The Issue of Violent Crime in Arkansas
Violent crime affects all states in America, but it has a more substantial presence in Arkansas, with 671.9 per 100,000 people in Arkansas having an offense of violent crime compared to just 398.5 per 100,000 people in the United States (“Crime Data Explorer”). To begin understanding how to solve the problem, it becomes necessary to define violent crime. Specifically, the FBI’s definition lists violent crime as “offenses that involve force or threat of force”, namely “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.” (“Crime in the United States”). Arkansas’ 68.6% increase in violent crime compared to the rest of the nation provokes the question: What can we do to reduce the amount of violent crime? There exist many difficulties in attempting to completely eliminate all violent crime as it can have various causes such as poverty, mental health issues, a troubled home life, and more (Fernandez, Pendergrass, paragraph 4). However, solutions to reduce the amount of violent crime do exist. Solutions like increasing funding to police departments, implementing focused deterrence strategies across the state, and investing in community services to help out citizens all aid in reducing the amount of violent crime, but with varying levels of effectiveness. Out of the solutions listed, investing in the community has the greatest impact due to the solution addressing the problem before the police get involved, and sometimes entirely preventing any issues in the first place.
Increasing police funding seems like an obvious solution that would allow for more officers to stop violent crime. However, cities with more police
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Repeat offender intervention programs do something similar, though those involve telling the high-risk individual that the police will focus extraordinary legal attention (Braga, paragraph 27). Focused deterrence seems like a promising method to lower violent crime