JACKSON — Members of Jackson’s officer-involved-shooting task force started showing up at the Porter Building across from City Hall on Monday, Aug. 27, prepared for what was supposed to be their final meeting before handing policy recommendations to the mayor. Turns out they had arrived an hour early. Constituent Services Manager Keyshia Sanders said before heading to her birthday celebrations, birthday gifts in hand, that the meeting would start at 6 p.m., despite a City email indicating a 5 p.m. start time, an hour earlier than every other meeting in the last four months.
The previous week, the group did not have a quorum at a meeting at Mynelle Gardens with the chairman calling in and deciding about 45 minutes after the start time that the meeting should delay to this week.
Monday’s schedule blip was just the first sign of disorganization that left an opening for a dissenting group of activists to unravel the meeting.
‘Brutalized or Killed by Police?’
Normally, the task-force meetings invoke the feeling that the mayor-appointed members are behind glass or on display, as the general public sits in chairs that often surround their boardroom table. Attendees are typically only allowed to speak during the 10 minutes of public comment at the tail end of the meetings. However, some of the activists who walked in around 7 p.m. during Monday’s meeting and plopped down next to other task-force members, quite literally invited themselves to the table.
“My name is Joseph Jordan, and I’m a resident of west Jackson,” one man said, interjecting himself into an ongoing conversation about parameters on releasing video to the public, should any of an officer-involved shooting exist.
Several task-force members jumped in to inform him that they would call for questions at the end of the meeting. Jordan took issue with having community comments left for the end of the meeting because, as he said during the meeting, the community should more of a voice there, even more so than the task-force members.
“That’s very sweet, but I had an important question, which is just to find out, like, who here has family or close friends that have been either brutalized or killed by police?” he asked.
The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.
