Shreveport's Increasing Homicide Rate

Shreveport's increasing homicide rate is causing a great amount of concern. Many people are calling for saturation patrols and increase police budgets. Something we have already done multiple times.

There has been a stark increase in homicides Shreveport Louisiana as a result of the societal effects of the pandemic. As of September, homicides are up 112% from 24 in September 2019 to 54% as of September 2020. Many explanations have been given as to the direct cause like the increase in unemployment, the mental effects of quarantine and isolation and the growing hunger/stress of foods insecurity that thousands of Shreveport citizens are feeling. There is a debate in the political halls of Shreveport on  how to solve this problem and the continuous, dominate answer coming out of city halls in the use of patrol saturation and increase police funding, even as the conversation of police and prison abolitionism and reform reaches more people. This policy will not work and is in dangerous to think that increase policing is a solution for. We need a radically new solution to the “crime” problem but, this requires an entirely new analysis to find. An analysis of crime, especially homicides, as a social problem rather that a problem of individuals is needed or we risk feeding into the socially destructive policy of incarcerate, which destroys people and promotes community destructive behavior.

            This peak in homicides is very much not like others this city has faced. The main reason is the cause of this wave. The spike in homicides during the 90’s was largely fueled by de-industrialization and the systematic destruction of community cohesion in the Afrikan community during the crack epidemic. The cocaine/crack market became a vital part of the economic life of many urban young black people during this period. Due to social collapse, and the collapse of traditional social structures, like stable employment, and political engagement, gang culture manages to proliferate as the result. This peak in homicides is not gang related, most of the old, well established gangs in the Shreveport area have died out during the 2000’s. Result of destitution and individual alienation as the result of the lock down measures, alienation of labor and the failure of local, state and the federal government to provide any sort of sizable relief to struggling people.  Even if we accept the idea that the effect of patrol saturation would have the same effect, that doesn’t mean there will be a decrease crime rate. Take the example of operation Thor and TBONE. Though they were not complete failures, the contribution to the decrease in the homicide rate is minimum. Thor took place during the height of incarceration politics and the crack epidemic yet still saw some of the highest homicide rates recorded* and the homicide rate for TBONE coincide with general trends throughout the united states. There is very little hard evidence to say that saturation techniques would work in the typical situation, but the idea would not hold up in this special situation.

            If our focus is primarily police patrol, arrest and prison focus to the increase in rate, we risk feeding into the problem. The prison system and prison industrial complex impoverishes, socially destroy and feeds into the “crime” problem and leads to other problems. Be it the school to prison pipeline which feeds children early into the prison system, the insane sentencing that annihilates family cohesion through the holding of large masses of people in borderline torturous conditions in many prisons and the hyper militarization of local police, becoming paramilitaries that occupy what Malcom called the United States’ “internal colonies”, they all lead to the same destination/  What has the increase police presence and increase incarceration rate as a result gotten us. We now have hyper impoverished communities in arguably a worse state since the 50’s, destroyed families torn apart from the incarceration machine, and the highest incarceration rate on the planet.

            I do not have completely flushed out examples of alternatives for an increase in police presence, but I do have an alternative analysis that should be used when addressing the homicide rate and potential alternatives. Crime is generally viewed by most in power as the result of moral individual failure instead of it being a product of a broader social decay. This individualist outlook has never been proven so wrong as in the current. Throughout the united states, many people are slipping into poverty and hunger through no fault of their own and for the past forty years there has been a degradation in job quality and the increase in the rate of young people living off poverty wages as the result of Neo-liberal economics along with an decrease in community cohesion due to the genocidal policy of mass incarceration and the drug war waged against Afrikan peoples. We need to acknowledge all these things as the fragile back of the camel that broke and the pandemic as the final straw. Anyone with this analysis could see the problems we are facing from thousands of miles away, but because our political “leaders” and our general public do not have this, there is little attempts to efficiently solve the problem, only failed policies that feed into it and destroy communities.