Chief Predicts No Change

“Until we reach a point where we have more cohesiveness in this community and less social disorganization occasioned by rapid growth,” Police Chief Harry Caldwell said this week, “I do not predict that we will see a decrease or leveling off in our crime rate.”

Crime has become public topic No. 1 here in recent days as one disclosure after another has brought the situation home.

On Oct. 1, Houstonians awoke to read in their morning papers that the city had recorded its 500th murder of the year, as many killings as occurred here in all of 1978, a record year. There have been nine more killings since then.

A few days later came the Spangenberger‐Huff man killings.

And this week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that in the first six months of 1979, serious crime in Houston increased by 14.7 percent, well above nationwide increase of 9 percent. For murder, the increase for Houston was staggering 33.9 percent, more than double the figure of 15 percent for all United States cities with populations of a million or more.

In fact, 79 more killings took place in Houston in the first half of the year than in Detroit, once widely called Murder Capital, U.S.A. And while Houston's murder rate has been steadily rising, Detroit's has been dropping.