LR posts 1st gain in crime in 5 years
Property offenses drive 3.9% rise
The capital city’s five-year drop in crime is over.
According to recently released figures from the Little Rock Police Department, investigators saw 16,681 major offenses committed in 2011, a 3.9 percent increase from the 16,057 such offenses in 2010. Major offenses include homicides, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, thefts, vehicle thefts and arson.
The increase comes after a gradual decline in crime dating back to 2006.
Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas said that after months of monitoring the city’s crime trends, he wasn’t surprised to see the increase.
Business robberies nearly doubled from 163 in 2010 to 300 last year, and burglaries went up 11 percent citywide, from 3,322 to 3,686 in the same period.
Although Thomas said he is displeased by the numbers, he points to the record lows of 2010, which saw the lowest number of major offenses since 1979, as a sign that his department’s efforts to curb and respond to crime are paying off.
The rise was mostly fueled by crime in the department’s Northwest Patrol Division, the city’s largest patrol division, which stretches from the businesses and retailers along University Avenue to the new developments on the city’s western limits.
Even though this part of the city historically sees fewer violent crimes than the other two patrol divisions, and did so again this year, it has more criminal acts and did so again in 2011, tallying 24 percent more incidents than the city’s downtown neighborhoods and 36 percent more than the city’s southwestern neighborhoods.
It’s property crime that’s pushing those numbers up.
While total larcenies, or thefts, went up only 4.7 percent in the northwest division, from 3,958 to 4,147, vehicle thefts rose more than 21 percent from 317 to 385.
Overall burglaries in northwestern neighborhoods swung upward by 27.8 percent, with last year’s 199 business burglaries marking a 48 percent boom from the 134 year before.
Residential burglaries rose by nearly 25 percent, going from 928 in 2010 to 1,158 the next year.
Thomas says crime rates have peaks and valleys. And while violent crime’s peaks and valleys may be more pronounced, such as the number of total homicides going from 28 in 2010 to 37 last year — a 32 percent increase — property crimes are a constant in Little Rock and a common affliction in all neighborhoods.
In their official statistics, Little Rock police do not count police-involved homicides or other homicides ruled as justified. In 2010, there were four non-criminal homicides and one in 2011.
“I always have concerns about violent crime,” Thomas said. “But [citizens] are more likely to have their car broken in ... their residences burglarized ... you have to try and strike a balance [with department resources].”
Sgt. Andre Dyer says eliminating property crime, especially in a patrol division that covers such a large area and encompasses so many types of neighborhoods, is next to impossible.
“It’s like trying to find the Abominable Snowman in Antarctica. He could be standing next to you and you wouldn’t know it, it’s so white out there,” Dyer said. “This place is so huge that if they wanted to hit John Barrow [Road] today, migrate to west Little Rock tomorrow, go to the top of University the next day ... we can’t be in two places at one time.”
Dyer has been chasing thieves for seven years in the city’s northwestern districts. The head of the Northwestern Patrol Division’s mobile squad, a team of uniformed and plainclothes officers meant to respond to “hot spots” of criminal activity, Dyer’s team has gotten good results. In 2011, it made 68 arrests for 153 burglaries, earning the department’s Police Unit Commendation last week.
Seated at the head of a small conference table Friday morning, Dyer met with his squad members to go over a list of names and vehicles he wanted his officers to pay attention to once they went out on their patrols. Many of the names are familiar, Dyer said, because the majority of the burglaries in the northwest are done by a “pod” of about 20 career thieves.
“We arrest the same people over and over [for burglary and breaking and entering],” Dyer said. “They get out [of jail] and they go right back to what they’re doing.”
When one gets arrested, one of his associates will come bail him out. When one group of two, three or four burglars are locked up, eventually another group comes in and picks up the slack.
On Thursday, they arrested one of their regulars.
Officers spotted Fred Hay walking along Mara Lynn Road. They arrested him and eventually charged him in a Feb. 29 burglary.
According to Hay’s arrest affidavits, he was charged in the burglary after the resident living in the 10800 block of Beverly Hills Road found some of Hay’s paperwork in his home.
It was Hay’s release papers from the Pulaski County jail from two days before the burglary.
“It’s always evolving. If we catch them once, they’ll switch something up, they watch us as much as we watch them,” Dyer said. “Every time they evolve, we have to evolve with them.”
The newest evolution, according to police, comes from the top.
In a part of a reorganization of a department that is counting on more money and more officers with new sales tax revenue, Thomas moved his property crime detectives out of the department’s headquarters and put them out in the three patrol division offices.
By having detectives working side by side with patrol officers and burglary squads under the same supervisors, Dyer said there is a faster response and a shared responsibility for property crimes occurring in his division.
“Instead of waiting for a detective to come from [the department headquarters downtown], they’re right there and we can go back out canvassing and working other burglaries in the neighborhood ... it should be an interesting summer.”
At-large City Board Director Joan Adcock has fielded criticism from citizens in the northwestern parts of the city who complained not only about crime problems, but a lack of police presence or visibility in their neighborhoods.
She thinks Thomas’ reorganization, along with the prospect of hiring as many as 60 new officers, will help renew the long-term crime reductions the city had enjoyed. Most important, according to Adcock, is keeping those concerned citizens involved in their own neighborhoods.
“[The city] really stepped up to help the citizens become a partner in fighting crime,” Adcock said. “The [police captains] are telling us how much more the community is reporting the crime and calling on it ... ‘It’s we’re not going to take it ...’ when we see [crime rates] go up, we realize we all have a part to play in this.”
Former head of the Coalition of Little Rock Neighborhoods, Clayton Johnson, is less enthusiastic.
A longtime resident in the Meriwether Park neighborhood, Johnson said he’s watched the Police Department initiatives start up and then go nowhere. Throwing more money at the problem or, more accurately, at more law enforcement resources, won’t result in a visible difference for citizens.
He said the city isn’t seriously interested in eliminating crime. They merely want to manage it.
“This year’s [numbers] suck, but it’ll drop 3 or 4 percent next year, but we never see any real declines,” Johnson said. “They have a problem they’re never going to fix because they won’t admit they have a problem. The city has a crime rate that is chronically elevated over the national levels ... but they can never fix it. They deny [the national data] ... but the numbers always work against them.”