LITTLE ROCK — North Little Rock crime statistics released Thursday show noteworthy drops in both violent and property crime for the first six months of 2010 compared to the same period a year earlier, with violent crime at its lowest in at least five years.
Through June 30, the North Little Rock Police Department received 253 reports of violent crimes - everything from homicide to rape to robbery to aggravated assault. In the first six months of 2009, the department had received 328 such reports. According to month-by-month statistics obtained from the department, the 253 reportswere the fewest in a five-year period beginning with 2006.
In the same period, property crime - burglary, theft, forgery and the like - peaked during the first six months of 2008 at 3,160, up from 2,269 in 2006. In the first six months of this year, there were 2,526 reports, down from 2,813 in 2009.
“Great Work!!” North Little Rock Police Chief Danny Bradley wrote to his officers on an internal department bulletin board.
In an interview Thursday, Bradley said there was no one factor he could point to for the decreases. His department, where he has been chief since 2001, has gathered and analyzed more data thanin years past, he said.
“That means we can respond to problems more quickly and identify them before they get out of control,” he said.
Bradley also said he asked officers to make more traffic stops, in part to meet more people and see what else turned up - like guns, drugs or people with open arrest warrants.
“That doesn’t mean writing everybody a ticket,” the chief said. “But good things come from traffic stops.”
In the first six months of 2009, North Little Rock officers made 9,603 traffic stops, according to department records. They made 10,865 through June 30 this year.
But even when the numbers say reports of crime are down, it can feel different on the street.
Terry Eslick, president of the Rose City Neighborhood Association, said he has seen no difference.
“It really doesn’t seem to be much better to me over here,” he said. “The police might tell you there’s less crime, but when you live here 24/7, it really doesn’t seem like it.”
He said there were entrenched problems with neighborhood burglars and harassing gang activity. Police officers take too long to arrive and rarely do enough to produce real change, he said.
“I’ve told the chief and his lieutenants and I’ll tell you, too: I really think they’ve lost track of what we go through every day,” Eslick said.
He said police too often cannot see problems from his perspective or challenge conventional wisdom.
“I think they’ve made up their mind, that they think they’re doing what they can do and that’s the way it is,” Eslick said. “That doesn’t help me.”
The co-chairman of the Baring Cross Neighborhood Association on the other side of town, Jim Rose, said he takes police officers at face value when they say things are improving.
“It does seem to be less prolific than it has been,” he said. “It seems to be going in a good direction.”
According to the statistics released Thursday, North Little Rock police saw yearover-year declines in most categories.
Among violent crimes, reports of forcible rape decreased from 13 in the first six months of 2009 to eight in the first half of this year. Robberies went down from 110 to 81. Aggravated assaults were also fewer: 157 in 2010 in contrast to 193 in 2009.
And reports in categoriesof most property crimes also decreased. Burglaries declined from 653 to 548. Reports of thefts of motor vehicles also went down from the first six months of 2009 to the same period in 2010, from 409 to 323.
Little Rock police said they had no comparable data. The department has not finished analyzing data for May or even entering reports from June into its computer system.
Bradley, a former president of the Arkansas Association of Chiefs of Police, said he would like to take credit for all the declines, but they are consistent with national trends reported by the FBI in its annual Uniform Crime Reports. In the FBI’s preliminary report on 2009 statistics released in May, violent crime nationwide decreased 5.5 percent compared with 2008, with property crime down 4.9 percent. The year before, violent crime nationally declined 1.9 percent versus 2007, with property crime declining 0.8 percent.
“I don’t know that there’s anyone that can explain just what is happening,” Bradley said.
He said recent trends have demonstrated that the old thinking that a poor economy and high unemployment meant more crime was false.
“You can’t really find much of anyone anymore who will believe that,” he said.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 07/23/2010