Sage strategies help lower violent crime in Y’town

Last week’s release of Uniform Crime Reports from the FBI showing the most violent of violent crimes increasing significantly from 2016 to 2017 in Youngstown offered a grim snapshot on public safety in the Mahoning Valley’s largest city. Homicides, Youngstown police reported, increased from 19 to 28 over that one-year span, a shocking 47 percent increase.

But that single point-in-time data, however, fails to present a broader, deeper and more accurate perspective on the long-term progress city police officers, detectives and prosecutors have made in lowering the city’s violent-crime rate.

When taking a more strategic view, as Vindicator crime reporter Joe Gorman did in a three-day series he wrote earlier this week on homicide trends over nearly two decades in Youngstown, a much more clear and encouraging picture develops.

After spending months combing through records and interviewing key players in the arrest and prosecution of hundreds of suspects, Gorman’s reportage revealed a variety of encouraging trends. Consider:

From 2011 to 2017, Youngstown recorded 169 homicides. Of those cases, 107 were solved, for a closed-case rate of about 66 percent. That’s well above the national average for bringing murder cases to a complete and successful close.

Over the past three decades, the number of homicides has been on a consistent downward spiral. During the 1990s, Youngstown averaged about 50 homicides per year, falling to 29 annually from 2001 to 2010 and dipping even lower to an average of 23 annually from 2011 through 2017.

Of the 211 people charged with a homicide by Youngstown police that were bound over to Mahoning County Common Pleas Court between 2001 and 2017, a vast majority of those defendants – 169 – were convicted and went to prison.

WHAT CAUSED DECLINES?

The decreasing likelihood of victimhood in Youngstown and the increasing likelihood of convictions for violent-crime suspects have resulted from a variety of factors. Some are mere demographic trends, such as the continuing slide in the city’s population from 96,000 in 1990 to a Census-estimated 65,000 in 2017 that automatically cuts the potential for victimization.

The severe weakening of street-gang conflicts over drug turf in the city also has contributed to a marked decline in violent mayhem and its attendant senseless carnage.

Other factors for the city’s comparatively safer streets, however, must be credited to players throughout the criminal justice system from street cops to detectives to prosecutors to judges.

Richard L. Rogers, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences at Youngstown State University, cites improved police tactics for violent-crime reductions in Youngstown and in cities across the nation.

In recent years, for example, many have credited the Community Police Unit, a patrol unit with one officer assigned to each of the seven wards daily to interact with address residents’ concerns before they become serious crime-breeding issues, with success in improving police-community relations and in reducing all levels of mischief. It is one tool of crime fighters that should be spared the chopping block as the city faces some unpleasant decisions to balance its budget in coming months and years.

What’s more, the advent of more sophisticated forensic technology, including more intricate and reliable DNA testing and the increasingly routine placement of video security cameras throughout neighborhoods, have played large roles in cracking more cases, finding more suspects and ridding the streets of more violent elements.

Fortunately for all who live and work in the city, police officers here have been on the cutting edge of implementing proven successful crime-fighting tools and tactics.

Those tools and tactics continue to show positive results. So far this year, for example, the city has recorded only 12 homicides, compared with 17 at this time last year and 54 at this time in 1995.

Nonetheless, though it is heartening to witness the advances in improving public safety, clearly the city has a long way to go.

As we editorialized earlier in the week, the violent crime rate in Youngstown remains one of the highest for cities of its size across the nation. That’s why it remains critically important that police officers of all ranks and responsibilities stick to their guns and remain steadfast in their tactics, strategies and commitment to chip away assiduously at Youngstown’s long-standing and nefarious reputation as a hotbed of lawlessness.