The homicide rate differs among Pulaski County law enforcement agencies and with the national increase for the first quarter of 2021.
An FBI report sampling 37 cities with data available for the first three months of the year shows homicide is up 18% relative to last year.
Despite this, North Little Rock has had less than half the number of homicides this year compared with the same period last year.
By the end of March last year, a total of seven victims had their lives taken in North Little Rock. In 2021, Friday's death of Darryl Porter being ruled a homicide by investigators made it the third homicide in the city.
Lt. Amy Cooper said although she is happy to have a lower rate of homicide, predicting what impacts the rate in North Little Rock is difficult.
"With crime, it ebbs and flows," Cooper said. "We see crime increase, and we see crime decrease. And that comes and goes with the times."
Cooper said she is happy for the citizens to have a secure environment.
"We've been very fortunate as a city for our citizens that we have seen a decrease," Cooper said. "It provides a sense of security for our citizens that we've seen this decrease. We would hope that the trend would continue and we would have a low year this year."
The same cannot be said for Little Rock, which, with 11 homicides so far, has continued posting high numbers -- a 57% increase in homicides from Jan. 1 to March 15 in 2021 over 2020, when the city had seven homicides through March.
When the trend of high homicide numbers began in the city heading into the summer of 2020, early theories from department members suggested the covid-19 pandemic and restrictions on business may have influenced people.
Little Rock Police Department spokesman Mark Edwards said that with many people in Arkansas being vaccinated, he thinks many of the individuals involved in homicides fail to resolve differences between each other.
"We think there's a little bit of [covid-19 influence], but also a lot of them are people who know each other who just can't solve differences," Edwards said.
While he said some of the deaths in Little Rock involve different groups not getting along, the majority involve altercations between individuals who are in a domestic relationship or have some personal disagreement.
"There's quite a few domestics this year already," Edwards said. "Of course, there's going to be some clique issues, we think. People are in little cliques that don't like this clique, but there's very few of those. A lot of them are people who know each other that just can't solve differences."
The Pulaski County Sheriff's Office does not track homicides by month, but it recorded nine deaths in the first three months of 2020 and is investigating two homicides this year, said spokesman Lt. Robert Garrett.
Garrett, who previously worked as a homicide detective, said that especially in the unincorporated county, you cannot predict homicides.
"As cliche as it sounds, you can't predict murder," Garrett said. "If somebody wants to kill somebody, they're going to kill somebody. You can try to get the actors that have a tendency for that type of behavior, but you still can't predict it."
Even while being able to catch and monitor those with violent tendencies, some of the suspects in the homicide cases do not have any criminal background, making it even harder to predict, Garrett said.
"In reality, most of the homicides that we've had especially out in the county were people who did not have much of a criminal past to begin with, like the double homicide we had at the end of last year," Garrett said. "That guy was in the military with no criminal history whatsoever. He just snapped."
He also said many of the violent crimes in the county are connected to drugs.
"The majority of ours are usually drug-related," Garrett said. "There is some kind of drug transaction or some kind of drug beef. We don't normally have stranger homicides. We don't have people who get accosted or killed in a robbery on the street where you would need to be able to defend yourself."