• By KIMBERLY VETTER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Feb 16, 2009 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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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.”

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