The Curse of Violent Crime

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Increasingly, the vast majority of America's law-abiding citizens are being held hostage to the irrational acts of a relatively small cadre of career criminals. Declares New York Police Commissioner Robert McGuire: "Street crime is the most serious thing we face today. It has an enormous impact on the quality of people's lives. It determines where we walk, what time we walk, even whether we play bingo at night and whether we go to the theater." Sums up San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein: "Crime can be as paralyzing as any autocrat if, as it increasingly does, it imprisons citizens in their homes because they fear to venture outside."

But those who stand on the front lines of the battle against crime insist all Americans must break out of their fortresses and join the fight-not in a physical way, which is foolhardy, but in a search for solutions. Drugs can be slowed, guns can be curbed, the criminal justice system can be improved, they say, if enough citizens turn their fear and anger into the kind of public pressure that will make a difference. Above all, the experts argue, citizens must care about their neighbors' safety as well as their own. Perhaps for too long America has persisted in the pattern Alexis de Tocqueville noted so long ago: a nation where "each person, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest."

-By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Peter Stoler/New York and Evan Thomas/Washington, with other U.S. bureaus