Force use declining, Little Rock chief says

Crime report to detail 2022 incidents

LITTLE ROCK — A crime statistics report set to be released next month will show a decline in police use- offorce incidents in Little Rock from about 450 in 2009 to 224 last year, the city’s new police chief said Saturday.

Speaking at the monthly meeting of the Coalition of Little Rock Neighborhoods at the Willie L. Hinton Neighborhood Resource Center, Chief Heath Helton said the report will also include details on the use-of-force incidents and complaints against the department.

His announcement was in response to a request from coalition President Kathy Wells, who complained that neighborhood advocates have urged the department to release such a report for “many decades.”

“Please start that,” Wells said. “We had this [incident], and this was the context and this was the outcome, whatever that might have been, justified, disciplined, whatever.”

She said it would be “a way to build that community trust.”

Helton said such a report is required, due to the Police Department being certified by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.

The report is currently 5758 pages long, he said.

“It’ll have a digital format that will push it out,” Helton said. “Then I’m also [putting] this nice little magazine thing together.”

Helton said, “We got to do a better job educating the public. I think we haven’t done a very good job of doing that in the past.

“I think when the public doesn’t know, just like anybody else, I think it’s human nature … whether it’s because we fear what we don’t know and if I don’t get an answer, I’ll just fill in the blank that helps me rationalize whatever’s there.”

Wells also asked the department to provide a “searchable variety of the police manual” on its website.

“Yes, [the manual] is there, but if I wanted to look at use of force, that’s nowhere in the chapter titles, and there’s no way to search for that,” Wells said.

During his roughly onehour meeting with the group, Helton, who was sworn in Jan. 26, also addressed guns and violent crime in Little Rock in 2022.

He said 732 guns were taken off the streets while 573 people were arrested for possessing illegal firearms.

While Little Rock saw a record 81 homicides in 2022, Heath said the city’s overall violent crime numbers were down 10%.

The “bulk” of the homicides were domestic or acquaintance-related, he said.

Heath also said his department — which is authorized by the city to budget for about 594 officers — has 92 vacancies. A new class of 28 is expected to start Monday, bringing the vacancy total down to 64.

At one point, founding coalition president Jim Lynch brought up the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis last month.

Nichols died on Jan. 10, three days after he was beaten by five members of the Memphis Police Department’s so- called Scorpion unit. The unit was composed of three teams of roughly 30 officers who targeted violent offenders in areas with high crime rates. It was disbanded in the wake of Nichols’ death.

“Do we have any of these specialized … units in the LRPD, and how are they governed?” Lynch asked.

Helton said the department has a street crimes unit that mostly works with the Detective Division and with the state’s probation and parole agency on some of its home visits.

“We’re [ a] data- driven agency,” Helton said. “So we identify areas of the city that are having an influx of violent crime. We put street crimes in there, and they’re high visibility and basically proactive. Whether they’re making traffic stops or we’re going after those individuals that we know are truly the worst of the worst. And a lot of times they’re looking for certain individuals and things of that nature.”

Helton observed that when it comes to smaller, specialized units, “You have to make sure you have adequate supervision.”

“I think when you see the Memphis incident come out, there’s probably going to be some some issues regarding, ‘Where was the supervision? What was their training?’ We’re going to see that probably become more and more as a topic. Right after this happened, I sat down with our chief who’s over that bureau and said, ‘Look, you need to make sure they’re fully [trained].’”

One of Helton’s goals is to create a “behavior response team.”

Helton said about 37% of the department is certified in crisis intervention training.

Helton wants to pair about four certified officers with the department’s social workers and have them respond to calls related to people experiencing mental health crisis or dealing with an unsheltered individual.

He said “tragic” incidents like the death of Nichols and the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020 hinder the department’s recruitment efforts.

“When we talk about it, there’s bad [professionals] everywhere. There’s bad lawyers, bad doctors and things like that, bad school teachers,” Helton said. “But I think no other profession gets vilified like we do. I mean, we see stories running all the time on the news about how teachers have committed sexual assault on children.

“That profession doesn’t get vilified. We have been vilified, and that makes it very, very tough to recruit and get people into the profession. And still, I’d say the bulk of the men and women that come to work every day do so for the right reasons. They do it because they want to serve, they want to give back. They want to protect. They want to do all those great things, but that continued vilification hurts when I think predominately the majority of the citizens here in Little Rock, I think support law enforcement, know that we have to have it.

“But we have a small group of naysayers who get a lot of play, whether it’s on social media, whether it’s regular media, whatever it is, they get a lot of airtime. And so that’s what resonates more and more with people when they try to choose professions.”