Jackson Free Press

The town-hall meeting that the local police union and the Jackson Free Press sponsored last week downtown was eye-opening and sobering. Audience members seemed genuinely flummoxed when they saw the PowerPoint slides of how few police officers are available in a given department at any one time. The numbers are grim—especially considering the naive ideas about crime-fighting pushed by local politicians and media.

That is, the police are supposed to save us from ourselves.

Except that they're not. They cannot be inside private homes where stressed-out families pull easily purchased guns on each other. They cannot be on every street corner where a drug deal goes bad. They cannot provide private security for your business. They cannot sit in the state Capitol and vote for a tax increase to fund better salaries, or to hire more officers, or to buy better equipment.

And they cannot solve the causes of crime: poverty, racist policies, poor education, a violent culture, missing fathers, the scorn of birth control.

Only people can do that, each doing what each can do, whether it's pushing for a tax increase to hire more officers or mentoring a child whose parents are missing, or in prison, or working three jobs. Or maybe it's by refusing to have, or to demand, unprotected sex that will result in more overburdened families, and more kids babysitting themselves on the streets of Jackson. Or maybe it's by seeing past race, and "thug" rhetoric, and realizing that the violent domestic conditions and substance abuse that infect the inner cities—and the suburbs—are the fault of all of us, and can only be solved by all of us working together.

But too many choose to play a perception game. Media sensationalize crime statistics, especially when they don't like the current mayor or police chief. We saw it during the last administration when The Clarion-Ledger morphed Chief Robert Moore's warnings about media-pushed perceptions that crime could not be solved into something he did not say: that crime was only a perception. We saw it from Melton supporters who repeated incessantly, without proof, that dropping crime figures must be cooked.

Now we see it from African Americans like blogger Othor Cain who do not like McMillin and, thus, are sending the same tired, and unsupported, allegations his way: numbers are cooked, and he's saying crime is a perception. Meantime, Ledger editor David Hampton is suddenly all about how perception does matter—now that a chief he likes is saying that it does.

It is time to stop this nonsensical madness. Crime statistics are only so meaningful, and are usually just used as a political weapon. Every Jacksonian must decide what he or she can do to help decrease crime, as well as stop the nasty crime politics that hurt the city's economic future. Then, step up and do it.