Arkansas Baptist College held a grand opening Aug. 25 for an institute researching black-on-black crime, named in honor of a student slain while helping someone change a tire just off the edge of campus in 2012.
The Derek Olivier Research Institute aims to reduce black-on-black violence through education, research and social development. Goals include collecting and analyzing research on urban communities and coming up with solutions that can bring positive change to Little Rock and other communities.
“If you look at Little Rock you have anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of your homicide victims are African American, and if you look at people we arrest, it’s similar — almost 90 percent is African American,” Eric Higgins, director of the Derek Olivier Research Institute, told Little Rock ABC affiliate KATV Channel 7. “But when you ask people to address it, they think ‘Wow, it’s overwhelming.’ And that’s what we are doing. We are trying to do that.”
The institute is named after Derek Olivier, a 19-year-old freshman member of the football team from New Iberia, La., fatally shot by an unknown assailant while helping a friend change a tire across the street from the campus on Sept. 27, 2012. Police said it is unlikely Olivier was the intended target, and the suspect is still at large.
The homicide occurred about a block away from offices of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Arkansas, which moved there in 2008 to begin an ongoing partnership with the historically black Baptist college brokered by Arkansas Baptist College President Fitz Hill.
Since 2007 Arkansas Baptist College has maintained a 50 percent-or-more male student population, many of them from low economic neighborhoods where violent crimes often happen.
“We want to bring these senseless acts of violence to attention and get out and do something about it,” Hill said in announcing plans for the institute in 2013. “Not just talk about it, write about it, rap about it, but to do something about it. That’s what this institute will be about.”
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