Just skimming the Wikipedia page for that place shows red flags all over the place. The population has been sharply declining since 1970 and the homicide rate is 56 per 100,000 vs the national average of 6.5.
Clearly something is very wrong with the local government and population.
It's called poverty. Welcome to rural America. Went down the shitter when industry left and the rest of the country ignored it for decades, so now we have MAGA, drugs and crime, and a whole lotta cheap land.
Is this how local residents feel? I find this sentiment rather confusing. Rural places tend to be distrustful of central government. Meaning, they are happy to be ignored by “the rest of the country” since those outsiders don’t share their values.
Local residents do feel that way. They have no money, no education, no job prospects, and don't feel they get respect. The fact that their cultural values are also at odds with the "haves" (in their view) further cements the view. But in a very real policy and economic sense, they literally were abandoned when industry left. Wall Street and Tech zoomed on while their factories and mines closed with no recourse to be able to recover from the economic vacuum.
How are they gonna go to college? Nobody in their family went. Their friends didn't go. They have family they need to stay home and take care of (no child care, elderly care, limited food assistance) and work for, in whatever way that means. Even if they went, it's not like every millennial with a degree gets a job, even with record low unemployment. Transportation is also problematic, just to get to a school, or a job. Rap sheets keep people from applying or being accepted. There's usually no jobs program to help older people transition from obsolete industries.
It takes a lot of outreach to get anyone to trust the system, if they have a flexible enough situation to go. Most people just don't see education being a solution, so they aren't going to jump out on a shaky limb in the hopes it might catch them. Better the devil you know.
This hasn’t really been true for a while. Much of the quasi-libertarian stuff comes out of the conservative intellectual crowd, think tanks, lobbying groups etc. Some of it was also a holdover from the Reagan era, which was the last big right-wing populist movement, before Trump showed up.
It’s the anti-immigration, pro-manufacturing stuff that really comes out of rural areas. Stuff that creates jobs and cuts down on wage-dilution. If the Trump years were about anything, they were about the right collectively deciding they wanted an industrial policy and pro-labor (not pro-union, mind you) policy, instead of warmed over economic libertarianism.
Plenty of poor towns without such homicide rates and robbery. You are taking the agency out of the hands of the people committing the crimes and handing it to the circumstances.
Homicides and crime still occur, they're just not well-documented. There has to be someone collecting that data and then reporting it. That costs money, so many places just don't.
The poorest towns in America don’t have the highest crime and the richest towns don’t have the lowest. Attributing violent crime to poverty alone does a disservice to the people living in places with violent crime.
Pine Bluff's population is much larger than 1,800. I'll just quote the full Wikipedia excerpt:
Pine Bluff had 29 homicides in 2021. Pine Bluff had 23 murders in 2020 - a rate of 56.5 murders per 100,000 people. The national average was 6.5 murders per 100,000 people in 2020.
As of July 29, in 2022 there have been 17 homicides reported in Pine Bluff.
Clearly something is very wrong with the local government and population.