Slaughter in The Streets

In Washington last week a stray bullet from a gun battle raging outside smashed through a kitchen window, killing a 47-year-old grandmother, Rosemary Stevens. Sometime before, a dispute among three teenage girls in Miami over a vandalized Cadillac erupted into gunfire and a 15-year-old girl was mortally wounded by a shot from a .9-mm automatic. In Houston last month, a Colombian man and woman were shot execution-style in their car.

These are scenes from an epidemic of homicidal violence that has turned the streets of many American cities into virtual war zones. With a month left before year's end, all-time murder records have already been set in several cities, and the bloody pace shows no signs of slowing down. In New York City homicides are up 18%, in Houston 44% and in the nation's capital an appalling 65%.

There is no mystery about the cause of the stepped-up slaughter. Says Raymond Kelly, an assistant chief of police in New York City: "We think the increase has a direct correlation with the use of crack," the cheap and readily available cocaine derivative. Kelly's figures show that the share of killings in New York that are drug-related has climbed steadily from about 25% in the early 1980s to almost 40% this year. The problem is double edged. On one hand, crack abusers frequently seem indifferent to the use of deadly force. On the other, the street-level drug trade is so lucrative that it seems worth killing for. In Washington law-enforcement officials attribute the mayhem to turf wars between rival dope gangs vying for shares of the city's wide-open, de-centralized crack market. The deadly competition in the two cities is made still more lethal by arsenals of sophisticated firearms smuggled from Virginia and other states with permissive gun laws.

The gangs embrace a cold-blooded philosophy. Boasts a reputed member of New York's Vigilante gang, who was secretly videotaped by police while sipping champagne and explaining his trade: "We sell drugs and we kill." Often the victim is gunned down at close range in public, with little attempt to conceal the killer's identity. Witnesses who testify about such murders often become targets themselves. Indeed, overburdened police forces have had little success in breaking the power of the drug gangs, even when they have adopted systematic buy-and-bust tactics or resorted to the dragnet-style crackdowns pioneered by Los Angeles police. Homicide experts predict that the havoc will continue until the demand for crack can be brought under control by better education and treatment programs. Says Washington Police Chief Maurice Turner: "Police alone cannot solve the drug problem."

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: Number of murders in five U.S. cities.