Busted

Corwin came to City Hall armed with copies of an academic study that examined the relationship between demographics and crime. Sure enough, the study describes how the youth population (yeah, black youth in particular) will expand in coming years.

But the Strip wonders whether Corwin read the whole thing.

The authors of the study — titled "Deadly Demographics" — do see a relationship between age groups and crime rates. But it's not a powerful relationship. James Alan Fox and Alex R. Piquero determine that demographics played only a "modest" role in the drop in crime during the 1990s.

How modest? Just 10 percent.

Experts attribute other factors (a good economy, creative policing strategies) for the relatively calm '90s. Hell, the best-selling book Freakonomics makes a convincing if ghoulish case that legalized abortion played an important role, too. (Freakonomics argues that, by reducing the number of unwanted babies, Roe v. Wade effectively shallowed the pool of future criminals. Bennett was talking about the book with a caller when he made his comment about aborting black babies, a notion he immediately labeled "morally reprehensible.")

But back to Corwin. The Strip is happy to know that its police chief is open to law-enforcement techniques such as statistical analyses. But to this burnt end, Corwin's doomsday predictions sounded suspiciously like a guy looking for excuses, not solutions.

Bodies piling up? Hey, blame the census!

The Strip put in a call to police HQ to ask whether the chief might have overstated his case for demographics. A department spokesman, Capt. Rich Lockhart, said the city's homicide rate was a "multivariate" problem.

"I don't think he's saying that the demographic is the reason or that it would be the reason in the future," Lockhart said. "I think what he's saying is that, should this trend continue, that we saw over the last few years, where this group is increasing, then that could be the case."

Chief, consider your bet hedged.

Corwin's fear of problem "adolescents" may prove to be as hallucinatory as the superpredator warnings of a decade ago.

Remember the superpredator? He was the lawless teenager with no conscience. And he was coming in waves. In the 1996 story "Superpredators Arrive," Newsweek described "a generation so numerous and savage that they'll take the violence to the next level." The book Body Count warned that "the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known" was upon us.

Lock your doors! Run for the suburbs! The superpredator warnings and other alarms propelled the get-tough-on-crime movement, which led to harsher sentences and meaner prisons.

But the prediction never materialized, and the '90s closed with eight straight years of falling crime rates. Superpredator? Superhype.

The person credited for coming up with the term superpredator, incidentally, is an egghead named John J. DiIulio Jr. DiIulio managed to live down what Salon.com called "one of the most disastrously wrong predictions in the annals of public intellectuals" when, in his first term, George W. Bush named DiIulio the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Hey, we're all for second chances. As for Chief Corwin, the Strip hopes he finds Step 1 in Year 2: admitting he has a problem.