Ellington

Former TV sportscaster Rick Whitlow seems like an incredibly nice person. He did not, however, impress me as a criminology expert when we met April 24 to talk about his new job. He is executive director of the new Metro Jackson SafeCity Watch, a group formed to bring "accountability, enhanced communications, community involvement, and entrepreneurial energy to the broken Metro Jackson Criminal Justice system," as a press release put it on April 28.

I had basically two problems with my meeting with Whitlow, who had contacted me to give publicity to the new group, spearheaded by City Councilman Ben Allen and friends, including Bill Latham, Clint Henry, Tony Huffman, Wydette Hawkins and the management of Habana Smoke Shop—men Whitlow called the "founding fathers." First, the director of the new police "watchdog" group seems to know little about policing strategies and certainly displayed no knowledge of the theories behind "community policing," the strategy that Chief Robert Moore is trying to institute in Jackson.

Second, he seems quite willing to grab onto negative statistics about crime in Jackson in one sentence, and then say statistics don't matter when those statistics are challenged. First, he told me that Jackson is "ahead of national trends" for crime, per capita. Then he said we have be "careful messing around with stats." (A statistic database is one of the group's stated objectives.) Next, he rejected the suggestion that perhaps we should just ignore stats altogether if they're so unreliable: "Then we wouldn't have a measuring stick."

I told Whitlow about a questionable use of crime indicators I had just seen. In the speech announcing his candidacy for Hinds County district attorney, Wilson Carroll stated: "A recent study found that Jackson, Mississippi, is the fourth most crime-ridden, dangerous city in America." He cited a Morgan Quitno Press study that, last fall, ranked Jackson No. 4 from the bottom of their "safest cities" report. Carroll then continued, "And that's the good news. Because since this study was done, crime in Jackson has gone up across the board. Murder, assault, property crimes—crime is up in nearly every category. As a result, it is entirely possible that Jackson, Mississippi, today is the most dangerous city in America."

Whoa.

Here's the problem with that analysis. Morgan Quitno, a publisher that does various best- and worst-city studies every year to sell books, uses a complicated formula to decide the rankings. In this study, the numbers were FBI figures from 2001. Based on those figures and the FBI's 2002 figures, crime dropped in Jackson by 5 percent in 2002. After Carroll's announcement, I asked him what figures he's using to show that crime has gone up even further. He pointed to the Clarion-Ledger's story that crime has gone up 15 percent—but I explained to him that that figure was for the first three months of this year over last year (and based on a 29-percent jump in February). In other words, he was comparing a year-long apple with a three-month orange. Further, there is no evidence that Jackson may be even more dangerous than other cities by now, since another annual comparison of cities hasn't been done, yet, using the same criteria. Two million jobs have been lost in this country; crime is probably up in other cities, too. It just wasn't logical, and worse in my book, it was another example of crime sensationalism for sheer politicking. And it included some pretty serious Jackson-bashing, to boot.

Anyone who has spent much time going over statistics knows that it's pretty easy to find the good and the bad and the ugly, depending on what you�'e looking for, in any set of numbers. And apparently Whitlow's group is out to prove that crime is off the charts in Jackson, and that the mayor and police chief are ineffective. In a WAPT-TV interview, member Wydett Hawkins accused the "so-called chief of police" of "doing nothing." He said the new group�s goal is to make sure the city isn't hiding crime from residents.

What a goal.

In my journalism career, I've not been one to support the police all the time, or to try to skewer them, either. I try to be fair. As we saw all too well on 9-11, their jobs are tough and require major courage. Here in Jackson, a typical officer makes about $22,000 a year, and must face the demons that the rest of us fear.

I do believe in being critical of the police, as well as all public officials, but "critical" means intelligent analysis and watchdoggery, not conducting witch-hunts. If the police do something stupid, I'll report it. But since I started my crime series, it has become obvious to me that a good number of people just do not want to see the city, or the police, succeed, for whatever reason. They are creating hysteria—an attempt to create a perception of incompetence—that is counterproductive at this point. This is not fair to the good people of Jackson who want to help the police fight crime—without splitting the baby in half in some political chess game.

At Chief Moore's April 9 press conference, in which he announced that crime had increased in the first three months of 2003, he patted his department�s back for arresting nearly all the suspected murderers this year, and lamented the difficulty of solving auto thefts and other property crimes (which nationally have less than a 15-percent arrest rate).

"I'm going to give you more data than you've ever had before," he told the media, challenging us, in turn, to tell the whole story. He said he wants to reverse the media-driven perception that the city is "drowning in crime. It's just not true." Then, after a Clarion-Ledger reporter asked him what he was going to do to change this perception, Moore said police were going directly to community members through speeches and neighborhood meetings, adding, "A lot of people don't know their precinct commanders. Then he said, "Perception is fueling too much fear out there; we are going to get them (residents) the information, so they can decide."

At the end of our talk, Rick Whitlow assured me that his group would report the successes of the police department, as well as their weaknesses. "We're not trying to dictate policy. We're not going to be political in this matter."

Good. Because the rest of us will be watching, too.

Donna Ladd is the editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press.