The felony trial of Mayor Frank Melton and police detectives Michael Recio and Marcus Wright begins Monday. Although we cannot yet know what defense their lawyers will mount, it seems evident that Melton did in fact demolish the duplex on Ridgeway Street. There are multiple witnesses, and prosecutors have filed a motion suggesting that there is even videotape of the incident.
Instead of arguing that Melton is innocent, it seems that his lawyers will argue that the duplex on Ridgeway is guilty. Melton's lawyers have tried to argue that the duplex has a history of drug distribution and that Evans Welch, a mentally troubled man who lived in the duplex until it was destroyed, also has a history of drug abuse, as if the crimes of one man justify the crimes of another. (Welch has never even been charged with distributing drugs, much less convicted.) Friday, April 13, Judge Joe Webster threw out most of that argument, though defense lawyers will be allowed to argue that the duplex has a "reputation" of being a crack house.
We have heard some version of this argument—both from Melton and his supporters—since the grand jury indictments last September. "Let him do his job," Melton's supporters urge. "We have to fight these dope boys by any means necessary," Councilman Kenneth Stokes argues.
Every indication is that Melton and his lawyers will argue that even though he did demolish the house on Ridgeway, he should not be convicted because the house had it coming. He did it, they will argue, because he had to do it to reduce crime.
This is the big lie.
Melton was elected to office on the basis of this lie, which is epitomized by his promise to eliminate crime in Jackson within 90 days. Thus, we elected a lawman who is not a lawman, a mayor who hates the rule of law.
Now we are living in the sad aftermath of hype. The truth is that crime was steadily falling under Melton's predecessor, but violent crime shot up around 12 percent during Melton's first full year in office. (We will have firmer numbers when the FBI releases crime stats next month, but this was the trend at the end of last October, when Police Chief Shirlene Anderson terminated ComStat).
I would say we were swindled, but you can't blame a man for buying lemons if that's the only fruit in town. Local media, especially The Clarion-Ledger, happily parroted Melton's crime-fighting braggadocio while they attacked Mayor Harvey Johnson for failing to take crime seriously, even as crime fell year after year under his administration. In that, they failed the public disastrously. Politicians spin. The press must cut through the spin and report the truth. When they do not, they betray us all.
Still, statistics lie, as Anderson has said of ComStat numbers, and part of why Johnson failed politically—beyond the media's willful incompetence—is that the public needs more than happy numbers to believe in success. They need a leader. They need action. They need someone to get out and kick a little ass.
Crime stats are a skinny little man hissing static in our ear. Melton, in a bullet-proof vest, with weapons strapped to his chest and a small army of police officers in tow, is crime-fighting you can feel.
But take a second look.
Melton is avowedly our great crusader against "crack houses," but he and his moveable feast have never made any drug bust of consequence. I went with Melton on a raid not long before the Ridgeway incident, and we shot through the streets of Jackson with blue strobes flashing, setting up roadblocks and questioning suspicious characters—many of them kids—everywhere we stopped. It looked great for the cameras, but in six hours of disrupting traffic all over Jackson, the team made one arrest. Melton tied up 20 police officers for his magical mystery tour, as Sheriff Malcolm McMillin has called it, and all for one arrest. That one arrest was of some poor slob who was asleep in his car at a hotel where we stopped. The cops more or less forced the man to get out of his car, and it turned out he had one little rock of crack on him—a misdemeanor offense. If I were a police commander and one of my officers came back after a night out on the town having made just one arrest for one rock, I would give him very strong words. If 20 came back with only one such arrest, I would have a stroke.
Law enforcement professionals tell me that only the laziest cops go down the drug food chain rather than up it. It's easy to arrest someone who has bought $20 of crack—easy and pointless. It's harder to arrest the guy who sold that rock of crack, and it is harder still to arrest the guy who supplies crack to the dealers. But that's the only way to make any real impact on drug sales.
At most, Evans Welch was a little dealer, and there isn't even evidence of that. What we can say for certain is that taking Welch off the street made no real impact on crime. All it could ever be, like all the rest of Melton's efforts, was an empty media event designed to give the appearance of progress.
Consider the cost. Under Melton's lack of leadership, we have lost police officers at a precipitous rate. In Precinct 4, which includes Fondren, there are only 43 active-duty police officers total, according to sources inside city government. Officially, Jackson has 425 police officers on duty, but the number of officers on active duty is probably closer to 350. Taking 20 cops out of that threadbare force to make one misdemeanor arrest is a shameful waste of resources.
I don't know whether we'll see the end of the Melton circus in the next two weeks, though there are strong indications that if Melton survives these indictments, the FBI may soon bring more. What I do know is that these indictments have, for the most part, put an end to his police raids, freeing our overworked police officers to do the real, unglamorous work of fighting crime. For that, I thank our police officers, our prosecutors and the citizens who indicted Melton.
The tragedy of Melton is the tragedy of seductive lies, but Jackson won't suffer this tragedy much longer. We have real police officers and real hope for the future. All we have to do is choose the truth over lies.
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