The Nation: THE CRIME WAVE

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America has been far from successful in dealing with the sort of crime that obsesses Americans day and night—I mean street crime, crime that invades our neighborhoods and our homes—murders, robberies, rapes, muggings, holdups, break-ins—the kind of brutal violence that makes us fearful of strangers and afraid to go out at night.

So said President Gerald Ford last week as he sent a special message to Congress on a subject that has long plagued the nation and frustrated several Administrations: the nation's continuing crime wave.

Ford's characterization of anticrime efforts as being "far from successful" is a major understatement. After all the past rhetoric and all the past campaigns against crime, conditions only got worse. Even as the White House was preparing the message to Congress, the incidents of violence and stealth that have terrorized so many millions of Americans were continuing across the nation. In one 72-hour period, eleven persons were killed in Atlanta, six by gunfire. In Detroit Beach, Mich., a woman watching her four-year-old grandson at play saw him stabbed to death by a teenage boy who was apparently after the 40¢ that the child had in his pocket. In New York City this spring, police charged a gang of six teen-agers—one of whom was 13—with murdering three elderly and penniless men by asphyxiation. One man died with his prayer shawl stuffed into his mouth.

Directed at a problem of this intensity and scope, Ford's message was generally devoid of optimistic promises. It was realistic about the limited role that the Federal Government can play in fighting crime, which is largely under state and local jurisdiction. The main thrust of Ford's proposals was to ensure that serious offenders go to prison. In this he seemed to reflect a growing consensus of both liberals and conservatives. Ford called for mandatory jailing, with certain exceptions, of persons who commit violent offenses under federal jurisdiction. He also urged a reform of the chaotic system of federal laws. State legislatures should follow suit, he suggested, and he asked Congress to authorize $6.8 billion for Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grants to local and state governments between now and 1981. In several states, victims of crimes receive compensation for their physical injuries; Ford now proposes awards of up to $50,000 for those hurt in federal crimes.

In one major respect, the President's recommendations were disappointingly weak. Although he agreed with countless criminologists that handguns "play a key role" in the current rise of violent crime, Ford failed to endorse measures that many experts believe are necessary to stop that increase. He declared himself "unalterably opposed to federal registration of guns or gun owners." He did, however, make one important proposal: a ban on the manufacture, assembly or sale—though not the possession—of "Saturday night specials," the cheap, easily concealed pistols that have been flooding American cities and turning thousands of quarrels and robberies into murders.

In sending his message to Congress, the President insisted that he was not talking about law-and-order, the Nixon slogan that turned out to be so empty. Yet, Ford added, "we can and must make our legal system what it was always intended—a means of