LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock’s Board of Directors Tuesday pledged City Hall support to community efforts to decrease crime and invited activists to join the discussion of how the city will spend prevention, intervention and treatment money.
City Manager Bruce Moore said he expects the conversation to begin next month after the city’s director of community programs presents a detailed report on currently funded programs.
Led by Vice Mayor Dean Kumpuris, the city board puta hold on any new spending of prevention, intervention and treatment money. That line item almost doubles to about $6 million after passage of a sales-tax increase. The city will begin seeing revenue from the increase in March.
“It is not an effort that you’re going to solve or that we’re going to solve. We may have a small chance of solving it together but that’s the only way,” Kumpuris said. “We’re a city that’s unique in the United States. We’ve got $6 million to try to help the situation and we’re going to revamp it because obviously $3million helped a lot of things but we weren’t maximizing what we were getting for our $3 million ... What we’ve said is we’re stopping and we’re going to put our money into efforts where we think we can get the biggest bang for our dollar.”
The Rev. Benny Johnson, founding director of Stop the Violence, said of particular concern is black-on-black crime. He and others in the group said the board must show more concern.
Johnson called for tougher enforcement of loitering laws, especially around convenience stores and other places that sell alcohol.
“It seems like the city doesn’t even care,” Johnson said during a presentation to the board. “If this type of killing was going on in the white community, the city would be shut down. You couldn’t go up to Hillcrest or out in Chenal Valley and see people standing around in front of stores.”
After the meeting, Johnson said he was hopeful.
“I think we really got our point over tonight,” he said. “We’ll have to stay on top of it, though, and we will.”
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 01/18/2012