The city of Houston is planning to make a record breaking announcement Wednesday. It has to do with crime, and what you’ll hear may surprise you.
The police chief and mayor will announce our streets are safer than they’ve been in a long time. No one can say for sure why, but we might as well celebrate.
“I do love this city,” said Mayor Annise Parker at the 2012 City of Houston Inaugural Ceremony.
Mayor Parker kicked off the year 2012, but in Houston it might as well be the good old days.
FOX 26 first told you a month ago that the city was on pace to finish the year with the lowest number of total murders since 1965. Now, the preliminary numbers are in, and there were 198 murders in Houston for 2011.
Houston hasn’t finished below 200 murders in almost 50 years, not since Lyndon B. Johnson was president and the “Sound of Music” won the Oscar for best picture.
“Well, it’s good news,” said Houston City Councilman Ed Gonzalez.
Gonzalez worked a dozen years in homicide, starting in the mid-1990s.
“I remember stories of some of the veterans talking about how common it was to go out and respond to one murder scene and by the end of the shift respond to a second. It was that busy,” he said.
Today’s numbers are part of a nationwide trend. The decline is striking given Houston’s population growth and the assumption crime would increase during a recession.
“There’s never an easy answer. I think one thing is that we do have fairly good ties between the police and community so you get a lot more participation from people willing to give information,” said Gonzalez.
Everyone would like to take credit for the plunge. Perhaps it’s because violent criminals are being locked up longer or maybe our medical center is keeping more people alive? Criminologists point to the book, “The Great American Crime Decline” for other theories.
“One is there are just normal fluctuations in crime overtime. Another explanation would be the baby boom generation aging out of the crime prone age range which is 15-29. Also, the drug of choice from the 1980s and 90s changed from crack to marijuana, and it’s stated that’s a less violent type of drug,” said Dr. Emily Berthelot, Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Houston Downtown.
HPD’s homicide captain attributes the decline to the department’s crime reduction unit which saturates high crime areas with officers.
“They’ve done a heck of a job, put a lot of people in jail, disrupted a lot of criminal activity and had a big impact, I think, on the crime rate,” said Cpt. David Gott.
Whatever the reason, let’s hope the trend continues.
