Jackson isn’t just Mississippi’s capital. It’s America’s murder capital

Jackson, Mississippi, knows the blues.

There's the old men at sunset carting old amps through a full parking lot to the back of an otherwise nondescript bar, to deliver a fearless late-night symposium in the oldest school of blues.

And then there's the Jackson that wakes up in the morning wondering how many young men got killed somewhere else that night. Jackson isn't just Mississippi's capital. It's America's murder capital, two years running.

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is perfectly, painfully aware that his city has a murder problem. And he wants to do something about it.

"Our residents aren't against police," he said. "Our residents are supportive of having more law enforcement to cover gaps and show presence. But they want a police force that is accountable to them."

But who do those police officers answer to? In a city where 83% of residents are Black and 90% of its voters are Democrats, the only person who lives there with the power to hire or fire the capitol police chief is the white Republican living south of Smith Park in the governor's mansion. This is a democracy problem. .

The response of Mississippi's predominantly white conservative state legislators and Republican governor, Tate Reeves, to violent crime in the state capital last year was to expand the jurisdiction of the Mississippi capitol police department, a state-controlled agency. House Bill 1020 expanded the footprint of the Capitol Complex Improvement District to much of north-east Jackson, while creating a parallel court system to handle cases brought by the capitol police, bypassing the district attorney and locally elected judges.

Jackson's murder problem is real. The national homicide rate per 100,000 people in the United States was about 5.5 in 2023. Jackson's high-water mark in 2021 was a staggering 99.5. Last year Jackson's rate was 78.8..

Though violent crime has been falling across the country, Mississippi overall had a homicide rate of 19.4 per 100,000, the highest of any state. Jackson is a fraction of that: only about one out of 20 of Mississippi's roughly 3 million residents live in Jackson. Take Jackson's 138 murders out of the state's 2022 calculation, and Mississippi still has a murder rate of 14.6, about three times the national average.

Poverty incubates violence. Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the country and most of Jackson's murders are in its poorest neighborhoods.

But the section of Jackson covered by the capitol police is not where you find most of Jackson's murder problem. It is where most of Jackson's white people live.

"If it's a notion about how we make it safer, then please justify why they are in the areas with the lowest crime?" Lumumba asks rhetorically. He surmises that it is one more extension of white conservative contempt of the state's largest city, a Black-majority city viewed as unable to act in its own interest on how to operate a police department.

"Someone from north Mississippi certainly doesn't have a greater interest or desire for safety within our communities than we have for ourselves," Lumumba said. "And so, it's paternalistic. I think it is underpinned in partisanship. Also quite frankly, and honestly, it reeks of racism."

Over a chicken biscuit and coffee in middle-class north Jackson, Dr Anita DeRouen, a high school English teacher and former college professor, recounted a drive-by shooting at an empty house last year, up the street from her own in midtown.

"I was outside packing up my car and I hear what sounds like three pow pow pow," she said. The city cops responded, eventually, she said. Little came of it; no one had been hurt.

Her house is just inside the footprint of the Capitol Complex Improvement District now. She has a doctorate in English and still does a thing that's characteristic of Black people talking about race in Mississippi. Rather than refer to it directly, she points to the brown skin on the back of her hand when she means Black people.

If she has to call the police now, the capitol police respond first. "What I've noticed is, I do see more police in my neighborhood when there's a reason to call the police. Right? Do people feel more confident calling the police? I don't know. I just see them around."

DeRouen's concern about the capitol police district is about who they will police, and to whom they will be accountable.

"As a person living in Jackson, I was more concerned about the court situation that came along with that. Because we elect our judges, and they weren't going to be elected judges," she said. "The thing that struck me about the district as a whole was that it was so carved out to protect as many white people as they can."

The police chiefs of each agency talk to each other regularly, and talk in public about trying to coordinate their efforts. A police officer responding to a call in the CCID in Jackson's north is one fewer to answer a call in the south, after all.

Wade came to the job less than a year ago with a community-oriented policing strategy to address the city's violence. He holds regular community meetings where he shares crime data and solicits feedback from the public. The city established an office of violence prevention and trauma recovery last year, which works to intercept people who are likely to commit an act of violence - or to be a victim of violence - before they add to Jackson's statistics.

The Jackson city police department fields about 275 officers. The capitol police have about 200 and are staffing up to get to 225, chief Bo Luckey said in public comments in May.

Neither agency is unblemished. Even as the legislature was considering a plan to expand the authority of the capitol police, the department was under scrutiny for a series of questionable shootings. In one case, an officer fired into an apartment building while chasing a suspected car thief, shooting a woman asleep in her bed. In another, police appear to have shot through the windshield of a car, killing 25-year-old Jaylen Lewis.

People around Jackson are touchy about policing right now after the revelations of the Goon Squad torture case in neighboring Rankin county. The federal investigation resulted in convictions for six white Rankin county deputies who sexually humiliated and abused two Black men, shooting one in the mouth. The trial surfaced a pattern of misconduct that still has the community reeling.

Local law enforcement in Jackson bristles at any comparison between their policing and that of the Rankin sheriff's office.

Jackson police are still digging out from criticism for failing to notify Bettersten Wade that her son Dexter Wade, had been killed by an off-duty police officer and - despite having ID and her phone calls to the coroner's office - was buried in an anonymous pauper's grave behind the county jail. The city and county remain at odds over who should take blame; meanwhile Jackson reformed its notification processes in the wake of public scrutiny.

In comparison, two years after the Lewis shooting, Mississippi public safety officials have remained unwilling to reveal basic details about the event to Lewis's family, citing a continuing "investigation".

State officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.

The mayor noted that the city's clearance rate for homicide investigation's is above 70%, an indication that the public is willing to work with city police to solve crime. The national average is around 50%.

Lumumba insists that the violence in Jackson is not a product of poor policing, drawing a contrast in approach with the capitol police. "But the fact that new problems surface, new interpersonal conflicts take place means that there's a gap that we're not filling," he said. "And I only say that to say that this is absent in the consideration of the state, as they try to approach a safer environment for Jackson from a paternalistic standpoint. They don't engage community."

Downtown Jackson has been losing population for a generation. You can drive long vacant stretches between buildings before finding signs of life inside. Depopulation isn't just a Jackson problem - when you look at the list of shrinking communities in America, Mississippi towns like Greenville, Clarksdale and Vicksburg top the list, all expectations of Sun belt growth be damned. People are fleeing poverty.

The emptiness creates problems for those who remain: squatters and unobserved spaces nurturing crime. Loss begets a vicious cycle.

But people live in this town. Many are thriving.

An hour before blues time at Hal and Mal's, Jackson's resident drag queen Penny Nickels was finishing up trivia night at the other end of the bar. It's a monthly event held by Mississippi Capital City Pride. They're worried about how the police will handle anti-queer harassment.

"I've had protesters outside protesting, just me. I'm just one queen," Nickels said. "I'll be getting out of the car in the parking lot, and they will be coming out. Like they will be yelling directly after me."

The city's Pride festival is a major event in Jackson, and has long had administrative support from the city government, said Chris Ellis, chair-elect of Mississippi Capital City Pride.

"The governor vacates the premises while we're around," Ellis said. "I'm sure if he was there, he would ignore us, pretend we don't exist, or outright claim that we're, you know, degenerates, and all that good stuff."

Jackson's LGBTQ+ activists fought for protections from bullhorn-wielding protesters during Pride, and the city responded with an ordinance limiting how amplified sound can be used in public.

Alas, the capitol police do not enforce Jackson city ordinances.

That complicates the coordination Jackson's police department hopes to achieve with the capitol police. For the moment, a single 911 system handles all calls for the city, regardless of type. "When a citizen dials 911, they don't know if it's a city ordinance or a state law," Wade said.

The legislature anticipated this problem. Reeves vetoed a bill extending local ordinance enforcement authority to the department, because he doesn't like the city's politics.

In a Facebook message explaining his veto, Reeves said capitol police should not be obligated to uphold local laws restricting police from pursuing immigration violations, describing Jackson as a so-called sanctuary city.

"I believe, if this bill were to become law, the capitol police could not assist ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in deporting illegal aliens that live in this community," Reeves said. "Any time or attention - from an already under-resourced police force - on dealing with city ordinances [of which there are hundreds and none of which have been contemplated, much less approved, by the state] and code enforcement is an unnecessary diversion of personnel from their mission of finding and arresting the criminals."

Reeves did sign legislation requiring any protest next to state property in Jackson to obtain the written permission of the Mississippi public safety director or the capitol police chief. That legislation has been blocked in federal court.

Jackson's annual Pride march - which is held in an area that is now covered by the CCID - is nonetheless caught between the governor and his politics, Ellis said.

"We've always done a march around Jackson as part of our festivities every year," Ellis said. "And we're talking about not doing that because it's in the purview of the capitol police."

"The reason he even stopped me was because I had my white girlfriend in the car." Just after leaving an arraignment hearing at the Hinds county courthouse in Jackson, a Black man in his 30s nervously, described the reasons he ran from a traffic stop from a capitol police officer in an unmarked car earlier this year. As the Jacksonian talks jackrabbit fast, he's reliving the event. He requested anonymity to help prevent reprisals.

"So he profiled me. I was driving her car," the young man said, explaining how the officer pulled him over because his girlfriend was with him.

"He gets out. I just see him waving the gun.

"I instantly take off, police or no police. This is supposed to be a traffic stop. I'm not wanted for anything. And I haven't did anything. But I've been assaulted by the police. I've been beat for nothing. They were supposed to be taking me to jail, instead they put gloves on, beat me and they just dropped me off in a neighboring neighborhood."

In his recollection, Jackson city police tuned him up in an alley some years ago. But it was capitol police that went after him recently.

Jackson is depressing, he said.

"If you can make it here, you can make anywhere. But if you didn't make it out of here, then really, it was all against you anyway."

An afternoon in a courtroom at the Hinds county courthouse will break your heart. On a random Monday in July, two dozen men and women - mostly men, almost exclusively Black men shackled together - passed before the bench.

The state's initial legislative plan called for the establishment of a parallel court system for cases brought by the capitol police, bypassing Hinds county superior court. Chief justice Michael K Randolph, a white conservative Republican, would have appointed the judge for this court. Its prosecutors would be appointed by the attorney general, Lynn Fitch, also a white conservative Republican.

A fifth circuit federal court approved the basic concept in affirming the law last year. But Mississippi's state supreme court also ruled last year that the court's judges could not be appointed and hear felonies under the Mississippi constitution.

So now the plan is for the court to be restricted to misdemeanor cases, said Hinds county superior court judge Johnnie McDaniels.

"The idea was that court was created to alleviate the backlog of cases in Hinds county. But I'm not sure we have a backlog of cases in terms of misdemeanor cases," he said. "My position has always been that the state legislature should simply fund two other circuit court judges for Hinds county, so that we can address the real backlog of the number of cases we have. We have a a number of murder cases, a number of all types of cases. And our judges work extremely hard."

Almost all of the defendants had court-appointed attorneys because they were too poor to afford private counsel. Most stood accused of relatively minor crimes. Probation violations, because they didn't want to show up in front of a probation officer without money to pay their fines. Drug possession. Running from the cops.

But four faced murder charges.

Senior judge Winston Kidd said what came through court that day was fairly normal. The murder problem is real.

"And I acknowledged that when [SB] 1020 came out," he said, referring to the bill that expanded the capitol police department's power. "I acknowledged this problem. But no one could tell us why do we need this bill? The only thing I could go back to was the fact that all four circuit judges are African American, and in no other jurisdiction in this state had they tried something of that nature."

In 2017, the Mississippi legislature created the Capitol Complex Improvement District as a vehicle to fund infrastructure issues in Jackson. The state and the city have been feuding over control of its ageing water system. Bit by bit, the state's eye has wandered over other Jackson assets - a baseball field here, the airport over there.

Jackson needs the means to alleviate long-term problems of poverty. Instead, the state looks at taking what the city has left.