Is San Francisco Seeing a Spike in Firearm Clumsiness?

I love a good non-sequitur too, but the stakes are pretty high. Kids are dying.

So far this year, over 65% of city homicide victims are between ages 16 and 35 -- and a majority of assault victims age 15 -- 24 admitted to San Francisco General Hospital suffer from gunshot wounds. On Monday morning, at a public hearing, Supervisor Sophie Maxwell asked the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice why … why why … there is a big spike in young people’s homicides in San Francisco this year.

Here is their extraordinary reply, made by Sgt. Mikail Ali: accidental gun deaths are on the rise.

Say what?

“Across the nation, children get access to firearms and inadvertently injure or kill another child, or themselves… Even in our own community, children simply having access to those firearms leads to violence and death.”

What? What? Is he saying that what San Francisco’s really seeing is a spike in clumsiness?

Supervisor Maxwell wasn’t having it. Was the MOCJ, she asked, really sure these increased fatalities weren’t crime related?

A brief conference with colleagues ensued, and Ali did a 180. “We are saying youth are more involved in violence,” he told the committee. “We’re seeing that in this city younger and younger people are involved in serious acts of violence.”

I can’t imagine what wires got crossed in front of the committee to get this kind of confusion, but the data shows that the second answer is the correct one. According to the MOCJ’s mid-year crime report, homicides are up in almost all police precincts over this time last year. We’ve had 53 homicides so far this year with most of July left to go. In 2005, we had 45 homicides including all of July; in 2006, 48. That means more young victims.

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said the increase in young victims “Is really alarming. I’d say a crisis.”

But the committee… and the MOCJ… groped in vain for a reason why. What’s happening? What are we doing wrong?

Maybe nothing. The federal Justice Department has attributed a nationwide crime spike to increasing violence among teenagers. That can’t all be San Francisco’s fault. In Philadelphia, PA, St. Paul, MN, Rochester, NY, New Haven, CT, and other cities from coast to coast, police are being asked the same question: what’s going on?

This isn’t the first time youth violence rates have risen in tandem across the nation: back in the late 1980s, fears of teenage “super-predators” was widespread as homicide rates among youth more than tripled and gangs scared the beejesus out of America.

“Congressmen William McCollum of Florida stated during a floor debate that today's youths are ‘...the most dangerous criminals on the face of the Earth,’” recalls a report by San Francisco’s Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice. “Warnings of a ‘teenage crime storm’ by ‘adolescent super-predators’ were soon being echoed around the country.”

Then, in the mid-1990s, juvenile crime raters started to fall all at once. No one predicted it, and no one could say why it happened. “There has been no shortage of hypotheses to explain the drop in crime after the fact,” Stephen Levitt wrote in the 2004 paper that infamously linked falling crime rates to rising abortion rates (PDF) -- a theory that has not since bourn out.

Efforts to figure out what happened -- why national youth crime rates rose uniformly from 1984 -- 1991 then fell all at one -- have all found nothing: national juvenile crime rates don’t correlate strongly with prison sentence duration, with trends in the drug trade, with unemployment rates… nuthin.

“The natural appetite for explaining events like the 1990s is for a single sound bite -- a bottom line that isolates a particular cause and identifies the key element that will determine the shape and volume of crime in the future,” wrote UC Berkeley legal scholar Franklin E. Zimring. “There was no single cause or even an evident leading cause for the nine years of declining crime at the national level, and there is no short list of leading indicators that provide clear views of the future.”

Absurdly wrong as the MOCJ’s initial claim was that our rise in youth gun deaths is due to accidents, nobody’s got a demonstrably better idea. The fact is that youth homicide rates in San Francisco may have little to do with what’s happening in San Francisco. National trends, by definition, aren’t caused by local factors. Which means, terrifyingly, that we might have very little power to do something about it.

That answer doesn’t sit well anywhere, and it’s particularly unlikely to sit well in San Francisco, where it’s an article of faith that government should be a proactive partner in solving social problems. The uniform message of the Board of Supervisors is “Do something” and Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice says “We’re on it” -- so far with no results.

Of course we have to do something -- try something -- to keep young lives from bleeding out on the street. But the fact that we have to do something doesn’t mean there’s actually anything we can do. Maybe we’ll get lucky, but mostly we’ll keep our fingers crossed as we try to make everyone’s life safer and wait for national forces -- whatever they are -- to turn.

The good news is that compared to 1984 -- 1991, youth crime -- again, in San Francisco and the nation -- is still very low. To the extent that we’re doing something wrong, doesn’t that also mean we must be doing something right?

--Benjamin Wachs