999 Illinois State Police Crime Report, appears to be part of a nationwide reduction in crime that many experts attribute to the robust economy, harsher prison sentences and the effects of community-policing strategies.
Yet in DuPage County, law-enforcement officials said they are concerned about alarming increases in drug crimes, which are not included among the major crimes in the state police report.
Several recent deaths from designer drugs in the suburbs have grabbed headlines, while DuPage County Coroner Richard Ballinger has reported that last year there were 30 drug-overdose deaths in DuPage, twice the 1998 total.
“The largest crime we have to deal with today in DuPage County is drugs,” said DuPage State’s Atty. Joseph Birkett. “Many of these drugs are making headlines, but it is more than headlines; it is reality. Overdoses are up, access by school age children is up.”
Across Illinois, reports of serious crime plummeted by almost 8 percent compared with 1998, the seventh time in the last eight years the state has experienced a decrease. Not only did reports of crime fall in each of the eight major categories, but the tally of statewide crimes last year also was the lowest since 1982, said Mark McDonald, an Illinois State Police spokesman.
“It’s an indication we’re living in a safer time than a decade ago,” McDonald said. The downward trend began in 1991 and was interrupted only by a small upturn in 1994.
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The declines were not universal, however. McHenry County, for example, saw reported crime increase by 11 percent from 1998 to 1999.
Moreover, police and experts caution that the statewide drops in crime reports will not continue forever.
To a certain extent, crime is “a social phenomenon that ebbs and flows like everything else,” said Arthur Lurigio, chairman of the criminal justice department at Loyola University.
Despite the declines, someone reported being the victim of a serious crime somewhere in the state an average of about every minute of 1999. About 17 sexual assaults were reported each day. A vehicle was reported stolen about every 10 minutes, and about 78 people were slain each month.
Statewide, reports of robbery dropped the most, by almost 12 percent. Next came aggravated assault, which fell about 9 percent, and murder, about 8 percent. Criminal sexual assault showed a drop of about 2 percent.
Reports of property crimes also fell in Illinois. Burglary was off by nearly 12 percent from the previous year, theft by 7 percent, motor vehicle theft by about 4 percent and arson by about 3 percent.
There were an average of 23.7 crimes per 1,000 people in DuPage County in 1999, compared with 26.3 in 1998.
According to state police totals, arrests in DuPage County for marijuana offenses in 1999 were up 9 percent, crimes involving other controlled substances (which include cocaine and designer drugs) were up more than 20 percent, cases of illegal possession of hypodermic needles were up more than 18 percent, and arrests for possession of drug paraphernalia were up almost 15 percent.
“When I started as a cop in the early 1970s, the drug culture was very much a real thing and then, relatively, it died down,” said DuPage Sheriff John Zaruba. “Now it is back as big as ever, different drugs, but the drug culture is back. It is in apartment complexes, back yards, wherever kids hang out. This is where the battle is today.
“We have high school students arrested for selling coke out of their bedroom, we have designer drugs easy to obtain, just not at the obvious places, but almost every kid knows where they could get this stuff.”
DuPage has an active countywide drug undercover unit, with its own set of prosecutors, but the current state of drug affairs has caused Zaruba and others to call for more help. The DuPage sheriff’s office will start blending more of its gang and drug unit work forces and possibly add four members.
“Gang activity seems to have leveled off, except when it comes to drugs. Business is good for them,” said Zaruba.
Said Birkett: “DuPage County has the benefit of a low crime rate, not much random crime, and that allows us to focus and address other issues, Internet crime, technology crime, crime against the elderly, these things are still growing.”
Several years ago, Naperville police took a national lead in having their officers patrol the Internet looking for sexual predators. Today, many DuPage departments have their own patrol.
“DuPage has almost a million people, and some crime is inevitable.” Birkett said. “Since we have to be concerned with the future, we need continued work on white collar crime and elderly crime, because we will all be there at some point.”
In Kane County, reports of crime dropped in all eight categories from 1998 to 1999, combining for a fall of almost 11 percent from 1998.
Burglaries were the fastest falling type of crime with a 22 percent drop.
Kane’s largest city, Aurora, chalked up a 5 percent decrease overall. But the number of motor vehicles reported stolen there increased from 372 to 416, almost 12 percent, and the number of recorded robberies went from 165 to 179, a surge of 8.5 percent.
Some experts warn that the statistics tell an incomplete story.
By definition, the tally does not include unreported crimes. Some victims are unwilling to come forward, perhaps out of a reluctance to contend with the justice system bureaucracy, or a belief that police will be unable to solve the crime, or even the desire to spare themselves embarrassment.”White collar crime remains vastly underreported. Many companies like to handle these matters themselves; they don’t want to make the company look bad. But it isn’t unheard of that someone rips off one company and years later they are at another company and they have committed another similar crime,” Birkett said. “It’s the public that pays through higher prices for these crimes.”
In areas with small numbers of reports, even a minor change can translate into a misleading jump or drop when expressed as a percentage. And the number of reports of crime can vary because of police policies, from starting a task force to crack down on particular offenses to presenting incorrect data.
“There have been a number of cities that have been cited for deep-sixing reports,” said Michael Maltz, a criminal justice professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “People cook the books in order to achieve certain goals. …They want to show less crime for the most part.”
The crime rates in fast-growing communities also can be misleading, because the true population might be larger than the population figure used by the state.
But experts say that reports of crime, as imperfect as they can be, remain a fairly accurate yardstick to compare crime by community.
“Since reporting seems to be getting better and better, it’s probably a pretty good indicator of what’s been happening,” Maltz said.
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– For detailed information about crime reported in individual communities, visit chicagotribune.com/go/crime on the Internet.