It was a lot to digest in an hour or so meeting of the city’s Public Safety Committee. The subject was crime in Pine Bluff and how the city should deal with it. That problem has been a constant source of irritation for the city and one that has been studied and thought about for decades. Consequently, it was not likely that a quick answer was going to make itself known in such a short discussion. But every little bit helps, we suppose.
Certainly, everyone is on edge. The latter part of August had several high-profile violent events, as did the first week of September. In all, there have been six homicides and eight people shot and wounded in about a three-week period. Even by Pine Bluff standards, those are significant numbers.
We won’t rehash the firing and reinstatement of the police chief, but that obviously was the result of some frustration on the part of the mayor in the wake of such a string of disturbing events.
What stood out from the committee meeting were the variety of solutions that were floated. For one, in response to the spate of killings, Chief Kelvin Sergeant has pulled in officers from various other areas of the police force and put them on the streets, thereby saturating the city with police who were directed to have zero tolerance for traffic and other infractions.
That seems to have worked over the three-day Labor Day weekend, as things were quiet then, but then flooding the zone is not a sustainable plan. For one, those other areas of the police department, where many of those officers work, will eventually need to have their staff back in place; otherwise, those departments are going to suffer. And then there’s the overtime that will be costly.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The other ideas that were tossed out were issues that have plagued Pine Bluff for a long time. Sergeant said the city needed “buy in” from the community, and he suggested that “jobs, education (and) housing all those things will help crime.”
Absolutely, they all would, but to hang one’s hat on those, which are goals that will likely take years to see come to fruition, is to postpone the idea of a safe community, well, for years.
He also said he was going to look into getting some equipment that would help the department fight crime, such as a remote surveillance tower, license plate readers and cameras to monitor intersections in high crime areas. Those might hold some promise, but as Alderman Win Trafford pointed out, both the police and fire departments have wish lists filled with high-ticket items, and the city has to plan accordingly in order to be able to buy those items.
Then the subject of quality-of-life issues was raised by Mayor Shirley Washington with one possibility being to go in with the county on a race track, with the thinking being that youngsters who race in the streets would use the track instead.
Housing, jobs, education, a race track. As one can see, the conversation veered pretty far away from actual policing. All of which points up the fact that crime in Pine Bluff is a multi-faceted, multi-layered problem without any easy answers.
We suggest more of the same in the way of conversations on the subject but in a structured atmosphere that invites input from the community as well as from those who have been there, done that.
We are not the only town of our size with a crime problem. Let’s put together a commission on crime. Let’s hear what the good folks of Pine Bluff have to say. Let’s bring in professionals who have been involved in cleaning up crime in other communities. Let’s put together a multi-faceted, multi-layered plan that is equal to the foe we are fighting.
Most important, let’s not take our eye off this ball until we see it land in our mitt. Let’s not grow complacent and leave the subject behind because crime is not on the front page for a few weeks.
We have invested a lot in ourselves, millions upon millions to go forward. People outside our borders are starting to sit up and notice. But we are not going to go as far forward as we otherwise could if we don’t solve this crisis. And we need to start today.