A Letter From the Publisher

By John A. Meyers

Compared with many other stories, the Goetz phenomenon was easy to report, if only because nearly everyone, from law-enforcement authorities to the man or woman in the street, has a ready opinion on violent crime. TIME correspondents working on this week's cover stories gathered a full sample of such reactions across the country. They also found themselves remembering their own experiences with crime and criminals.

New York Correspondent Barry Kalb covered the latest indictment of the subway gunman and talked to defense lawyers to turn up new details about Goetz's personality and past. Kalb also drew on his experience covering Watergate to report on how grand juries work. His New York colleague, Correspondent Kenneth Banta, talked with Goetz's neighbors and friends and rode the city's subways for a day to canvass straphangers on the level and fear of crime. Banta knows about crime first hand: he was the victim of an attempted mid-Manhattan robbery six years ago. While reporting this week's story, he recalled "the overwhelming sense of helplessness and anger I had felt then."

In Houston, Reporter Gary Taylor interviewed citizens who had formed neighborhood patrols and court-monitoring groups. Taylor also has a painful knowledge of the subject: in 1980 he was shot during an assault. The experience lingers. Says he: "For months I awakened each morning at 2, the hour I was shot, and was unable to sleep. While watching TV cop shows, I still find myself turning from the set whenever guns are fired."

Atlanta Reporter Leslie Cauley, who talked to state police officials and judges in Georgia and South Carolina, learned last December how even a minor incident could affect her. Returning to her car one night, she found the window vent broken and the glove compartment rifled. Angry, she headed home. "I was on the interstate when it hit me. I started to shake as I considered what might have happened if I had come upon my thief. In my anger, what would I have done? And what, in his desperation, would he have done?"

Houston Bureau Chief David Jackson, who interviewed local police and prosecutors, encountered crime victims' resentment even while off his job. "During jury selection last month, nearly half of the group of prospective jurors indicated we had been burglarized," he recalls. "Many could barely mask their impatience with the criminal justice system. After watching them, the accused burglar evidently felt he had little chance of a sympathetic verdict. He changed his plea to guilty."