Economy Triggers Security Concerns
Desperate Acts Send Residents To Guns, Alarms

By Jonathan Mummolo and Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 28, 2008

Stacy Jack, a suburban mom of two, is buying a gun.

It seems to Jack, who lives in Prince William County, that crime has gotten worse lately, and with the economic situation deteriorating, she is scared.

"My husband and I just talked about it and ran through some worst-case scenarios if we're headed down a bad road economically-wise," Jack said of her decision to buy a gun. "What if somebody wants to break in and take our possessions or our cans of food? A fear of the unknown is a terrible thing."

Police say the most recent data available show a marked increase in property crime this year in much of the Washington region, including burglaries, incidents of shoplifting and thefts from cars and foreclosed homes.

Whether the economic downturn will have a far-reaching impact on crime is unknown -- and some officials are not convinced that there is a strong correlation -- but the surge in property crimes is apparent.

Violent crime, however, is down in the District and many of its suburbs, according to preliminary data. Law enforcement officials said that crime statistics are still being tabulated for the last few months of the year -- the period following September's global economic collapse.

But many people say they aren't waiting for the final stats before taking security measures into their own hands: buying guns, checking out home security systems and avoiding shopping malls after dark. A District woman said she was so fearful when her husband brought home a new flat-screen TV that she made him chop the box into little pieces on trash day, so no passersby would be tempted into her home.

In more than three dozen interviews, local residents said they are worried that layoffs and financial strains will push some people to the breaking point, endangering the public safety. They said they had been spooked by a number of recent high-profile crimes around the Capital Beltway, each with a perpetrator more brazen than the last.

A Potomac woman was injured when a man slashed the strap of her purse outside the Neiman Marcus in Tysons Corner. A woman was abducted at gunpoint from a T.J. Maxx parking lot, also in Tysons, by a robber who forced her to withdraw cash from a bank. Another assailant stabbed a postal worker on rounds in Rockville. In the District, a thief made off with two bags of church collection money, although a priest pursued him and recovered one bag.

"It's inevitable," said Regina Watts, 40, an Oxon Hill resident. "People are getting desperate."

Watts recently decided to do all of her holiday shopping online after she saw GameStop employees at the Pentagon City mall offering to escort customers who bought electronics to their cars.

"I just felt to carry an amount of cash that big and to carry a lot of bags would make you a target for people who are robbing and things like that," Watts said. "I just didn't want to put myself in that situation."

The total number of property crimes, including larcenies, burglaries and auto thefts, has increased in nearly all Washington area jurisdictions this year.

The region's overall increase in property crime this year runs counter to the national trend last year, when crimes against persons and property decreased, according to FBI statistics. Locally, the results were generally mixed last year, although some jurisdictions reported more robberies and thefts.

In Prince George's County, burglaries jumped about 8 percent through Nov. 25, compared with the same period last year, while overall crime declined, officials said.

Acting Police Chief Roberto Hylton said some poorly executed crimes make him think the recession has pushed some otherwise lawful people to the brink. He cited the example of a "novice" criminal who recently took a taxi to and from a robbery, leaving a trail of witnesses.

"These are first-time criminals," Hylton said. "They're actually leaving traceable evidence at the scene. . . . They just don't know how to commit a crime."

In neighboring Montgomery County, burglary and theft accounted for most of an increase in crime this year. One significant category was stealing from cars, as thieves snapped up portable GPS devices, MP3 players and other items at a rate 21 percent higher than the same period last year.

"There are a lot of people who live on that edge, where crime is a realistic option," said Montgomery Police Chief J. Thomas Manger.

In Arlington County, property crime climbed 13.5 percent in the first three quarters of the year, fueled largely by a rash of stolen GPS devices from vehicles, easy targets for criminals looking to make quick cash, said Police Chief M. Douglas Scott. The increase could be a "precursor" to worse crime to come as the recession deepens, Scott said.

Not all law enforcement officials share that view, and academic research into the relationship between recession and crime has produced differing results.

Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said property crimes and street robberies, in particular, tend to rise during periods of economic trouble. On the other hand, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, overall crime fell, although that might have been attributable to the end of Prohibition and to the New Deal public works projects that put many young men to work, researchers said.

Fairfax County Police Chief David M. Rohrer is one of the skeptics. He said the economy is just one of many factors that influence crime, and it is too early to say whether it is having a significant effect. Property crime in the county, which has a population of about 1 million, increased 12 percent in the first three quarters of the year, while violent crime fell by about 10 percent. But property crime has been rising in Fairfax for two years now, predating the economic downturn, he said.

"I just don't think that the sky is going to be falling as far as crime," Rohrer said. "I don't think a law abiding citizen today is going to turn to crime tomorrow because of the downturn."

Rohrer said crimes at malls that had suburban moms buzzing this year were "isolated incidents," including a robbery in November outside Neiman Marcus at Tysons II Galleria and the abduction in September of an Alexandria woman from the Springfield Mall that ended in her death.

"I don't think those cases, those high-profile cases, are about the economic downturn," Rohrer said. "They're still troubling cases. . . . I think the perception piece is certainly a concern. People should feel safe to walk in neighborhoods, to walk in shopping centers."

Rohrer said he was far more concerned that cuts to police budgets would take officers off the street than that economic hardship would drive people to commit crimes.

The economic downturn is creating opportunities for crime, whether or not it is creating criminals, officials said. Prince William had a steep rise in metal thefts earlier this year, including at houses left vacant by foreclosures. Vacant houses are also plagued by squatting, vandalism and teen parties, officials said.

Copper thefts have been rampant in Charles County, and a surge of burglaries began there last month, Charles Sheriff Rex W. Coffey said.

"We had more [burglaries] last month than any month I could ever remember in Charles County since the '80s," Coffey said. The county recorded 84 burglaries last month, up from 63 the previous November, he said.

Stacey Lewis, a lawyer from Forestville, said that in the past two months, she and her 23-year-old daughter have been careful to arm the alarm system even when they are at home.

"With the economy putting a major stress on families and people out of work, you are going to see more crimes across the board and crimes of opportunity," she said. "Someone in my church had tools taken out of his car in Clinton the other day. He ran into a store for a second and -- boom! -- $3,000 worth of tools gone."

Sales of guns and ammunition are up 8 to 10 percent this year, according to state and federal records, fueled in part by fears that the incoming Democratic administration might tighten restrictions on gun sales. But some new gun owners -- crowding instruction classes and local ranges -- are also worried about rising crime, according to Nan Sanders, a retiree and shooting instructor from Vienna.

Sanders's group, Piedmont NRA Instructors, held a class in Chantilly recently on personal protection in the home and had more than a dozen students, about twice as many as usual. There were so many inquiries about a basic pistol class last month, "we had to turn people away," she said.

Jack, a communications professional, said she will be taking a gun safety class next month. She and her husband, Jay, a Realtor, decided to buy a firearm after a recent conversation around the dining room table. They talked about some of the recent high-profile incidents, of how "unbelievable" it all is, how fast everything is changing, how scary it is not knowing when it will stop or turn around.

A gun seemed to be the answer.

Staff writer Dan Morse and researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.