"One policeman covered the front of the apartment building while the other ran to the back, with me close behind. Gun drawn, he scaled a fence to the rear yard. I jumped the fence right after him."

So reported our San Francisco bureau chief Joseph Boyce in one of his files for this week's cover story on crime in the U.S. The episode--a false alarm on a burglary-in-progress--took place while Boyce was on assignment in Chicago, riding prowl cars in the city's Woodlawn section, a neighborhood whose crime-stalked alleyways Boyce had known intimately in the early 1960s as a policeman on the Chicago force. Boyce's return to Woodlawn was part of an effort by all of TIME'S domestic bureaus to reassess the nation's continuing and increasing crime problem. Correspondents across the U.S. interviewed sources on every side of the issue: criminals in prison and out, law enforcement officials, crime victims and criminologists. In New York, Reporter-Researcher Edward Tivnan talked with defense lawyers, prosecutors and social workers about the juvenile justice system, while Reporter-Researcher Nancy I. Williams pored over crime statistics and Picture Researcher Antoinette Melillo worked on illustrating the resulting twelve-page report.

Journalistically as well as socially, the crime problem proved to be all-embracing. Senior Editor Ruth Brine, who directed the project, decided that the subject demanded an interdisciplinary approach involving three departments of the magazine. Associate Editor James Atwater of the Nation section surveyed President Ford's message to Congress on crime, and the sheer dimensions of the situation Ford sought to address. Staff Writer John Leo, whose usual province is the Behavior section, traced the dovetailing economic, demographic and moral currents that underlie the crime explosion. Associate Editor Jose M. Ferrer III, who has written our Law section since 1967, wrote the third part of the report, which deals with solutions to the crime problem. In the course of his research for the story, Ferrer often found himself tapping the same crime experts who were being consulted by White House aides working on Ford's policy statement. As it turned out, when it was delivered at week's end, the final version of the presidential message incorporated several proposals similar to the reforms Ferrer suggests in the cover story.

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