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player ready...For the fifth consecutive year, reports of major crime in Illinois declined in 1999, with the crime rate in Lake County dropping 4.5 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 Lake County, reports of aggravated assault and battery increased by 40 percent compared with 1998, and reports of criminal sexual assault increased by 10.4 percent. Local law-enforcement officials attributed this to an increase in the number of victims who report such crimes and an emphasis by police and prosecutors on charging and prosecuting such crimes as felonies.
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, the tally of statewide crimes last year 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.
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 Chicago.
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.
There was an average of 26.8 crimes per 1,000 people in Lake County in 1999, compared with 28.1 in 1998.
In past years, Gurnee has been plagued by high rates of property crime, largely petty theft at Gurnee Mills mall and the Six Flags Great America amusement park. Last year, however, there were 19.4 percent fewer burglaries and 11.2 percent fewer thefts reported in Gurnee compared with 1998.
Gurnee Police Chief Bob Jones attributed the decline to his concentrating a larger police presence in these areas.
“We directed patrols in that direction,” Jones said. “If the figures accurately reflected the population of Gurnee, however, they would be down even more. It takes years for the figures to catch up.”
Rapid change in the population is only one of many factors that can result in misleading crime statistics.
The crime rates in fast-growing communities can be misleading because the true population might be larger than the population figure used by the state. In areas with small numbers of reports, even a minor change can translate into a misleading jump or fall when expressed as a percentage.
Figures can also be skewed because residents of one area may be far more likely to summon police for a given problem than those in another region. And the number of reports of crime can vary because of police policies, from starting a task force to a 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 at Chicago. “People cook the books in order to achieve certain goals. … They want to show less crime for the most part.”
And 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. In particular, experts say sexual assault is widely underreported.
Law-enforcement officials in Lake County said they believe they have done much to counter this particular problem.
“Over the past few years we have seen an increasing willingness to come forward on the part of victims of sexual assault and aggravated assault and battery,” said Jones, a past president of the Lake County Chiefs of Police Association.
Jones attributed this increase to a network of professionals, from social service and hospital personnel to police and prosecutors, trained to deal with the fears and needs of such victims.
Social service agencies such as Gurnee-based Lake County Council Against Sexual Assault, for example, train police countywide in dealing sensitively with such victims, while the police, in turn, refer victims to the agency for counseling services.
“We have tried to create an atmosphere that makes victims more willing to report,” Jones said.
Ann Subry, LaCASA’s director of development, is almost happy to see the higher numbers.
“Sex crimes historically have had the highest rate of occurrence and the lowest rate of reporting,” she said. “What’s new is not the number of incidents but that victims are coming forward. That’s what is reflected in the numbers.”
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Lake County State’s Atty. Michael Waller speculated that an increased emphasis by police and prosecutors on charging and prosecuting as felonies the more heinous of these crimes has something to do with the rate increase.
“We haven’t noticed an increase in these types of cases in the court system,” Waller said. “What we have seen is an increased emphasis on charging and prosecuting felony domestic violence cases.”
Deputy Chief Bob Randall, who oversees criminal investigations for the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, agreed.
“The police and the courts are increasingly willing to and successful at charging and prosecuting domestic battery cases as felonies,” Randall said.
Jones cautioned against placing too much importance on the assault statistics specifically and the crime rate in general. Because the crime rate is calculated from 1998 population estimates, he said, it is slightly inflated.
“The population in the county has grown quite a bit in the last year and a half,” Jones said. “If the rate reflected that growth, it would be even lower.”
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.
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.