Micro-focus needed

We all had to hear the tired, tragic refrain from the same old song last Friday night in North Little Rock.

Late night at a convenience store. A teen robber with a hoodie and a gun. A shot, a murder, all caught on video.

Some details made it even more heart-wrenching and blood-boiling.

The victim was an airman who lived by the Air Force oath, in which he solemnly swore to defend we the people against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He saw an armed robbery and sacrificed his life trying to stop it.

He was just a few years older than the alleged shooter.

Four local teens (from age 16 to 18) have been arrested, and police reports indicate the group drove around for about an hour looking for some place to rob.

It’s impossible to know how many other automobiles passed the suspects’ vehicle during those 60-some-odd minutes, but none of the passersby or pedestrians at stoplights knew how dangerously near they were to gun-toting, murderous criminals.

No one working in the businesses the group cased knew how perilously close they came to personally staring down the barrel of a semi-automatic handgun that night.

From a societal threat standpoint, it’s important to understand that while the actual shooting only took a few seconds, the lethal risk lasted more than an hour.

The legal system will focus on those moments in that store. But if this violent chorus of disconsolate angst and grief is ever to improve, our social structure must strive first to eliminate the hour leading up to it.

And before we can ever hope to uncover effective solutions—as opposed to all the failed feel-good efforts—we have to achieve a much clearer public consciousness of how violent crimes unfold and who most often commits them.

Because it is tracked, measured and reported statistically, it’s easy to think of violent crime as a “thing” itself. But crime is not an infection that befalls our society; every act of violence is individual and willful.

Improvements will occur only when the behavior of criminal individuals changes.

But most solutions start at the largest group levels, rather than the narrowest individual ones, and that’s a key impediment to progress.

It helps explain why, after hundreds of millions of dollars in increased education, welfare and incarceration spending in Arkansas over the years, our violent crime rate remains stubbornly high—and the correlating quality of life in the most-affected areas despairingly low.

Analyzing state averages on anything that is purely individualized, such as crimes like murder, often does more harm than good.

Statewide, Arkansas suffered 258 murders in 2017. The normal calculation for murder rate is to break it down by a metric like this: With a total population of 3 million, our rate is 8.6 murders per 100,000 people (the highest in 20 years).

The flaw in that rate assessment is that it spreads the murders out in all directions and across all ages. That’s not how the murders occurred at all.

One county—Pulaski—accounted for 75 murders, or nearly 30 percent of the total number.

Since Pulaski County’s population was around 390,000 in 2017, by doing the easy calculation, Pulaski’s murder rate comes in much higher at 19 murders per 100,000 people.

But that figure still presents a uniform rate as if murders are committed by perpetrators spread evenly throughout the population age groups.

In fact, the disuniformity by generation is enormous. FBI Uniform Crime Rate data show that among known offenders, 38 percent of all murders are committed by people (overwhelmingly male) between the ages of 13 and 24.

Census data report the number of males aged 15-24 in Pulaski County to be fewer than 24,000, only six percent of the total population.

That means roughly four out of every 10 murders in Pulaski County—29 of 2017’s 75—are committed by a population segment that excludes 94 percent of the residents.

The volumes and rates for other violent crimes (rape, robbery and aggravated assault) are much higher, and retain the disparity of offenders by age group.

In a better world, one that many other states enjoy, the brave airman Shawn McKeough, Jr. should be alive. And the four teenage suspects should be in school, not jail.

Similarly sized population states like Utah and Iowa have violent crime rates half of what we endure. They obviously know and do things we don’t.

The violent crime problem, including gun crime like Friday night’s, is highly saturated within a minuscule percentage of a single age group inside easily identifiable geographical boundaries.

That calls for a truly surgical focus. Anything that hints of one-size-fitsall or even/most isn’t a solution; it’s a distraction or, worse, a dereliction.

It also calls for urgency in reworking outdated juvenile laws to address the more violent nature of crimes, and more open sharing of information between schools and law enforcement.

Successful intervention for only a few thousand young hearts over the course of a year would drastically reduce our crime rate and its victimization.

With all our resources, can it really be so hard?