Jackson Free Press

Eric Stringfellow wrote a column yesterday that seemed to get that fighting crime in the city is about a whole lot more than the police and even the district attorney's office. He wrote: "One of the more crucial tasks for Jackson is that its residents take advantage of existing economic opportunities and create new ones. People are beginning to understand that and how this relates to reducing crime."

Unfortunately, this look at the bigger picture is coming a little late in this year's political game—after he's provided too much unconsidered fodder for Jackson-bashers such as Wilson Carroll and Haley Barbour—but it does give me hope that Mr. Stringfellow is going to tone down his crime rhetoric in the future and help us all figure out the many ways to help prevent crime in our city, as we shore up the tax base, and encourage the kind of renaissance that's ours if we come together to make it happen. We welcome him to the cause should he care to join us.

Cheers on this column.

Previous Commentsshow

Wilson Carroll: Jackson-Basher. Faye Peterson: Incompetent District Attorney. My vote would be for the Jackson basher. And least he acknowledges there's a crime problem. Faye Peterson is a true case of being in the right place (and right county) at the right time. She survived law school, got appointed DA because Ronnie Musgrove owed a certain elected official from Bolton a political favor, and got re-elected because voters in Hinds County use skin color and party affiliation as a lithmus test for who they're supporting. They could care less about the candidate's ability (or in Peterson's case -- inability). BTW, Stringfellow is more inconsistent than the New Orleans Saints. One week he's on a tangent against Harvey Johnson, the next week he's defending Harvey Johnson from the same accusations he (Stringfellow) hurled the week before.

Oz Collins

Nov 17 2003

I'll give you the inconsistency point, Oz. I'm all for columnists who think for themselves and are unpredictable, but inconsistency is a different problem. And Stringfellow certainly has been that this year, although I think he's getting more focused lately. Of course, I disagree with you wholeheartedly on the Carroll-Peterson point. For one, I never saw a single reason that Carroll would be a *better* D.A. than Peterson. And I saw too much evidence to the contrary that he was going to be in way over his head. As for the "crime problem" acknowledgement thing, I really think this is a red herring thrown out there by people set on bashing the city, or at least it was originally. Now it's been picked up like the refrain to a bad top-40 song. The fact is, of course the D.A. and the police chief know that there is a "crime problem" -- any crime is a problem, and they're in the thick of it every day. It's quite ridiculous to argue that they wouldn't think that. And if you check news databases, you'll find that they're constantly misquoted (even by C-L columnists and certainly by its letter-writers) on what they've supposedly said about there not being crime problems and that crime is only a perception. The truth is, Oz, law enforcement and D.A.s can't stand up and say "crime is out of control, ladies and gentlemen" -- the worst thing they could do to "fight" crime (whatever that means) is to send a message, and thus create a perception, that the crime is out of control. Crime is prevented by communities believing it can be prevented, not by people who throw their hands up in the air and whine about "leadership" all the time. The fact is, then you change the "leadership" and very often the same old problems are there. (Jackson has a long history of this.) These people are trained to be specific in a no-nonsense way -- about how they're doing their jobs and what they're doing differently or better or whatever. That's part of the reason I could not have supported Wilson Carroll for this position -- his campaign showed that he's way too reactionary and prone to believe anything anyone tells him; that would make it very hard to focus on his job like a laser beam. In my conversations with Peterson, I found her very focused on the job and specific cases (of which she knew every detail) and not prone to hysteria. Hysteria never prevented, solved, prosecuted or sentenced a single criminal.

ladd

Nov 17 2003

MORE ... People who do these difficult jobs on a consistent basis know they need to be removed from politics as much as possible. The fact is, Peterson could have played played much more politics than she did in this race, and the fact that she didn't was quite impressive to me. That doesn't mean there aren't any problems with the criminal-justice system, or with her office, but it would have been really silly to elect someone with ridiculously little experience for the job. That clearly would have been trading one problem for one that would have probably have been much worse for Jackson. As for Jackson-bashing, Jackson residents should not even consider electing an official who stands up and talks the city down with ridiculous superlatives, especially using old data (the corporate media already does enough of that). That person is not then going to come in and return us to those so-called "glory days" of Jackson's past; the only reason you would do that is to engage in the politics of destruction. And that the city can do without. It's one thing to stand up and say, "These are the problems I see, and this is how I can help fix them." That is very different from "Jackson is decaying from bad leadership and people are scared to death." That person isn't exactly interested in helping the baby, if you know what I mean. In case you missed it, I did a piece recently on the Carroll campaign and treatment of numbers, and there are some blog comments following it at: http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/comments.php?id=1894_0_4_0_C

ladd

Nov 17 2003

-- I'll get off the Faye Peterson discussion. You love her. I think she's a nice lady, but I think the DA's office is heading in the wrong direction. We'll leave it at that. Leaders who won't talk about problems won't solve problems. And that's the problem with Harvey Johnson. He has an impaired vision for Jackson and he won't fess up to Jackson's problem and ask all Jacksonians to come together to take Jackson back. ("Take Jackson Back" -- that's a good slogan for a Mayoral Hopeful in '05) But while Harvey Johnson makes pride rides and you act as if crime isn't a problem in Jackson, I hear personal stories from my father who had his truck stolen while at work, of several friends who have had their apartment vandalizes, and of one friend who had a gun pointed at his head in an armed robbery in Fondren. There are plenty over victims around the city. These things don't happen in Madison County, Rankin County, or Copiah County -- except once in a blue moon. This isn't about going back to the glory days. It's about going back to the peaceful days. I'm not talking down. I'm straight talking. As for old data, the new data isn't much better. Jackson had a crime problem then, and it has a crime problem now. A 1.7% drop isn't reason for anybody to move back or encourage anyone else to stay. We both want Jackson to work ... and admittedly, I know we've got a hard task ahead.

Oz Collins

Nov 17 2003

Oz, I don't "love" Faye Peterson. I don't have enough information to reach an ultimate conclusion about her, or certainly don't know her well enough to "love" her. It's creating a false dilemma to say that I "love" her because I was not impressed by her opponent. I agree that leaders must talk about problems -- but I haven't gotten the impression that Johnson will not talk about problems. I've heard him talk many times about problems. What is your basis for that assertion? Please don't say The Clarion-Ledger. "Take Jackson Back" from what? That is a terribly negative slogan, and has a rather disturbing tone to me. I can't imagine any serious candidate actually using such a slogan. Of course, there are victims of crime in the city! It is another fallacy to argue that because one (a) does not believe that crime is "out of control" or believes that people shouldn't overreact to it and panic, therefore (b) "crime is not a problem." I hear people try to make this jump in logic regularly, and it's bizarre to me. It's certainly not my reasoning, or that of anyone else I've talked to. We all know people who have been victims of crime. I've lived in a lot of places, and the same was true everywhere, from Neshoba County to NYC. It's awful that your friend was a victim of armed robbery, and I hope the perpetrators were the ones who have been apprehended. But, beyond that, what is the ultimate point? The truth is, crime has fallen dramatically in Jackson over the last 10 years, but the crime that still happens is awful and needs to be prevented. Over-reacting to that fact, though, and missing the forest (smart on crime) for the trees (tough on crime) IS NOT GOING TO LESSEN CRIME. Of course, more crime happens in cities. And we as a community have to figure out how to best deal with the conditions that cause that crime, all of them: Electing an unqualified D.A. would have been a silly way to deal with it. The mayor holding a panicked press conference would be equally silly. Scaring more of the tax base out of town is also silly. I appreciate your straight talking; that's what I'm about, too. To that end, I wonder: what peaceful days are you referring to? What years? Was the entire city peaceful, or just your neighborhood? Could it be that the "glory days" are an illusion?

ladd

Nov 18 2003

MORE ... You're right about the crime problem, past and present. As I've said repeatedly, the only reason I've parsed numbers as much as I have is to try to calm people down a bit when they see our progress so that we can actually come together as a community to make more progress. Still, though, I find it unethical for a potential public official to cheat by using old data against his opponent. Call me pollyannish, but we can't have a viable discussion about crime prevention unless we boot politics out of the way. This city is riddled with politics of destruction, and it seems that much of it is coming from past the city limits. Community leaders, and that's means all of us, just need to ignore that and get on with it. Agreed on the 1.7 percent (actually that's the year-to-date increase this year, not drop). It really doesn't say much -- except that there's no reason to panic, and there is reason to suspect the people who try to overplay crime for their own purposes. Why in the world would someone who cares about a place do that to a city's fiber? That's just weird to me. Oh, yes, politics. Yuck. I agree with you: I want the city to work, too, and it will if we all come together instead of constantly try to tear the city down. The truth is, crime is not going to magically drop with a new mayor, a new police chief or a new D.A. People might think so, because the same people wouldn't be making such a big deal out of it if it happened on the watch of their hand-picked "leadership." (Looking at the crime trends of the last 20 years shows that.) Crime is going to drop when we take an unflinching look at what actually causes crime: poverty, unemployment, hopelessness, torn and broken communities, bad media coverage (this is true: often young people lower to the levels of the community's overly publicized low expectations of them), misplaced resources, drugs (legal and illegal), easy access to weapons, domestic violence, and so on. Of course, many people just want the easy answer: "get tough on crime." Many of them don't care about study after study about recidivism and what causes it, or any other academic study about crime and its causes. They just want the quick and easy fix that someone else has to do. And there is no quick and easy fix to mending communities. All the more reason that we must do it. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, we must do what we believe we cannot do.

ladd

Nov 18 2003

Take Jackson Back is actually quite similar to the campaign slogan of a progressive presidential candidate: Howard Dean -- Take Our Country Back.

Oz Collins

Nov 18 2003

That's a good point -- but I don't quite see the analogy between Harvey Johnson and George W. Bush.

ladd

Nov 18 2003

both are incumbents who should be a lot more vulnerable than they probably will be.

Oz Collins

Nov 18 2003

"Take back the City" is a phrase often used by Jacksonians who lived here prior to the 80's when drugs began to have such an impact on crime in Jackson. For a "born and raised" Jacksonian it is an rally cry that means we want our city to be "taken back" from the criminal element that has had such a negative impact on inner city neighborhoods. To argue about the frequency of crime is silly when we all have access to crime stats online (FBI). The common denominator is per 100,000 people and yes, Jackson is a very high crime city. White flight caused much out migration in the 70's and early 80'. Fleeing from crime took over in the late 80's until now. Even more significant is how few transferees coming into the region want to live in Jackson because of high crime and taxes in relation to more suburban places in the tri-county area. Any person who runs for Mayor who is willing to try and "take back the city" has my vote. But woe be unto one who uses it as a campaign tactic and doesn't follow up. So far, Melton has a long, long, way to go to prove he is up to the job.

realtime

Nov 9 2005