Crime Summit Useful?

JSU criminology professor Jimmy Bell says the city’s upcoming crime summit, planned for Aug. 31 will be different from crime summits hosted in other cities, while the ACLU is concerned that the summit will not tackle crime issues in a substantive way.

Co-organizer Bell praised the effort as community-centered. “A lot of the other summits that I’ve observed have been given by the criminal justice system, with the police, courts and prosecution making decisions that impact everybody else. That’s not the way it should be,” Bell said. “The discussion should focus on true collaboration and people coming together in the spirit of sharing ideas and talking candidly about the issues.”

Bell worked with former Mayor Dale Danks in organizing the summit, which Bell estimates will include hundreds of people from the community, as well as government officials and other organizations like churches and community associations like Catholic Charities. The meeting is open to the public, and rather than feature guest speakers, will consist of a large information session that will then break down into smaller meetings catered to specific groups. One break-away group is designed to work with neighborhood associations, for instance, while another serves to lead church organizations into a more efficient role for promoting community cohesion.

It all ties in with community policing, says Bell. Community policing, unlike traditional policing, is more of a preventive effort. In traditional policing, a crime happens, and then you call the cops, in that order. In community policing, the community takes enough of an interest in local affairs to see the crime coming and try to stop it.

ACLU Public Education Coordinator Brent Cox said he was concerned that the people initially invited to participate in the summit were handpicked by the mayor. “People don’t seem to know about it,” Cox said. “The people who have a real vested interest, like the neighborhood associations, who are trying to come up with solutions, they didn’t seem to be invited.”

Bell, responding to criticism that Mayor Melton was too prone to pick clone thinkers to attend the summit, said that the general public is welcome to attend.

But others have low expectations for the summit as well. Although Hinds County Sheriff Malcolm McMillin says his job is a whole lot easier when the community is working with him, he argued that it will take more than one night’s meeting to get people to come together and effect change. He even told Hinds County supervisors recently, “we’ve talked long enough” about crime and that it didn’t take a “rocket scientist” to acknowledge that there was a crime problem in Jackson.

Hinds County District Attorney Faye Peterson said she planned to attend the summit but said she feared the summit “doesn’t have the setting of a working meeting.”

“I’ve been in planning meetings where we worked together and made improvements, but this doesn’t appear to be one to me. I’ll be there to participate, but it’s not the format I would’ve chosen,” Peterson said.

“In spite of the naysayers who say we’ve done this before, I don’t think that we’ve really had an honest conversation from the citizen’s perspective. The citizens are key, and they will guide the focus over what happens in the next 12 months,” Bell said.

Bell says the summit will hopefully spark enough interest among participants to spin off subsequent summits.

“The summit itself is only a starting point to bring people together to organize different issues. I’m pretty sure the committees that emerge out of it will meet, in my estimation, over a 12-month period, at least.”

Attend the crime summit on Thursday, Aug. 31, at 7 p.m. at the TelCom Center, downtown at 105 E. Pascagoula St.

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