Little Rock politicians called a crisis meeting Sunday afternoon about the other killing spree, the one taking place in the streets instead of on the prison gurneys.
State government killed four people in a week after trying to kill eight in 11 days and getting cut short on that ambitious goal by the courts.
Little Rock killers have not kept up the state’s one-week pace. They’ve taken only 20 lives in four months. But the Little Rock killing pace represents a significant increase over recent years and seems — and is — frightful, disgraceful, unacceptable and tragic.
And it’s embarrassing for the city, just as Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s killing spree was embarrassing for the state. “The banal horror of Arkansas’ executions” is the headline on an unflattering New Yorker article this week. I know … who in Arkansas cares about anything from New York?
The state has now run out of one of its killing drugs, effectively imposing a moratorium on further killing-spree opportunities, perhaps until prison officials meet someone on a parking lot for a new drug deal for a misrepresented purpose.
Little Rock is not running out of guns. There’s a pawn shop that is selling them to 14- and 15-year-olds in Little Rock, according to the Rev. Benny Johnson, speaking Sunday at an urgent meeting of the group he heads called Stop the Violence.
To clarify: Stop the Violence means in inner-city Little Rock, not at the Department of Correction, where the last man killed was said to be jerking and convulsing and moaning as it happened, which the governor’s office called flawless.
Little Rock saw two homicides during the eight-day period while the state was killing four. So the local deterrence effect of the state’s capital punishment was not readily evident. That’s because it doesn’t exist.
State government wasn’t killing to deter. It was killing to extract revenge for the victims’ families and to sustain politicians’ standing.
Speaking of banality, political hand-wringing about rising crime rates in the streets will almost always amount to cliché — to politicians rolling around on plowed ground as if the dirt is a new discovery. But that wasn’t altogether the case Sunday at Little Rock City Hall, mainly because of the informed candor of Police Chief Kenton Buckner in his presentation to the loftily perched politicians.
The chief got called in to talk to the city board members about the city’s murder spree as if he had a greater responsibility than anyone else. People on the front lines have braver and more immediate responsibilities, but not greater ones.
The chief said:
• The police cannot solely solve the problem.
• Poor, deprived neighborhoods are plagued by crime mostly because of being poor and deprived, as well as because of drugs.
• The police department could add 500 more officers and still not make a dent in the problem absent neighborhood support and community support. Anyway, he said, adding a lot of officers could well mean adding bad cops.
• “Zero tolerance,” a popular notion by which the police would saturate every corner of the inner-city murder hotbed and detain anybody looking suspicious by broad definition — such as driving with a failed taillight — is a bad idea. He said zero-tolerance treats law-abiding people unfairly and leaves scars. People would call the city “racist,” he predicted. Much of the city’s crime problem is the result of the city long being called racist, because it long has been.
• What’s happening is that the new round of killing largely represents old gangbangers from Little Rock’s HBO infamy of 20 to 25 years ago getting out of prison and returning to Little Rock. They tend to engage their teenaged descendants in new violence less turf-conscious than in the ’90s. But it is so brazen as a prevailing culture that victims are afraid to tell police what they plainly saw happen to a loved one in broad daylight.
What the chief was saying, essentially, is that we can better fight this crime wave if the people, all of them, including the politicians, will do more than merely plead with the police, but cooperate with them.
(Please notice that the state is letting menaces out of jail while it is killing 400-pound diabetics and amputees. Life in prison for all of them, locking down the menaces and not killing the old and fat, makes more sense.)
As for the politicians, they listened and uttered … well, banalities … such as that of City Director Lance Hines, who represents west — meaning safer — Little Rock.
His pearl was that we need to get the word out that Little Rock at large doesn’t have a serious crime problem, but that only a few of our remote and abandoned neighbors do, and that things aren’t as bad for the rest of us as they are perceived from the 6 o’clock news, which only tells the bad stuff.
Yes, the problem would surely be solved if the local television news program offered this lead story: “People living in Little Rock north of Interstate 630 and west of the state Capitol had another blissful day, heightened by satisfaction that the state killed a couple of fat old men at the prison last night.”
Beyond Buckner’s, there was more truth-telling earlier Sunday. It took place at the Stop the Violence meeting.
Allow me to synopsize the best of what was said there: Little Rock and other cities have, over decades, systematically imposed public policies that isolate poverty and violence in neighborhoods with liquor stores on every corner, handy for drunkenness and armed robberies. And we have fashioned a new broader economy based on a consolidation of services that limits neighborhood job opportunities such as the ones we used to have for high school-aged kids who needed something to do to keep them out of trouble.
“It’s fixable, but it will be hard work,” state Sen. Joyce Elliott said.
One idea that might not work was Benny Johnson’s to confront Gov. Asa Hutchinson with a demand that he appoint a task force to try to stop the illegal sale of guns to mid-teenagers.
The governor probably has had enough trouble lately with the National Rifle Association, which seems to oppose any restriction of any gun, stolen or otherwise, child-carried or otherwise.
The answer is more likely Joyce Elliott’s hard work, which we need to start doing right after we figure out exactly what the job is and how to do it.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.