Unnecessary resistance

Reform shouldn’t mean ‘defund’

The headlines deliver the disturbing news from around the nation. On Friday morning, it was a 2-year-old boy killed by gunfire in West Memphis. His mother, also injured, is expected to recover.

On Thursday, a 71-year-old man fatally shot three during a potluck dinner at an Alabama church.

Authorities in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, stopped a rented box truck and found 31 similarly dressed men with riot gear who were, according to the town’s police chief, on their way to riot at a LGBTQ+ Pride event. Police say the men hailed from 11 different states. One of them was from Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Last week, a West Virginia man was charged with opening fire in a Maryland machine shop. Three of his co- workers died. Before that, it was a guy in Tulsa who was mad at his back surgeon, so naturally, he shoots the physician and others.

It’s a good thing we all live in Northwest Arkansas, right?

That’s a nice sentiment, but it’s also heavy on wishful thinking. Exceptional as our little piece of the world is, it’s not at all immune from violence. Three men were arrested last month after a “rolling disturbance” in Fort Smith between several people in at least two vehicles. A man was shot in the head. Three men were arrested, two in Fort Smith and one in Fayetteville.

In Rogers last month, a 16-yearold girl was charged as an adult with attempted capital murder and other charges related to nearly a dozen shots fired at a house. Inside were four people, including a 7-year-old girl.

Of course, it makes the news when someone gets hit by a bullet, but how many times are guns being fired that put people’s lives at risk but, through good fortune, nobody is injured? Bullets always hit something. It’s just a matter of time before “shots fired” turn into “someone’s been hit.”

Let’s not forget about the incident that left one man shot in the chest in the Walton Arts Center parking lot in Fayetteville in April. Some men, in their 20s, had gotten into a fight in one of the bars earlier. As the bars closed, one man who had been involved approached the wounded man’s group, with a gun in plain sight, according to police. Turns out the man who was eventually wounded was also carrying a gun, so he pulled it out and tried to fire, failing because the gun malfunctioned. But others responded and, by the time the shooting stopped, more than 30 bullets had been fired. Five vehicles were struck.

Does anyone think the fact nobody else was struck by a bullet makes this any less of a concern for public safety?

Arkansas has, in the last decade, become an “open carry” state, allowing anyone to possess a gun as long as they do not have intent to unlawfully employ the weapon against anyone. There’s lots of room for debate over how that law should be applied, but Republican leaders in the state, including Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, have said they believe Arkansas’ law allows for open carry.

Law enforcement today operates in an environment where guns are plentiful and — even when they expect a person is up to no good — they have limited capacity to do anything about it until the bullets start to fly.

What brings all this up? Police Chief Mike Reynolds asked the Fayetteville City the other night for permission to apply for a $625,000 Department of Justice grant to help his agency hire and pay five officers. They would form a violent crime response unit. The city would match the three-year grant with $341,555 and there would also be $292,054 in additional project expenses.

His idea is ( 1) to add officers to a department that doesn’t have enough and (2) relieve patrol officers, already stretched thin, of having to drop what they’re doing anytime an incident of violence breaks out. He also says a dedicated group of officers can allow for a more proactive approach to violent crime, including prevention.

Surely, everyone is aware that national incidents of violence have spiked in the last few years. Reynolds noted growth in violent crime locally, too. The city had 19 homicides between 2012 and 2018, then it matched that number between 2019 and 2022.

The overall violent crime stats show growth, from 432 instances of homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault in 2019 to 555 such incidents in 2021.

Reynolds acknowledges plenty of other communities would love to “just” have Fayetteville’s numbers, but “For Fayetteville, Arkansas, they’re as high as we’ve seen.”

Thankfully, the City Council approved the Police Department’s application for the grant and, if it’s approved by the Department of Justice, will hopefully follow through with accepting it. Let’s hope the City Council doesn’t get cold feet — as it did once rejecting federal money to add some more police officers to protect local schools — and leave Fayetteville less protected.

There are those who would have it that way. Sarah Moore, who speaks for a nonprofit group called the Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition, asked City Council members to reject applying for the federal money. She’s got a list of ideas she supports, but the common theme among her addresses to local governing bodies is to stop cities and counties from spending a dime more on either law enforcement or jail cells, and reduced spending would be just fine with her, too.

Anti- poverty work, affordable housing, mental health care, substance abuse treatment — that’s how she’d like Fayetteville to respond to folks willing to shoot up Dickson Street.

As we’ve said before, we appreciate the potential of programs like she mentions to make a difference for some people who get crossways with state and local laws. Cities and counties that believe those reforms can make a long- term difference should invest in them.

Where we part ways with such reformers is their insistence that to get what they want, they need to stifle spending on law enforcement.

Our communities need law enforcement. Fayetteville, specifically, could benefit from adding some officers.

We’ve said it before, so we’ll say it again: Whatever gains can be made through judicial reforms and how communities respond to disturbances, they cannot replace the need for law enforcement and jail cells as a firm foundation for criminal justice efforts. People willing to break laws need to know that, if they refuse to change their ways, law enforcement will eventually catch up with them and communities will have jail cells available to put them in.

It’s foolish to believe any reforms will relieve the world of dangerous people, those willing to hurt others to get what they want. It’s also foolish to suggest the aforementioned reforms necessitate resistance to every law enforcement request for funding, unless “defunding” police is the real goal.