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CRIME DOWN BUT HOMICIDE RATES STILL DISTURBING

By Ray King/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Saturday, September 12, 2009 9:57 PM CDT

Of all the crime statistics, perhaps the most disturbing is the number of homicides the city averaged since 2000.

Pine Bluff averaged 13 homicides each year, and 23 per 100,000 population. The only city of comparable size that came close was West Memphis, which averaged six per year, and 21 per 100,000 population.

The trend was down during the first half of the year but has edged up lately.

The state’s capital, Little Rock, with a population of more than three times that of Pine Bluff, averaged 40 homicides per year, according to Web site, cityratings.com. Those numbers were more than three times the national average.

By comparison, Hot Springs averaged four per year, North Little Rock nine per year, one each for Rogers and Springdale, two each in Fayetteville and Texarkana, three in Jonesboro, and none for the Russellville area.

Longtime Prosecuting Attorney Steve Dalrymple has seen the level of violence increase over the past 10 years.

“The use of violence is much more now than it has been in a 10-year period, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I guess I have a perspective on that,” he said. “Too often now you see what would have been settled in the past with a fight in the driveway, involve the use of violence, sometimes over matters that when you look at them later, other than there was a tragedy involved, were silly.”

A general term

“A lot of times when you’re looking at homicide figures especially, people forget that ‘homicide’ is a general term, it means the loss of a life and that can come from any direction,” said Steve Sumner, a criminal justice instructor at Southeast Arkansas College, and a former Pine Bluff police officer.

“It can be negligent homicide, it can be justifiable homicide,” he said. “A police shooting is a homicide, and it would be logged under homicides but it’s justifiable.”

A common theme regarding homicides is that a high percentage of the victims and suspects are young black males.

Self-defense?

Dalrymple said another factor is that some members of the public have bought into the idea that they have the right to “preemptive self-defense, which is actually not a legal term.”

“Self-defense is recognized under the law as a means of using force, even up to deadly force, to match what is an imminent and real deadly force, or what ever level of force you’re responding to,” he said.

“We’ve had a number of situations where someone gets tired or concerned about the way someone else is treating them over a period of time, and they preemptively want to go over there and shoot them, and too often, the public thinks that’s justified,” Dalrymple said. “The standard of what’s legal and what’s not legal has changed in the public’s minds.

“The problem is that the one who is charged with the crime has taken an action that now endangers all of us because when someone uses a gun, and very few of the people who do are skilled with them, then all of us, all of society, is subject to catch a stray bullet,” he said.

No public outcry

Another problem Dalrymple and Chief Deputy Prosecutor Kyle Hunter said they also see is that most homicides don’t generate a public outcry, especially considering the number of churches and ministers in town.

Earlier this year, several churches and individuals did sponsor programs aimed at reducing homicides, including a “mock homicide funeral” but those drew small crowds, mainly other ministers and representatives of law enforcement agencies.

“It may not be just ministers,” said Hunter, who keeps a board in his office listing all the county’s homicides, suspects and scheduled trial dates. “It may be the whole community, and it may be because we see so much of it. Is there an anger toward this? Has it lost its shock value, either because of television or because it happens so often in our community?”

“There’s not an outrage in the use of violence in general because, in a sense, I think the public is saying these are two individuals who had differences,” Dalrymple said. “They’re generally people who know each other. There are standards of what we’re supposed to do, how we’re supposed to act, what acts we as individuals can take, and I think there’s too much tolerance by society in general to use more than what the law allows. Many times, the guy that gets killed is the worse of the two but the violence that was used was certainly not appropriate for the circumstances.”

Sumner noted that there are a lot of things going on in Pine Bluff that people don’t see.

“There are very small things going on in the background that causes a lot of these problems, and part of it I think is complacency,” he said.

“We’ve got over 100 churches in this community and when somebody gets killed, there should be 100 preachers beating the pulpit yelling, ‘this is not right,’ and that doesn’t happen” he said. “I almost wish we had somebody like Say Macintosh that would stand up and scream like that.”

While Lt. Bob Rawlinson agreed that maybe the outrage is not there in many of Pine Bluff’s homicides; still, police work hard to try and solve them.

“We take every homicide as seriously as the last one, or the next one,” he said. “We have an above average solve-and-closure rate on our homicides. We’re above the national average because those guys (detectives) get on it, and they’re going to work it, and it’s just a shame that when you wind up having a homicide, you’ve got one person going to the cemetery and another person winds up going to jail.

“There’s victims everywhere, and we really feel for those families, but we are solving those homicides and I just want people to know that we’re going to keep working hard on them, everyone of them,” Rawlinson said.

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