Another Little Rock Murder

Note from Steve:

While some of the people involved in some of these killings are probably gang members, right now it does not appear that this is a repeat of the Gang Wars of the early 90s but all it takes is one key gang leader being killed and the war will be on. The LRPD is aggressively pursuing their job and intervention and prevention people are also re-doubling their efforts.

It will be critical that the public realizes they must also be involved by working to dry up the recruit pool of young gang members. Remember our motto: "To Beat Gangs, We Must Compete With Gangs." This is becoming more and more difficult with the continued cutbacks in intervention and prevention funding. It is hoped that our community leaders will recognize that simply increasing jail-space is not going to fix this problem. Only a balanced spending of resources on both intervention and prevention efforts as well as suppression and law enforcement efforts will help.

Click on this link or go to www.KATV.com to hear a 6 minute interview with former gang leader Leifel Jackson turned preventionist. The former Crip leader has some interesting comments.

Also, go to wwwNLRYouthServices.blogspot.com to read how our city of North Little Rock is working to stay on top of the issue. Steve


With LR killings at 33, officials sensing a crisis

BY JIM BROOKS, CHARLIE FRAGO AND VAN JENSEN
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

The executive director of the Martin Luther King Commission on Tuesday called for Little Rock leaders to treat this year’s surge of homicides as “a crisis situation” after five slayings over the previous two days added to an already violent 2006.

State Sen. Tracy Steele, DNorth Little Rock, said that he was in the midst of drafting a set of recommendations, including putting more police officers on the street and finding a way to add more jail beds.

“If it’s a crisis, city leaders should treat it as such and the state should have a role,” Steele said.

If necessary, he said, the state should step in to reimburse surrounding counties - and possibly state prisons - for accepting overflow criminals from the Pulaski County jail.

The five slayings brought the total number of homicides to 33 for the year, putting the capital city on a course to surpass the 1993 record of 76 killings.

The city already has surpassed the number of homicides in 2000 by three, and it’s not far behind the numbers tallied over the past five years: 34 in 2001, 43 in 2002, 44 in 2003, 40 in 2004 and 41 last year.

Mayor Jim Dailey acknowledged that the city is struggling to find an effective response. “There are so many emotions you go through,” Dailey said. “One is just frustration, and another is the obvious human reaction as you think of people and families that are affected.”

“The third one is: What are we going to do?” the mayor said. Little Rock is not alone in facing an increase in the number of homicides.

Professor Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said substantial declines in murder rates during the 1990s halted around the turn of the century. Now some cities are experiencing a rise in homicides, while others like New York and Chicago remain below their historic highs.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2005, to be made public Monday, will show a rise in murder rates in many cities, he said.

“It might be that Little Rock is part of a broader pattern,” said Rosenfeld, co-author of Crime and the American Dream and numerous scholarly articles.

Usually influencing homicide rates are a mix of social factors like a faltering local economy, new drug markets, heightened gang activity, policy decisions like early release from jails and prisons and a reduction in police department staffing.

“The first place to look is always local conditions,” Rosenfeld said.

BLOODY MONDAY

Monday began with the discovery of a double homicide in Hindman Park in southwest Little Rock.

Cousins Monte Johnson, 21, and Sean Johnson, 18, both of Little Rock, were discovered lying near a road, each shot multiple times. The killings occurred a short distance from the scene of a Sunday-morning slaying.

Late Monday night, officers were dispatched to another killing in southwest Little Rock, where a fight in an apartment complex parking lot at 6320 Butler Road left 17-year-old Bernardo Zavala of Little Rock dead.

About 45 minutes later - and several miles away - 46-year-old Terry Baird, also of Little Rock, was shot to death during a dispute with an unknown man behind a residence at 202 E. 27th St. in downtown Little Rock.

No arrests had been made in any of Monday’s or Sunday’s slayings.

In a Tuesday morning interview with The Associated Press, Dailey said he worried that a “war on the street” was to blame for the surge in homicides.

“It is shocking. It is sad because lives are affected, families are impacted,” Dailey told the news agency. “It’s almost like there’s some sort of rivalry or war on the street going on with some of these individuals or groups.”

Later Tuesday the mayor said his words probably represented an overreaction.

“I think that was an emotional response and it’s probably an overstatement,” he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “It was a gut feeling, a visceral reaction to the situation.”

But the mayor said he believed that the recent slayings may signal a shift in the homicide dynamic - with isolated “dispute-related ” slayings giving way to retaliation killings.

“It does seem that there is more of a retaliation or a reaction or response, with more violence as opposed to something that might be more random,” Dailey said. “There might be some connect-the-dots potential.”

Little Rock City Manager Bruce Moore agreed with Dailey.

“Obviously, the two in Hind-Benny Johnson (left) and Robert “Say” McIntosh add a cross Tuesday to a display of crosses at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Daisy Gatson Bates Drive that mark the number of Little Rock homicides in 2006. man Park leave a lot of unanswered questions,” Moore said. “The other two [Monday slayings ] appear to be random - two individuals just getting into some type of altercation and deciding to pull out some type of weapon.”

But the city manager said the police are doing everything they can to address the situation.

“The men and women of the department are doing an excellent job, and we’re committed to providing all the needed resources. Operation Quiet Nights is being very effective,” Moore said, referring to a recently established program in which the Police Department floods some high-crime neighborhoods with officers during the evening hours. The areas are selected because of the incidence of “shots-fired” calls, as well as by accounts of drug and prostitution activity.

“We’re getting a lot of firearms and a lot of drugs off the streets,” said Moore, who met with the mayor and Police Chief Stuart Thomas on Tuesday to discuss the matter.

During the first month of Operation Quiet Nights, officers arrested 267 people, the chief said.

“Not all of them go to jail, but because the program puts more officers on the street at critical times, it disrupts the activity in certain neighborhoods,” Thomas said.

“I don’t think it is a manpower issue,” he added, although the department has about 40 vacant officer positions.

RESIDENTS MORE ALERT

While comparisons are being made between this year’s violence and that of the mid-1990 s during the height of the gang wars, Moore said the circumstances this year are different because they lack the element of open gang warfare. But even so, he said, each death is a tragic loss for a family.

“We’re focused on violent crimes and ones that are causing our young - mainly black - males to lose their lives,” Moore said. “As a city, we’ve got to address it.”

Joan Adcock, a city Board of Directors member who lives in southwest Little Rock’s Ponderosa-Brookwood neighborhood, said residents have become more alert to potential trouble.

“They’re a little more concerned with what’s going on around them, reporting things that a month or so ago might have seemed minor,” she said.

Adcock and her neighbors have noticed more aimlessness and anger among young people, she said.

“People are not moving out of the street when you drive down the street. There are [many] more young men just hanging out.”

Adcock and other neighborhood activists said that fewer beds at the Pulaski County jail have created a lack of fear among criminals.

“It all goes back to the problem of not having a viable jail,” said Herb Dicker, president of Southwest United for Progress and of Neighborhood Connections, an umbrella group of the city’s neighborhood associations. “At 880 beds, it’s just a revolving door.”

The jail is operating this year with 245 fewer beds than last year, the result of a county budget shortfall. For that reason, the facility has been closed for much of the year, and misdemeanor inmates have been either released early or not incarcerated at all. Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley also attributed the upsurge in homicides to the overcrowded jail.

“The No. 1 factor - not enough jail beds,” the prosecutor said. “I can’t prove it, but my 16 years of experience tells me that there is a feeling on the street that there are no consequences [for crime].”

Finding a way to raise money for a larger jail is at least part of the solution, Adcock and Dicker said.

“It’s time to stop talking about it and take some action,” Adcock said.

B.J. Wyrick, a city director also representing southwest Little Rock, said her constituents are scared, but counseled patience with the Quiet Nights initiative.

“One of the things Chief Thomas cautioned us about was when [police] concentrate on problem areas, what happens is they’ll leave and go to other areas,” she said. “As for what happened in Hindman Park, potentially these might be coming from another location.”

The police need some time to fully implement the new strategy, Wyrick said.

“I think the approach is right. It may take us a while to figure out who is involved in this stuff,” she said.

‘FLASH-POINT KILLINGS’

Thomas said the slayings that have been cleared by the arrest of a suspect reveal they are not related to one another. He called such slayings, over personal disputes, “flash-point killings.”

“Arguments between people that would be solved [in the past] with punches are increasingly being settled with deadly weapons,” the chief said. “There is a ready availability of weapons and a willingness to use them.”

Drug use also is involved in many of the homicides cleared by arrest so far, the chief said.

“For some people, particularly those whose judgment may be impaired by use or abuse of drugs, is [the likelihood of going to jail] a consideration at the flash point?” the chief said. “I don’t know.”

The only real pattern to this year’s homicides seems to be chaos, said Jeffrey Walker, a professor in the department of criminal justice at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

“In ’93, it was a gang war with a relatively limited number of people in a relatively confined area,” Walker said. “Now... it is still related to drugs, but not in a narrow way.”

Walker called the current situation a “system overload,” with additional criminals on Little Rock streets because of jail overcrowding and other factors.

“That destabilizes the system, puts more people in contact where tensions can flare, and creates competition,” Walker said.

Little Rock police Sgt. J.B. Stephens, who commands the department’s street narcotics unit, agreed. “I can buy that,” Stephens said, saying a large number of the people his unit arrests end up being released from jail on citations.

“It’s not unusual for me to see the same person out on the street the next night,” he said. ‘‘It starts a vicious cycle.”

The shift of homicides out of the “iron rectangle” lends credence to the theory, Stephens and others said.

In the early 1990s, homicides in Little Rock were largely contained to a rectangular area in the middle of the city. Bordered by Interstate 630 on the north, Broadway on the east, Roosevelt Road and Asher Avenue on the south and University Avenue on the west, the area saw 27 of the 63 murders in Little Rock in 1994.

As recently as 1997, more than half the city’s homicides occurred in the “iron rectangle,” according to a Democrat-Gazette map from that year. But so far this year, only eight of the 33 homicides have taken place inside the area. Seven killings have occurred in a small area southeast of the “iron rectangle,” and eight have occurred below West 65th Street in southwest Little Rock.

A demographic comparison of homicide victims and suspects between this year and 1993 show minor differences. This year’s victims have averaged 35 years of age, while 1993’s victims were almost four years younger.

But the ages of suspects for 2006 and 1993 are within threetenths of a year, on average.

As in 1993, the victims and suspects this year are mostly black, but a higher percentage of whites have been killed so far than in the record year.

Homicides also are much more contained to males. Ninety percent of victims and suspects this year have been men, while just more than 83 percent were men in 1993.

Police Chief Thomas distinguished between a gang-related slaying and one committed by a gang member.

“There are gangs out there and there always will be. We have had some gang-related slayings in the past, and we will in the future. But is there an organized fight or dispute out there between one or more groups? I’m not sure there is.”

Thomas said he’s in constant communication with his law-enforcement colleagues.

“We’re tapping into every resource that is out there,” he said. “But I believe we are deployed and responding in a state-of-theart fashion.”

This story was published Wednesday, June 07, 2006