The nexus of the story was whether the mayor got upset and how upset she got. But where the story ended showed she had a right to be irate.
The scene was the neighborhood and house where a 69-year-old man was brutally murdered. As the story goes, he was sitting in his carport, smoking a cigarette, minding his own business at his house on Lilac Street, at its intersection with Howard Drive.
What comes next is a scene no one in this city should have to witness or be near. A neighbor who lives across the street from the man said rival gang members — they’ve been referred to as teens — got crossways with each other, with one group wanting the other to come out of a house. When the ones inside the house refused to exit, the man was shot and killed by those outside his house.
The back story, and the reason Mayor Shirley Washington has every right to pitch a fit, is that she had been working with the people in that neighborhood and the Pine Bluff Police Department for more than two years on the crime problem in that area.
We can just imagine the conversation with neighbors pleading with the mayor for some relief from the violence, and the mayor saying she was going to see that things improved. And when they didn’t — and after knowing pretty much exactly where the epicenter of crime is in that neighborhood — well, we can see the person in charge of the city — Mayor Washington — raising her voice. Of course she would. An innocent retiree had just been shot twice and killed for apparently no reason.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
As the mayor put it, she had been told by neighbors just how horrible conditions were in that area.
“So the guys in the cars were shooting at the guys on the corner,” she told our reporter, Dale Ellis, “and the guys on the corner were running around chasing them with their assault rifles shooting at them. In the process, the other houses in the neighborhood were getting shot up, cars were getting shot up, people were afraid to sleep in their beds at night. People were afraid to go out and mow their grass because they never knew when this was going to break out.”
Close your eyes and let those images sink in. What if that was happening across from where you live?
The mayor said police got a handle on the crime in that area for awhile, but the calm didn’t last, and now the violence has returned.
The police seem to be in a bit of a dither over how the mayor comported herself at the crime scene, saying Washington was “yelling.”
For her part, she said she’d never been to a crime scene.
“But this day, when the call came through, it was different,” Washington said, “because I’d been reaching out for so long about this same house at 3101 Lilac St.” She said she raised her voice but didn’t yell and didn’t shove anyone, which was also alleged.
As one of the neighbors said, gunshots in the neighborhood are a common occurrence and that when the police were called, they’d sometimes come out, sometimes they would stop and look around and “sometimes they would just ride through.”
Again, if ever there was a time for some forceful communication, it was then and now. This wasn’t a place that was unknown to the police; it is a place where crime is part and parcel with living. Certainly, there is a time for cooler heads and calmer conversation, but in the heat of that moment, yes, someone needed to yell out. And as long as the criminal element feels it’s OK to shoot a man to death in broad daylight, or any other time for that matter, every one of us needs to yell until our voices are heard all across this city.