U.S. HOMICIDE RATE AT 40-YEAR LOW.

Byline: Staff and Wire Services

WASHINGTON - The first decline in four years in the U.S. homicide rate is very good news for some cities but does not mark a return to the large national crime declines of the 1990s, experts say.

Troubling signs in some cities - increased gang violence, for example - were not enough to push national crime figures up in the annual FBI compilation of crimes reported to the police.

Instead, the FBI reported Monday that the homicide rate in 2004 dropped to its lowest level in 40 years.

Los Angeles saw a small jump in homicides in 2004 - 518, up from 515 in 2003. But rapes were down 7.7 percent, robberies were down 15.1 percent and aggravated assaults were down 12.9 percent.

In the San Fernando Valley, homicides fell 6 percent and violent crime fell 15.4 percent.

The rates for all seven major crimes were down and the overall violent crime rate reached a 30-year low, according to the FBI's compilation.

There were 391 fewer homicides nationwide in 2004 than the year before, the FBI said. Last year's total of 16,137 works out to 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 people.

That's a decline of 3.3 percent from 2003 and the lowest homicide rate since 1965, when it was 5.1.

``The declines are relatively small compared to larger, steady drops in the 1990s, and the results are by no means the same across the country,'' said professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

``We're not seeing important national trends like the shrinking of crack markets in the 1990s,'' Blumstein added. ``These are responses to local situations, changes in local drug markets and shifts in gangs.''

``The best news is that there's no national increase despite reasons - like economic conditions - why it could rise,'' said professor James Alan Fox of Northeastern University in Boston. Other reasons he cited were growing gang violence in some cities, local law enforcement budget cuts and a shift of federal law enforcement aid from local police hiring to homeland security.

``It would be easy to look at these numbers and get too complacent about crime,'' Fox said. ``That would be a mistake.''

The four major violent crimes - homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults - declined from 1.38 million in 2003 to 1.37 million in 2004. That produced a 2.2 percent drop in the violent crime rate, to 465.5 crimes per 100,000 people - the lowest since 1974, when it was 461.1 violent crimes per 100,000.

The three major property crimes - burglary, auto theft and larceny-theft - declined from 10.42 million to 10.33 million in 2004. That pulled the property crime rate down 2.1 percent, to 3,517.1 crimes per 100,000 people. These crimes produced an estimated loss of $16.1 billion, down 5 percent from 2003.

Rape was the only one of the seven crimes to show a numerical increase, up 0.8 percent, to 94,635 offenses, but the rate of rape declined 0.2 percent, to 32.2 rapes per 100,000. Lynn Parish of the Rape, Abuse & Incest Network, a national anti-sexual assault group, said Justice Department studies show that the incidence of rape, whether reported to police or not, has been declining over 30 years while reporting of rape to police has climbed for a decade.

The FBI data was compiled from reports to more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies, representing 94.2 percent of the nation's population. The Justice Department has found that barely half of all violent crimes and fewer than 40 percent of property crimes are reported to the police, but its surveys of crime victims, which also track unreported crimes, show trends similar to those among the reported crimes tracked by the FBI.

CAPTION(S):

box

Box:

L.A. CRIME

Source: 2004 Crime Statistics Summary; LAPD Statistical Digest