The Christian Science Monitor just ran a piece about Frank Melton called Mayor's tough tack on crime stirs up racial sensitivities:
ATLANTA – Wielding a badge of dubious origin and a loaded gun, mayoral candidate Frank Melton vowed to clean up crime in Jackson, Miss., with a slick slogan: "Help is on the way!" So when the mayoral candidate won, he took an unusual step of assisting police with drug stops or standing by at roadblocks. Mr. Melton's even engaged in racial profiling, critics say. The American Civil Liberties Union cites complaints that people have been pulled over based on their race and searched without cause. The twist: Melton is black.
"The mayor as a black man clearly does not fit the profile of a racial profiler, but what's even more confusing is that he's not a law enforcement officer - and we usually don't think of racial profiling being done by someone outside the law enforcement community," says Richard Forgette, a political science professor at the University of Mississippi.
Gun shots, murders, and robberies have become common in Jackson, a city of 184,000 residents, 70 percent of whom are black. The key reason why Melton beat his opponent with 88 percent of the vote last summer was because he campaigned on cutting the crime rate.
In the first six months of 2006, crime has increased by 26 percent, prompting the mayor to institute a state of emergency in June. He's implemented a strict curfew for teenagers and homeless people.
Melton does have a softer side. He's known to take young charges in to mentor them, and pull city school buses over on the interstate so he can hug the children inside.
Melton says he is a deputized volunteer sheriff, although neither Mississippi nor Texas has a record of his certification. His habit of wearing a sidearm on airplanes has alarmed federal air-control officials.
Critics of Melton's tough tactics say they are an illegal attempt to appease whites in a city that has lost many of its middle-class residents who have given up hope of a resurgence, experts say.
"He's got a lot of Rudy Giuliani qualities in that there's a lot of lip going along with the action," says Sid Salter, a political columnist for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. "He has succeeded in the Deep South in a town that has had its difficulties by bringing people together, by communicating with blacks and whites, but ... crime and urban blight and poverty are far more complex issues than Frank deals with in his world. He's like a kid playing cowboy."
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