Black-on-black crime

Baton Rougseeks a solution
By KIMBERLY VETTER

Priscilla Givins has a hard time looking at photos of her grandson, who was killed almost a year ago a block away from her home.

“I can’t stand to look at him,” she said, holding a handful of pictures she only recently got out of safekeeping. “It’s too painful.”

Givins’ grandson, 19-year-old Barry Heard, was gunned down March 16 in the 1200 block of South 15th Street hours after serving as the best man in his father’s wedding.

Heard was one of 82 homicide victims in East Baton Rouge Parish last year. He also represents the high percentage of those victims who are black males.

Of the 2008 homicide victims, 89 percent were black and 83 percent were male. An even greater proportion of the people arrested in those homicides fit the same description: 92 percent are black and 87 percent are male.

Chris Crothers, a spokesman for the Foundation for the Mid South, wrote a report on the disparities faced by black males who are 16 to 44. He said in an interview that the statistics for East Baton Rouge Parish are unfortunate, but unsurprising.

Black males in Louisiana are 10 times more likely to be murdered than their white counterparts, Crothers found in his study.

“In Louisiana, the age-adjusted homicide rate for black males is 54 (per 100,000 people) compared to 5 (per 100,000 people) for white males,” he writes.

Black-on-black offenses in the mid-South accounted for 94 percent of homicides between 1976 and 2005, he writes. Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi make up the mid-South in the study.

In general, black males have a 29 percent chance of being incarcerated at some time during their lives, which in 2001 was six times higher than the prevalence of imprisonment for white males, Crothers says in his study.

In 2000, more black males were imprisoned in the mid-South than enrolled in higher education, he says.

In Louisiana that year, there were 4,375 more black men in prison than in college, a number greater than in Arkansas and Mississippi combined, the study shows.

“I hope it’s a wake-up call,” he said in an interview. “I hope when people start putting the numbers together and look and the stats … that people will start asking the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘How can we turn things around?’ It’s definitely a call to action.”

Causes of violence

Edward Shihadeh, an LSU sociology professor and criminologist, has asked such questions and looked at what drives violence in Baton Rouge.

A study he did in the early 1990s found that economic deprivation — not race — accounted for a disproportionate concentration of serious crime in predominately black neighborhoods.

“Middle-class African-American neighborhoods in Baton Rouge are not plagued by homicide, assault and burglary,” Shihadeh says in the study.

But, “If you lay a map of crime over a map of unemployment and a map of poverty, all those maps look the same,” he said in an interview.

Shihadeh also found that black people in Baton Rouge are disproportionately concentrated in poor neighborhoods with high rates of unemployment, poverty and income inequality.

“It’s not so much that we have more poor, but that they are concentrated into small areas of town,” Shihadeh said.

The majority of black people in Baton Rouge live in neighborhoods that are more than 80 percent black, Shihadeh found in his study.

Residential segregation is a major predictor of the rates of homicide and robbery among black people, Shihadeh says in another one of his studies.

“Black isolation has profoundly negative consequences,” he writes. “Secluded in their own communities, many urban blacks lack the sustained contact with mainstream institutions necessary for upward social and economic mobility.”

So it’s not surprising that homicide victims and perpetrators share demographics, Shihadeh said.

“Most homicides require interpersonal action, often times involving minor disputes turning into altercations,” he said.

Preventing murder

To lower crime among black people, and in communities as a whole, Shihadeh said residential segregation must be fought and welfare that requires people to stay in one place must be abolished.

“You’ve got to free people up to move around,” he said. “If you allow them to move around, you allow them to move up.”

Another issue that can be tackled is vacant housing, which gives people an opportunity to commit crime, Shihadeh said. Vacant housing, he added, needs to be torn down.

Houses that harbor drug dealers also need to be taken down, Priscilla Givins said, adding that if it weren’t for such a house she believes her grandson would still be alive.

“If the people who killed him hadn’t moved into the neighborhood, he would still be here,” Givins said. “Drugs have a lot to do with the killing of young black men. There’s no doubt about it.”

Baton Rouge Police Chief Jeff LeDuff said preventing crime, especially murder, has to be an individual, as well as a collaborative effort, among parents, teachers, law enforcement, government, social organization and others.

“We have to teach conflict resolution,” LeDuff said. “We have to spend time with our children teaching them that a human life is more valuable than anything you can buy.”

That’s why the Police Department is involved in various community programs, has specialized task forces and crime-abatement teams and spends time in area schools, LeDuff said.

One program the Police Department plans to implement in the near future, LeDuff said, involves moving his office once a month to various Baton Rouge neighborhoods.

“You won’t have to come downtown to see me,” he said. “I’m going to come see you.”

Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokeswoman with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, said Sheriff Sid Gautreaux attempts to prevent crime by educating the community about crime prevention and the devastating effects of crime.

The sheriff educates the community via crime victims assistance programs, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in schools, junior deputies and Neighborhood Watch, Hicks said.

“We will stay on the course in being proactive in crime prevention through education, partnerships with other agencies and neighborhoods, internal cooperation among departments, visibility in high-crime areas, working with youths and community outreach,” she said.

John Smith with the Baton Rouge civic group 100 Black Men said his organization, in conjunction with Baton Rouge Constable Reginald Brown, is looking to convicts for answers.

“We are going to ask them what we can do and what were some of the contributing factors to their situations,” Smith said. “From there, we are going to come up with different strategies to tackle this problem.”

Will continue to recruit

In the meantime, the organization will continue to recruit youth to participate in Brown’s radio talk show once a month, Smith said. It also will continue its campaign to keep guns out of the hands of young people.

East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore said such groups as 100 Black Men, along with efforts by the religious community, have made solid efforts to curb violence in the parish.

Other institutions that have made contributions and need to continue to their part in the fight against crime are schools and the juvenile justice system, Moore said.

“We have to reach these children early,” he added.

Tracy Felton agreed, but said the juvenile justice system failed her 18-year-old son, who was killed last year in a shooting outside a north Baton Rouge night club.

“They don’t follow through and they don’t follow up,” she said of juvenile justice. “They need to come up with a better plan to save our youth.”

Felton said her son, Joshua, entered the juvenile justice system when he was 9 and from that point, she knew he would die young.
“The Lord gave him longer than I thought,” she said. “It’s still heartbreaking.”

Advocate staff writer Sonia Smith contributed to this article