Up in Arms Over Crime

By Ed Magnuson

A Saturday afternoon three days before Christmas. A dingy, noisy subway train rolls under Greenwich Village and approaches the World Trade Center. Five shots ring out in eight seconds. Four black youths lie wounded. Bernhard Goetz becomes a legend.

Amid an outpouring of praise for the man who refused to be mugged, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau takes the case to a grand jury. The panel of 23 New Yorkers indicts Goetz only for illegal possession of handguns. Much of the city applauds. So does much of the nation. A Media General-Associated Press poll discloses that 47% of Americans approve of what Goetz did, 36% prudently say that they do not know enough of the details to form a judgment, and only 17% feel that Goetz was wrong in shooting the teenagers.

But soon second thoughts set in. The youths had asked Goetz for $5, but were they really about to harm him? Two carried screwdrivers, but two were not armed. Why did Goetz, by his own account, bend over one slumped youth and say, "You seem to be doing all right. Here's another," and then fire a shot that may have crippled the youth for life? And if Goetz was a shy, retiring person as he claimed, why was he parading around town with reporters, making pronouncements on the need for law-and-order?

As public support for Goetz wavers, Morgenthau resubmits the case to a second grand jury. After deliberating last week, this grand jury throws the book at Goetz, charging him with four counts of attempted murder, four counts of assault, one count of reckless endangerment of other passengers in the subway car and one count of criminal possession of a weapon.

The story of Bernhard Goetz had taken an unexpected turn, but it still hit the same raw nerve in the American psyche. Despite his personal peculiarities (see following story), Goetz was to some extent an Everyman: even people who deplored what he did felt they could understand why he did it. "I was acting out of goddam fear," Goetz wrote in a first-person newspaper story. That fear is shared by millions of Americans whose pulses quicken at the sound of footsteps following on dark city sidewalks, who cross to the opposite side of the street when young toughs loiter ahead, who endure the impersonal intimacy of jammed buses and nervously eye what Columbia Criminologist Peter Read calls "the familiar stranger."

Fear. Many experts contend that it has always exceeded the actual danger posed by street criminals bent on violence. But there is no question that fear of crime is a dominant fact of urban life and a growing blight on suburbia as well. A new report by the Eisenhower Foundation, a group of academics who study crime, found that "the level of fear of crime remains at least as high" in the U.S. as in one of the worst previous periods, the 1960s. Atlanta Psychiatrist Alfred Messer, who calls the 1980s "the decade of the criminal," argues that the prevalence of violent crime makes people feel "helpless." He contends that Goetz "symbolically accomplished what we couldn't do and were taught not to do. He is seen as striking a blow for all of us."

And anger. The criminal-justice system is not working in America. It is absurdly slow, overburdened, understaffed, inefficient, random in its selection of who is to be punished. From the muggers' and rapists' perspective, the uncertainty of imprisonment, indeed the likelihood of avoiding it, is actually an incentive to commit crime. Out of 550,000 reported crimes in New York City in 1983, police made 106,000 arrests, but only 13,500 suspects wound up behind bars. Observes Circuit Court Judge Lawrence Richter Jr. of Charleston, S.C.: "The Goetz incident is just symptomatic of what's going on everywhere. People are just sick and tired of being pushed around by punks."

Indeed, many of those who defend Goetz say his indictment is really an indictment of the system, which they say is stacked in favor of the criminal. Two of the youths who accosted Goetz on the subway were granted immunity from prosecution as an enticement to testify against Goetz before the grand jury. Goetz, by contrast, was refused partial immunity and decided not to testify. Declared Barry Slotnick, one of Goetz's lawyers: "This is a case of the muggers against the muggees, and Round 2 was won by the muggers." William Kunstler, who is representing one of the wounded youths, saw the issue differently. Said he: "The indictment is the first step back on the road to sanity in this case."

In theory, at least, a citizen should have the right to protect himself if the state is unable to do so. But few would argue that anyone who enters a subway or walks lonely streets at night should pack a pistol and be ready for a shoot-out. By choice of vocation, thugs are handier with guns than are Wall Street brokers or Macy's salesclerks. Moreover, bystanders can get caught in the cross fire.

The initial praise for Goetz's dramatic act starkly underscored an increasingly hard-line attitude toward crime in recent years. More than 1,500 citizen crime-fighting groups have sprung up in 38 states, determined to be "nosy neighbors" and serve as the eyes and ears of police. Local spending on police increased by an impressive 65% between 1978 and 1983, according to one survey of some 600 U.S. cities. Despite some resistance to the huge costs, fully 35 states have embarked on prison-expansion programs. State legislatures are enacting laws to limit parole, stiffen sentences and provide new rights for the long-neglected victims of the senseless violence in urban America.

The public's fear and frustration have been felt by politicians and legislators at all levels, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Main Street. No one wants to be seen as soft on crime or on criminals. Ronald Reagan has led a conservative Administration that has championed efforts to limit the rights of criminal suspects and expand those of victims. Democrats Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro made the reduction of crime an element of their plea to return to "family values." Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, one of the most liberal members of the Senate, was a leading sponsor of the most sweeping federal anticrime measure in the past 16 years. Enacted last October, the revision of the criminal code permits pretrial detention of "dangerous" defendants, increases penalties for major drug offenses and eliminates wide disparities in sentences for people who commit similar crimes. Harvard Professor of Government James Q. Wilson's celebrated reference to New York could be applied nationally when it comes to crime: "There are no more liberals . . . They've all been mugged."

The slug-the-thugs attitude is evident in the judiciary as well. The U.S. Supreme Court now allows judges to admit illegally seized evidence as long as the police acted "in good faith." The Justices also have weakened the Miranda protections under which suspects must be granted counsel before answering police questions. Since the court's 1976 decision allowing capital punishment, 37 states have resumed executions. Pretrial detention of potentially violent defendants is now permitted in different forms in some 30 states.

The national impulse to strike back at criminals is growing at a time, oddly enough, when reported crime rates are declining (see chart). An important reason: the post-World War II baby boomers have moved out of their late teens, the most crime-prone age, and are now in their 20s or older. Experts predict that crime rates will continue to fall as this group ages. Harvard's Wilson thinks he has a campaign promise that every candidate can keep: "Elect me, and you will see the crime rate go down."

If violent crime is on the decline, is the citizen outcry misplaced? Most analysts say no. They contend that the three-point drop has little practical impact on individuals living in crime-ridden areas. Perceptions of the danger come more from reading about crime in local newspapers or hearing about it from neighbors. "People experience crime in terms of their vicarious personal lives, not in terms of statistics," notes Douglas Thomson, a criminal-justice-system researcher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Even with the decline, murder in the U.S. is more prevalent than in other industrial democracies. The violent crime rate in New York City was, in fact, 22 times that of Tokyo in 1983. Only the Soviet Union and South Africa imprison their populations at higher rates than the U.S.

Inhabitants of big U.S. cities are also assaulted by what Fred DuBow, a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation, calls "incivilities." These range from blasting radios and graffiti-marred walls to harassment by panhandlers. "A lot of us feel uncomfortable and threatened in those situations, and it's not just imagination," DuBow says. The sheer population mass of the largest cities, coupled with sensational news coverage of brutal crimes, contributes to the climate of fear. People in Portland feel safer than do inhabitants of Chicago, even though crime rates are higher in the . smaller city. Most Americans do not become crime victims, but most know someone who has. Many become quite rational prisoners of their fears, living behind triple locks and avoiding ominous places.

Sometimes, like Goetz, these potential victims make headlines by lashing out at their tormentors. When Laird Roy Roberson, 29, looked out of his Houston apartment window at 11:30 p.m. on Jan. 23 and saw two men and a woman trying to break into his car, he picked up a .22-cal. rifle and fired seven shots, killing Darrel York, 18, and wounding Jerome Marshall, 19. A grand jury decided that Roberson had committed no crime.

Residents of Detroit have added to their city's reputation as a rough place. So far this year three burglars have been shot and killed by angry homeowners. Marie Morrison, 78, shot a 16-year-old youth who tried to force his way into her house. Detroit Mayor Coleman Young praised her action, declaring, "Every person has a right and an obligation to defend their own home." Daniel Kindred, 41, killed Ronnie Trapp, 19, when he saw Trapp climbing out of a basement window of the Kindred house. Last week Wayne County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Elliott Hall decided not to seek charges against Kindred, contending that the homeowner's retaliation was "perfectly justified." In the third episode, Ernest Leflore, 50, heard a man breaking into his home and shot him with a .357 magnum pistol. While critical of the trend, Hall conceded that "the Bernhard Goetz affair has had an impact. People are thinking more readily of using a firearm than in the past."

In Atlanta, Arthur Davis, 46, a 6-ft. 1-in., 230-lb. truck driver, felt a gun in his back as he drew cash from an automatic banking machine early on Jan. 30. He instinctively wheeled around, knocked the gunman down, grabbed his pistol, put it to the prone man's head and pulled the trigger several times. The gun would not fire. "I wasn't going to stand there and let him kill me without doing anything," Davis explained. In another New York subway clash, Andrew Frederick, 25, saw two men trying to steal candy from an underground newsstand and intervened. When they turned on him, he pulled out a pocketknife and stabbed one of them, Felix McCord, 28, to death. After deliberating last week, a grand jury in Manhattan decided not to indict Frederick.

The fury of a victim can exceed his skill at handling a weapon defensively. A Kansas City couple, Thomas Hill, 76, and his wife Lillian, 72, were surprised by an intruder in their home. Thomas picked up a pistol off a table and fired. The intruder grabbed the gun. Thomas pulled a second pistol out of his pocket and tried six shots. The robber seized that gun too. Lillian emerged from the kitchen and squeezed off three more shots. Not one bullet hit the invader, who escaped with all three guns. As he fled, he avoided three more rifle shots from a neighbor.

Revenge rather than self-defense was involved when Leon Gary Plauche, 39, stepped from a telephone booth in the Baton Rouge, La., airport a year ago and killed Jeffery Doucet, 25, with a .38-cal. pistol. Doucet, who had taken up with Plauche's estranged wife, allegedly kidnaped and sexually molested Plauche's son Jody, then eleven. "A lot of people have stated that they would have done exactly the same thing as Plauche, if it had been their son," conceded Prem Burns, chief prosecutor in the Louisiana case. Burns said Plauche has agreed to plead guilty to a charge of manslaughter.

In most states a person can use deadly force when he perceives his life to be in danger, but not when only his personal property seems likely to be stolen. The key question is often what a victim thinks may happen to him rather than what more objective observers may see as the actual danger. "Even if there is some hideous mistake, and no threat really existed, the law entitles you to respond on the basis of your belief," explains Columbia Law Professor Vivian Berger. One common exception to the rule prohibiting deadly force in the defense of property is when someone invades a house. In most states the inhabitant can handle an intruder any way he wishes. Says Berger: "Under the law, your home is indeed your castle." When Louisiana passed such a law in 1983, attorneys referred to it as the "shoot-the-burglar" bill.

Law-enforcement officers are more circumscribed. The U.S. Supreme Court last week limited the right of police to use deadly force against fleeing criminals. In an exception to its recent law-and-order decisions, the court ruled that a Tennessee statute allowing police to "use all the necessary means to effect the arrest" of suspected felons violated the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable seizure. The case involved an unarmed 15-year-old boy who was shot and killed by Memphis police as he climbed over a backyard fence. "It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape," wrote Justice Byron White in the 6-to-3 decision. "A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead."

The laudable desire of the courts to protect the rights of suspected criminals has long been a sore point with victims of crime, who complain that no such solicitude has been extended to them. Today organizations supporting victims' rights are sprouting up across the country. More than 400 victims advocacy groups have been set up to advise those who have been hurt by crime and to seek legislation to help them. In most states victims, like other witnesses, are frequently barred from the courtroom to prevent their testimony from being influenced by the proceedings. This "witness sequestration" rule, says Florida State Representative Dexter Lehtinen, means that "the defendant's family can be present to win the sympathy of the jury, but not the victim." Lehtinen is leading a petition drive to eliminate this stipulation from the Florida constitution. A new group, Georgians for Victims' Justice, has helped pass state legislation that will permit victims to give written statements to a judge about the impact of a crime on their lives. Another major thrust of these groups is to let victims appear at parole hearings or, at least, require that they be notified before an offender is set free.

Some victims groups have carried their activity into courtrooms, trying to apply silent pressure on judges and juries by their stony presence. One such organization is led by a Houston socialite, Phyllis Morrow, 42, wife of a wealthy oilman. Her interest began in 1980 after she and her husband were robbed of $500,000 worth of jewelry. Her group also rates judges, advises victims on dealing with police and courts, and lobbies for laws to aid victims. Since the Goetz case, Morrow claims, "every legislator seems to want on the bandwagon to support a victims bill of rights."

While eager to see justice done, victims often find the glacial movement of the courts a painful and costly ordeal. Rosemary Boeck, of Wisconsin Dells, Wis., and her family spent at least 22 months testifying intermittently at three separate trials in Wisconsin and Illinois after her son's murder. She helped organize a Parents of Murdered Children group, which offers counseling. Says she: "I thought I was ready to be committed, but I found out that my feelings were normal."

Cash compensation for the expenses incurred by innocent victims of crimes, however, remains the major accomplishment of these groups. New York and California are in the forefront of this movement. New York, for example, annually handles some 12,000 cash claims from victims, granting an average of $1,500 per applicant. Up to $20,000 can be given a victim for lost income from work, and the full cost of medical treatment beyond what is covered by health insurance is compensated. Families can recover the cost of burials for murder victims. Says Ronald Zweibel, chairman of the New York State crime victims board: "This program helps reduce crime. Ninety percent of criminal cases are solved through information provided by citizens. If victims feel they are nothing more than a piece of evidence, we can't expect cooperation."

Helping the police with information, but not with physical force, is precisely the kind of cooperation law-enforcement officials most commend in citizens. One of the most successful techniques is the variously called Crime Stoppers or Silent Witness programs, in which TV and radio stations, as well as some newspapers, provide details on

egregious local crimes and ask viewers and readers for information that might lead to arrests. Participants are offered small rewards, guaranteed anonymity and are under no obligation to testify. One such program in Savannah features rewards of up to $2,500 and police awards banquets at which some 400 citizens a year are honored for their aid. "Over half the people who call in aren't interested in the reward," says Savannah Police Chief David Gellatly. "They just want the s.o.b. to go to jail."

In Houston, more than 200 callers a day respond to Crime Stoppers broadcasts. Fifteen police officers are assigned to follow up the citizen leads. Since the program started in 1981, 3,300 suspects have been arrested for more than 4,000 crimes. Police have seized nearly $56 million worth of narcotics and recovered stolen property valued at about $21 million as well as 802 cars.

In neighborhood patrol programs, residents roam their communities during high-crime periods, keeping an eye on strangers, watching rowdy youths, noting open doors or windows. They often keep in touch by citizens-band radio and report suspicious circumstances to police. Such groups, says Houston Police Sergeant J.C. Mosier, "are making a serious dent in crime. This pendulum of not wanting to get involved is swinging back."

Rather than chase would-be criminals, these citizen crime watchers are expected to let trained officers handle the rough stuff. Nonetheless, when Jerry Hester, a Hughes Tool Co. executive, heard four shots ring out while on patrol in his East Houston neighborhood on March 3, he could not resist the impulse to take action, however dangerous. As he radioed his base station --Hester's handle was "Stringbean," the base was "Country Cousin"--a white Chevrolet Monza with three occupants sped past him. He followed at high speed. Country Cousin, actually Howard Petty, 61, security director for the Eastwood Civic Association, relayed the information to a deputy constable hired by the association on weekends. The deputy intercepted the fleeing Monza and took the occupants at gunpoint to a nearby bar, where a customer lay dying from a gunshot wound. Other patrons identified one of the trio as the assailant.

Hester says that he has made enemies in the neighborhood because of the patrol's vigilance and has even had rocks thrown into his car. "But I have two daughters," he says, "and I feel that I'm making my neighborhood safe for my family."

A burgeoning watch program on New York's Long Island has spread to eleven communities with some 500,000 residents. It began after what Paula Broxmeyer, 33, calls "a horror movie" in Roslyn in 1982. She and four other women were enjoying an evening neighborhood party when two men burst through a door. One had a gun, the other an ax. They tied the women up, terrorized them for 45 minutes, then fled with their jewelry. "It robbed me of my sense of security," Broxmeyer recalls. "For two weeks I wouldn't leave my own house alone." Her retaliation was to organize a neighborhood crime patrol. It also helps elderly people fearful of going out to shop and supplies speakers who advise children in 90 schools how to know when they are in danger of being sexually abused.

In Green Valley (pop. 8,000), Ariz., residents donated funds to buy two patrol cars for a Sheriff Assist Team of 63 volunteers. The snooping neighbor is not always popular, of course, and a meddlesome one can incite false rumors, but the citizen informant can also make the work of police officers much more effective.

Some of the citizen attacks on crime take novel forms. In San Diego, John Wright, 65, who owns a roller-skating rink, has personally stopped an armed robber and a purse snatcher with his gun; he gives a year's free skating privileges to anyone else who grabs a thief. So far, six people have qualified. In Dallas, some residents are arming themselves with "stun guns," 6-in.-long battery-powered devices that disable a suspect with a 50,000-volt jolt. Although the gun is outlawed in a few states, its manufacturer insists that the shock effect wears off "in a couple of minutes." Los Angeles police have been pleased with residents' acceptance of their tanklike battering-ram vehicle, which can speedily knock down the walls of houses where dope dealers are thought to operate.

Catching crooks, of course, is only part of the problem: there must be some place to put them. Building new prisons is not only costly but controversial, since residents are rarely happy to have guard towers looming over the neighborhood. Without adequate jail space, justice can be distorted. South Carolina State Senator Glenn McConnell puts the problem bluntly: "Should the sentence fit the size of the prison or the severity of the crime?"

With some exceptions, the trend is toward longer sentences and more prison space. An unabashed liberal Democrat, New York Governor Mario Cuomo is pushing a $600 million program to build seven new prisons with 8,800 beds, the largest expansion of the penitentiary system in his state's history. A continent away and poles apart politically, California's Republican Governor, George Deukmejian, has his state embarked on a record prison-construction binge; he is seeking $1.2 billion for ten facilities with 16,000 beds. Almost every cell in his state now houses two convicts, which foes of overcrowding condemn, but each day the prison population grows by about 400.

In Georgia, tougher sentencing laws have to wait because the state has only 15,000 prison beds, roughly the number of new convicts sentenced each year. Opposing court-ordered release of crowded prisoners in Illinois, Cook County State's Attorney Richard M. Daley declared, "The issue before the court is whether the temporary comfort of jail inmates takes priority over the safety of our community."

Faced with the same dilemma, some states are choosing to keep prisoners convicted of violent crimes imprisoned, while releasing those involved in theft or financial skulduggery. However expedient, that practice has some inequities. The convicted embezzler of millions might be set free, for example, while a small-time robber would stay behind bars.

Long sentences and sufficient prison capacity are by no means a perfect solution. Critics rightfully consider prisons as "colleges in crime," where serious efforts at rehabilitation have largely been abandoned. They argue that only criminals convicted of the gravest crimes and repeat offenders can be locked up until they die, if only because prison is so expensive--upwards of $15,800 annually for each prisoner, more than it costs to send a student to Yale. The American Civil Liberties Union argues that greater certainty of some kind of punishment is a better deterrent to crime than stiff sentences.

Long sentences, however, can make a difference where chronic offenders are involved. A Justice Department study of male convicts who entered state prisons in 1979 shows that 61% of them had been jailed before and that nearly half of these repeaters committed new crimes shortly after their release --crimes that would have been impossible if they had served their full sentences. A recent study of 1,672 convicts released on probation in California was equally disturbing: fully 1,087 of them were arrested on new charges after being freed.

Many experts see the Goetz-like urge to attack an assailant as self- defeating. A new study done for the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice suggests that passive resistance is a more effective tactic than is a counterattack. The study found that the victim is far more likely to get hurt when attempting to subdue the aggressor, particularly one with a knife or gun. The kind of resistance that has the best chance of success, explains Richard Block, a sociologist at Loyola University of Chicago, who conducted the study, is to attract the attention of possible rescuers or to try to flee. Block predicts that if too many citizens take up arms, criminals will respond by adding to their own weaponry or by selecting more vulnerable victims, such as defenseless older women.

When citizens take it upon themselves to fight crime, they run the risk of treading on the civil liberties of others or using unnecessary force. Indeed, most law-enforcement authorities object when individuals or neighborhood-watch groups, such as one in Sun City, Ariz., carry pistols. Handguns in untrained hands are a clear menace. Last year, for example, a homeowner in El Cajon, Calif., shot a 13-year-old boy who set off an alarm in the man's storage shed. In San Diego, an 87-year-old man fired at a policeman investigating a fire next door. Both men were lucky; the shot missed.

"The little child in each of us would kill any person who infringed our slightest right," argues Rex Beaber, a clinical psychologist at UCLA. "A reservoir of rage exists in each person, waiting to burst out. We fantasize about killing or humiliating our boss or the guy who took our parking space. It is only by growing up in a civilized society of law that we learn the idea of proportionate response."

With the fear of crime and the public frustration at the justice system rising, it is not surprising that many Americans applaud Bernhard Goetz and yearn to strike back at criminals. But an apt warning to such citizens comes from Hubert Williams, director of police in crime-plagued Newark, N.J. "We can give up our Constitution in return for our safety. If you give police unfettered rights, I assure you that crime will drop. The price will be a garrison state. As a policeman, I think that is a price we cannot afford."

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With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta/New York, Joseph N. Boyce/Atlanta and Jack E. White/Chicago