Jackson Free Press

Mayor Frank Melton's State of the City Address was filled with determined talk, but no details.

An emotional Melton, who is under investigation by the FBI, took the stage and apologized for a myriad of snafus during his two-year term.

"I've made some mistakes, but they've been mistakes of the heart," Melton told the audience.

Melton's pitch called attention to social issues such as broken homes and families, with the mayor—who lived in Jackson while his biological children grew up in Texas—making at least three references to absentee fathers.

"It takes a man to teach a boy how to be a man. The problem is a serious breakdown in the family unit. The solution," Melton said, "is education and the church."

Melton repeated vows from his inaugural speech and his last State of the City address, promising to have "all school-age children … in somebody's class." He renewed his oath to put children found "in the street" during school hours in "the youth detention center," with the promise that "parents will be held accountable for their children."

The mayor emphasized the more than $1 billion in construction underway in Jackson, followed by a slide show of developments, many of them begun under other administrations or jump-started, in part, through Hurricane Katrina and the federal Go-Zone tax incentives that followed.

Melton said that while the downtown area grew a new face with all the incoming construction, he would concentrate on building new homes, refurbishing old homes and demolishing old non-livable structures.

The mayor dedicated speech time to crime, and emphasized community policing, although he outlined no plan for accomplishing the tactic, aside from saying "we need to do a much better job in the area of prevention."

Melton said he wanted to start arresting people who hold city citations, though the city has largely been ineffective at collecting derelict fines over the years. Melton encouraged people to pay their fines, reminding them that the courts would work out a plan for incremental payments if "you can't afford" the whole fine at once.

Melton added that he would be keeping Shirlene Anderson as police chief, because of her honesty.

"The police chief stays in place. … She has the courage to tell this community the truth about public records. Crime has never been down," Melton said, recycling his accusation that the last police chief downplayed crime reports. "…The fact is that she inherited a mess, and she has the courage … to deal with it."

Statistics say major crime had steadily dropped over the eight years leading up to the Melton administration—but then took a sharp shot upward by more than 40 percent during the last year. Last fall, Anderson discontinued COMSTAT reporting of crime statistics both within the department and to the public.

Melton offered more details on illegal drug sales than the city budget, which reported a possible $13.1 million shortfall this week.

"There are people who go through our city neighborhoods, and who pawn their cars for narcotics, then they turn around and call the police department and report the car stolen. Then we bump into the 15-year-old kid that's in the car. He goes to the detention center. She goes to the next neighborhood and buys drugs," Melton said. "We're going to stop that. Those people going through those neighborhoods attempting to buy narcotics are going to be arrested just like the people who sold it to them."

The city reported no arrests for drug sales in 2006.

Melton's drug-buying scenario mirrors the defense of one of his male companions, 17-year-old Michael Taylor, who was indicted for carjacking a woman last year at gunpoint.

Taylor's mother, Valerie Taylor, claims Taylor didn't steal the woman's car, that the victim was "going into (Taylor's) neighborhood pawning her car for crack."