Jackson Free Press

On Monday, March 14, Jackson resident Torri Parker and her boyfriend returned to her car parked at Parham Bridges Park after a workout there and discovered the passenger-side window knocked out and her purse missing from the vehicle. So began a spring break spent doing her own detective work.

Parker immediately called the police to report the theft. The responding officer gave her a card containing her case number and a contact number for follow-up.

On Tuesday, she spent part of the day calling credit-card companies, she said, to get lists of merchants who used her stolen credit cards.

By Wednesday, March 16, she still had not heard anything and went to JPD's Precinct 4 offices and threatened to call the mayor on the department's lack of progress.

So far, Parker said, police have made no arrests in the crime, and she remains angry that a detective did not appear to have taken her case until she approached the Precinct 4 commander March 16. Parker said her detective, Jaye Coleman, told her he'd taken the case "30 minutes" after her rant at Precinct 4.

"When I went to meet with that detective 20 minutes after talking with (Deputy Chief Brent) Winstead, he told me that he'd just got my information 30 minutes prior. It's pretty obvious to me that when I made my commotion that's how the case was assigned," Parker said.

Winstead disputes Parker's characterization. "She's not accurate about that at all. The case occurred on the 14th. We received the case on the 15th, sometime in the middle part of the day. The investigator was assigned the case that afternoon of the 15th, and he got in contact with us the next morning on the 16th," Winstead said.

Winstead said the detective had reviewed the case "that morning," but that he had been out of town the day before his meeting with Parker, and had been "following up on another case in Louisiana that afternoon."

By Wednesday, Parker, a University of Mississippi law student, had visited numerous merchants and asked for video of suspects who had used the card at the time and date specified by the credit-card companies. She said most merchants were not helpful.

"Many of them delete their film after three days or seven days," Parker said. She turned over every purchase time and date to her detective that Wednesday, she said, and continued follow-up with her detective on merchant conversations throughout the course of the week. On Thursday, Parker said her detective had made a few rounds visiting merchants to try to collect video footage. Winstead said it was to no avail.

Winstead said the merchants the investigator contacted during the course of Parker's investigation had no useful foot-age available.

"The stores that said they had it when she talked to them, they say they didn't have it when we talked to them. I don't know exactly where the communication breakdown was as far as that goes," Winstead said.

But Parker said her detective moved too slowly to gather film footage on his own before the evidence was gone on Thursday. "A lot of (merchants) told me straight up that they don't keep it long—like three days—and if (police) don't get it within three days they won't get it," she said.

Winstead refused JFP access to Parker's detective, and would not confirm that Coleman is the detective on the case. He said that the department "followed proper procedure." Police, he added, don't talk directly to banks and credit-card agencies to ascertain locations of post-theft use of the cards, unless the crime victim gives them the information. For this reason, he suggested that any crime victim provide information on post-theft transactions to an investigator as soon as possible.

JPD spokeswoman Colendula Green said the process takes time. "A lot of people want fast results, but there's a process that we have to go through. A report had to be written, and once it's processed and in the system it has to be assigned to the detective," Green said."But (Parker) was taken care of."

Madison Police Department Master Sergeant Kevin Newman said that the Madison Police Department also does not contact merchants directly to gather video data on stolen cards unless the victim hands investigators the date and time of the fraud. However, Newman said Madison police will wrest film footage of a customer committing fraud within 24 hours, if necessary.

"If there's a manager on duty, sometimes, we can get it in a couple of hours, but never more than 24 hours. If we need something right away, the merchants are pretty good at getting us what we need. If we know that they've used it at the store we'll act immediately," Newman said.

"We have a lot of time up here to look into things, so if something happens we throw our resources at it."

City Spokesman Chris Mims told the Jackson Free Press that persons wishing to lodge a complaint against police policy or police officers can call Police Chief Rebecca Coleman at 601-960-1217 or file an Internal Affairs Report investigation by calling 601-960-1674.