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Scientists doing research are very slow to reach hard and fast conclusions, lest they confuse outcomes by attributing them mistakenly to a cause. And even then, the door is open for other researchers to take what was in the original experiment and add to it to see if indeed the results are consistent.
All that to say that the Group Violence Intervention program the city is using seems to be working, and by that we mean that the number of juvenile homicides have dropped to nothing as the program runs its course.
As is well known, two years ago the number of juvenile homicides grew to a very scary level, not that even one death is something we should abide, but when the total number of teen deaths made up a third of homicides in the city, observers knew something was horribly wrong.
Efforts to quell the violence had failed in the past, mainly, as some would say, because those efforts weren’t based on much of anything other than gut reactions to the situation. But other voices kept suggesting that there was an answer to the violence — answers that had been tested and had been shown to work in cities with bigger, more complicated issues than Pine Bluff had.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Enter GVI.
The program has been around for a few years and works because it takes methods that have been tested and proven successful — think more doctoral degrees and fewer police badges. The driving force here is the director, the Rev. Kevin Crumpton, who keeps an eye on house break-ins (offenders looking for guns, for instance) and shootings (which, if they were more precisely aimed, perhaps, would injure or kill).
GVI celebrates a break-through day every day, with no teen homicides in more than 450 days. A big number was when there had been a year since the most recent death. Now it’s been a full 15 months.
So does doing X — here, implementing GVI — cause Y — the dearth of teen homicides? So it would appear. As one person connected to the process said, there was a day when twice-a-month meetings to talk about recent shootings took two hours. Now, sometimes there isn’t much to discuss.
The chief cheerleader behind the program locally is Circuit Judge Earnest Brown Jr., who, as Mayor Vivian Flowers said, has pushed and prodded the program along, even when, in the early stages, it seemed like a gimmick. Now she is a firm believer in GVI and has taken three unfilled positions out of the police department’s budget and is turning that money over to be used to fill three more GVI positions. With those positions, the city can start focusing more attention on adult violence.
The term “defunding the police” took on a political life of its own a while back. In some quarters, there were those who thought the police, because of their excesses, had ceased to be trusted community partners and that some new iteration should take their place. That was, to be sure, an extreme view. But a less extreme view was to take some of the resources going to police departments and turn them to different but related purposes.
In a very real way, that is what is going on in Pine Bluff. Those police positions had not been filled for various reasons, but now the money that would have gone to fill them will instead be repurposed, not putting someone into a uniform but putting someone on the street who will work against crime in a different way.
As Judge Brown has said, there is a push to expand the program to other cities in the state — cities that could use Pine Bluff as a template. “For the first time, Pine Bluff is No. 1 in something good,” he said. No research needed there — that is something everyone can be proud of.