Anti-crime group making headway

These crime meetings are exasperatingly necessary. We are referring to the series of gatherings that the United Citizens of Pine Bluff group has been having. The organizers, state Rep. Vivian Flowers, Kymara Seals and Michael McCray, got some detailed crime information from the Pine Bluff Police Department and then conducted a survey, which was an eye-opener.

They then started a series of public meetings and are up into the double digits now with how many they’ve conducted. This past week, they met at Southeast Arkansas College and then downtown at the UAPB incubator where they talked to business leaders.

The result has been a painful, yet productive, experience that reminds us of an intervention. Like the whole family sitting down with Uncle Buck and talking to him about his drinking and how it can’t go on. All the warts are right there for all to see.

In this case, everyone has a story. Gun violence tops the chart, of course, which leads to a murder rate that is many times more the national average in the United States. In fact, we have more murders than many countries in the world and certainly a higher murder rate than many places around the globe.

Part of this exercise is to find a way to make life safer and more enjoyable for those living in Pine Bluff. The other is to be able to present Pine Bluff in such a way that people would be comfortable moving here to take a job or start a business. Who, the organizers ask, is going to move here when all we seem to do is produce jaw-dropping headlines about homicides and shootings?

One business owner said they had to put bullet-proof windows in their building to protect their employees — at an additional cost of many thousands of dollars.

What compelled them to do that was a spray of gunfire that, the owner said, would have killed someone had it not been after the employees went home. Was someone shooting at them? No, they were just caught in the crossfire.

Interim Police Chief Lloyd Franklin Sr. was equally candid, praising his officers for their progress, particularly for the Blue Rain program that has cracked down on crime in the past several months. But he also railed about some police officers who, as he has said before, don’t need to be police officers.

Another part of this that is commendable is that the organizers are from Pine Bluff so they know whereof they speak. They hear the same gunshots as the rest of us. Rep. Flowers said that gunfire was near enough recently that she had to duck for cover. Collectively, we are all shaking our heads.

We look forward to the next phase of this group’s plan, which is to take what they have learned and make recommendations for a saner way forward. They have enlisted the help of other anti-crime groups, such as the Pine Bluff Crime Commission and an anti-gang initiative called GRIP, and no doubt, they will need the support of city leaders and residents to make a difference.

One 72-year-old attendee at one of the meetings may have said it best when she noted that she had seen a lot of such efforts come on the scene and drift away into obscurity over the years. But United Citizens, she said, was different.

“I am extremely excited about the Pine Bluff Crime Commission, GRIP, and Blue Rain,” she said. “We have people now at this point and in my opinion, I have not seen this many people in a while wanting to do something.”