Study Says Inglewood Has High Murder Rate : Crime: FBI puts it at 14th in number of killings among cities over 100,000 population in 1993. The police chief there says he’s not surprised.

There it is, listed among the 25 most murderous cities in the United States and next to places whose reputations for violence are known nationwide.

Inglewood.

The inconspicuous South Bay suburb of 112,000--better known as the home of the Los Angeles Lakers than as a center of crime--had the 14th highest murder rate in the country in 1993 for cities with populations over 100,000, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation report released Sunday.

Gary, Ind., ranks first on the list of 25, with 89.9 murders per 100,000 residents. Oakland comes in at 13th, one notch worse than Inglewood. Detroit is fifth. Los Angeles is last on the list, and notoriously dangerous New York City doesn’t even appear.

But Inglewood--quiet, middle-class Inglewood--sits smack in the middle with a rate of 39 murders for every 100,000 people.

If the statistics aren’t exactly what Inglewood Police Chief Oliver Thompson wanted to hear, neither do they come as any great surprise.

“The fact is that people kill people in this town,” Thompson said. “But I live in this city, and I think the city is a very safe place. I don’t make too much of statistics, whether they’re good or bad.”

Indeed, the figures in the FBI’s annual report, called Crime in the United States, could be broken down in a variety of ways, and adjusting the parameters slightly can drastically change the outcome.

Nearby Compton, for example, does not make the publicized top 25 list because it has 96,500 residents, just missing the 100,000 population cutoff. Had it been factored in, Compton would be fifth on the list, nearly doubling the Inglewood murder rate, with 64.1 murders per 100,000 residents.

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And just last month, the U.S. Department of Justice cited Inglewood as being among the 10 California cities with the largest drop in overall crime in 1993. Crime in every major category, except for murder, fell by an average of about 11%.

“But I didn’t make too much of those numbers either,” Thompson said. “Numbers are cold and hard. They don’t really say much about what’s happening in a city.”

The FBI uses the category “murder” in its crime statistics to mean the killing of one person by another, regardless of whether a court has deemed the action to be murder.

Of the 44 killings in Inglewood in 1993, 22 were drug- or gang-related; five were the result of robberies, four occurred during domestic disputes and five during other disputes. The remaining eight did not fall into specific categories, Thompson said.

As of Wednesday, 45 people had been killed in the city so far this year, 11 of them during a two-night gang war. Victims include a 2-year-old who was caught in the gangland cross-fire in January, the manager of a Price Club who was shot for $15 in change in September, and an ice cream vendor killed during a robbery in November.

While the nearly 400-page report paints Inglewood as a city with a violent crime problem (even though its murder count is down from 54 in 1980), the picture nationwide is slightly more rosy. Crime in general was down 2.1% over 1992, according to the document, and violent crime was down 0.4%.

Preliminary figures for 1994 show a continued mild decline in crime, said FBI spokesman John Hoos in Los Angeles, with violent offenses down about 3%.

In the South Bay, Hawthorne followed Inglewood on the murder list for 1993, with a rate of 15.8 killings per 100,000 residents. Gardena had the third-highest rate with 13.5 slayings per 100,000 people.

Of cities with 10,000 or more residents, two--Lomita and Palos Verdes Estates--went through 1993 without a single homicide. Two Palos Verdes police officers were gunned down in Torrance, however, during a meeting of officers.

Despite the differences in the murder rates in their communities, law enforcement officials from both Inglewood and Lomita agree that the best way of reducing crime is for residents to become involved.

“We can’t be everywhere,” said Lt. Ernie Roop of the Lomita Sheriff’s Station. “The neighborhoods have to work within themselves.”

Said Thompson, the Inglewood police chief: “The citizens have given it all over to law enforcement and said, ‘Hell, it’s your job.’ That’s what gets me upset, not the statistics.”

Times staff writer Lisa Richardson contributed to this report.