As a concerned resident of Pine Bluff, I applaud all efforts to figure out ways that we can reduce our city’s currently high rate of murder. Yet, with each unfolding homicide incident here in Pine Bluff, it is clear that our public discussion of the city’s killing problemcould use some fine tuning. The handwringing and blame-casting that occur after each incident, though understandable, does little to move us toward real solutions to this problem.
In listening to townspeople, there is a tendency to blame the problem on morally calloused youths and young adults run amok. It is said that they come from dysfunctional families and their parents are principally to blame for their misdeeds. It is beyond a doubt that families matter, but such labeling leads to few practical modes of intervention/prevention.
Here, as in other cities faced with the same problem, proposed solutions for our homicide problem range along a spectrum from “quick fixes” to utopian idealism. After having repeatedly gone for the “hire more cops” solution during the past, we now embrace a “close those damned nightclubs” sentiment.
But there are no quick fixes for our city’s or the nation’s homicide problem. Making a dent in current rates of killing will require hard work from us all. But that hard work must be guided by an effort to first separate fact from fiction in terms of our understanding of the killing problem.
As it now stands, Pine Bluff’s homicide rate is more than 30 per 100,000. This is as high as rates in some big cities, and twice as high as the current rate of homicide for all blacks in the U.S. As I have said before, “we are a small town with a big city crime problem.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
At the same time, the U.S. as a whole has experienced a sharp drop in the homicide rate during the past 15 years or so. This has occurred among people of all races and age groups. The current (2010) homicide rate for the entire nation is 4.8 per 100,000. This is the same as it was in 1961. It has been much higher. During some years within the 20-year period between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, our nation’s overall homicide rate shot up to nearly 10/100,000, roughly twice what it is now.
Prior to the advent of the crack-cocaine epidemic, some of the highest rates of U.S. homicide were seen during the mid to late 1970s. One very high rate was recorded in 1973 (for both blacks and whites). Since the peak years for homicide, victimization and offending ages are between 18 and 35; this means that today the then-young males of the generation who experienced those high rates are now between the ages of 56 and 73. So much for the tendency among some in this age range to wax nostalgic about the “good old days.”
But there is some basis in fact for us old-timers’s belief that our youths, and increasingly those at younger and younger ages, are more and more at-risk for homicide offending and victimization. For example, Centers for Disease Control data reveals that that among 10-24 year-olds in the U.S. during 2007, non-Hispanic whites had a rate of 3.5/100,000. Hispanics were at 20.6/100.000. Black youth in this age range had a rate of 60.7/100,00. This racial difference is profound and tragic.
As for that nationwide crime drop of the past 15 years, statistics reveal that the nation’s biggest cities saw a much sharper decline in homicide rates than what was seen in many medium-sized and small cities such as Pine Bluff. Numbers and rates of killing in the biggest cities have declined rather steadily year after year over this period. But in some small- to mid-sized cities, rates have been less predictable. They have gone down one year only to increase again the next. In some such towns the rates never went down substantially.
By way of explanation, some observers have cited some evidence that crackdowns on gangs and drug dealing in many big cities over the years have driven some persistent criminals to migrate to smaller towns or even rural areas, bringing with them the violent ways they learned in the big city. Thus the drug use and trafficking epidemics that began in the big cities simply took time to get to smaller places, and with them we get more crime. The recent crackdown on drug dealing in Helena-West Helena shows how small towns have taken on big city trafficking patterns. Therefore, any search for solutions in one town must take into account the fact that criminals, like all Americans, are very mobile — a fact well known to law enforcement. Pine Bluff is not an island but is instead a “part of the main(land)”.
We have our work cut out for us, especially since none of the aggregate homicide rates data show the profound impact of poverty and joblessness on the risk of being a homicide victim or perpetrator. Yet, increasingly, we are a city of the poor, and the violent among them are armed with both bad attitudes and with the Second Amendment.
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Darnell Hawkins is a resident of Pine Bluff.