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| "IT'S LIKE WE ARE UNDER SIEGE" - DIRECTOR DORIS WRIGHT |
At a city board meeting back in March, Director Dorris Wright asked City Manager Bruce Moore to have the Little Rock Police Department provide information about what was behind a rash of shooting in the city, especially in her ward which encompasses parts of central and west Little Rock.
It took LRPD an entire month to provide City Manager Moore a paragraphs worth of information.
The paragraph about crime statistics was the easy part and probably took a couple of minutes to look that information up.
Why the city is afraid to speak plainly and admit that the shootings were gang related and instead used a euphemism that appears less dangerous is just as alarming as the ever increasing crime.
Just yesterday there were four shooting in less that five hours.
Here are some crimes that have occurred, all over the city in the last few days:
- A man armed with a large pistol forced two Little Rock Waffle House employees inside the business, which he then robbed.
- A man was struck with a gun and robbed by two men who approached him in a vacant lot near a Little Rock club where he had parked his car.
- A 63-year-old Little Rock man who was chopping wood outside his home Saturday afternoon was robbed at gunpoint by two men
- After a robber made off with an 81-year-old woman's purse outside a west Little Rock store Monday afternoon.
- The only one of these four publicized that was solved so far is the last one. Not by LRPD, but by a man who witnessed the crime who then chased after the assailant and recovered her stolen property of the 81 year old victim.
A story about this memorandum, which appeared on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette today, relates that violent crime is on the rise in Little Rock and there has been a 16% increase in violent crime from January 1, 2017 through April 17, 2017 compared to the same time period last year.
No word from the task force that Mayor Stodola formed quite some time ago to take care of the crime problem in Little Rock after spending a year or so doing research on how to reduce it himself.
Changes are needed in Little Rock municipal government. Just go to a Board of Director's meeting or watch videos of the meetings on the city's YouTube channel and it won't take you long to realize what those changes are.
