If you had been in attendance at the most recent special meeting of the Pine Bluff City Council public safety committee, you would could have seen a number of important things. First, there was only one council member present, Irene Holcomb. Pine Bluff Police Department Chief Brenda Davis-Jones was there, as were Assistant Chief Ivan Whitfield and Deputy Chief Ricky Whitmore.
While this showing of city officials is laudable, the meeting was more memorable for what was missing: the public. There were exactly two members of the public in attendance — that’s right — two.
Rewind a bit to the murder adjacent to the 3 Gables nightclub. The same committee meeting bore witness to a standing-room-only crowd, seething with moral outrage at the violent spiral of community decline. Whither the outrage now?
Ironically, an editorial published just after that first meeting predicted this sorry turnout. Tempers would cool. Ardor would subside. Complacency would supplant urgency. It should not have.
With the most recent murder (and one other that might be declared by the state crime lab), we are on the precipice of having a murder rate for 2012 that is four times the national average. A quick glance at the calendar reminds us that it is still just April. The long hot summer awaits.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
If current trends persist, we could break yet another record in terms of local violence. As the public safety meeting showed, we may also break a record in terms of apathy. As Cassius tells Brutus, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Perhaps we didn’t pull the triggers, but nonetheless, we have allowed ourselves to become faulted “underlings” to the most dangerous of all civil perils: disinterest. Because the most recent spate of killing has been sufficiently de-sensationalized, we regard it as the normal course of things…. It’s Pine Bluff… lots of people just seem to get murdered. It is a gruesome nonchalance.
In this instance, we certainly cannot blame the police for inaction. They were present at the meeting. They were eager to listen, to field inquiries and to offer opinions. So too, was at least one member of the city council. Whatever criticisms may be lodged about the police in our community, this is one instance where they were on the ball and we (as citizens) were not.
Just to be clear, we do not assert that our local government is without problems. It has many and we routinely explore them in this venue. Rather, it is that we take for granted the level of access an average citizen has to their city officials.
Go to government meetings in other communities. They don’t always afford the general public the privilege of time at the microphone that we have here. Just as with the violence, we have taken this for granted.
While these last few murders have not been ugly, public, OK Corral gunfights in a public place, they were no less serious, no less evil and no less impacting on the fabric of who we are. Why then, did we forget?
There’s an old motivational aphorism that says we should act like the people we hope to become. We need to start acting like the community we hope to become. These meetings would be a good place to start.