Crime, potholes, homelessness: Jackson turns to data for answers
Jackson is laying the groundwork to use data across city departments and use it to address, initially, youth crime, homelessness and infrastructure needs.
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is a member of the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance, which trains mayors to understand data and use it to make decisions that can improve city services.
“If we don’t have proper data about where we stand, we can’t set sufficient goals of where we want to go in the future,” Lumumba said, adding that data also allows goals to be measured and followed.
Twenty mayors from North and South America are part of the cohort, which met last spring. The mayor said the program is an opportunity to learn from other city leaders and see what Jackson is doing well. As part of a network of mayors, he can reach out to them even after the program is over.
James Anderson, head of government innovation programs for Bloomberg Philanthropies, said the mayor joined the program last year with an ambitious application that articulated a vision of changing a work culture that did not use data before.
The use of data, including in city settings, has been a trend for the past decade, but the Bloomberg program is looking for mayors who want to take greater steps, Anderson said.
For example, Jackson is now one of the few cities across America with a formal citywide data strategy, he said.
“This alliance was the next step to help the most ambitious cities make ambitious gains,” Anderson said.
Lumumba hopes using data can help the city be more proactive in its decision making and dealing with crises. As part of the citywide strategy, departments are also getting help with accessing data, understanding it and using it more in their daily work.
One of his goals is to use data to reduce youth violence by addressing root causes of violence.
Data has helped the city see that the sharpest increase in violence has been youth, and that has led to focused efforts for that population, such as work through the Office of Violence Prevention & Trauma Recovery and a youth curfew approved at the beginning of the year.
One challenge of a youth curfew is finding a place to house those who violate it, Lumumba said. There is a county facility, the Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center, but it holds those charged with misdemeanors or felonies, including those who face adult criminal charges.
A way to provide space for youth to go and to give them access to programs is through curfew centers, which Lumumba said are in the works. In a March episode of a city talk show, he said there are plans to partner with a local church to open a curfew center.
Lumumba envisions the center as a place staffed with social workers and professionals to provide young people with extra curricular activities and teach them conflict resolution skills.
Through the program, another of the mayor’s goals is to use data to get Jackson to “functional zero” homelessness, which is the point where the same number of people entering homelessness exit homelessness in the same month.
Although Lumumba said there are regional challenges to addressing the issue, recent counts show that 67 of the 93 people experiencing homelessness in central Mississippi were in the metro Jackson area.
Nearly 1,000 people experienced homelessness in Mississippi in 2023, according to the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The common way to get these numbers are through “point-in-time” counts, which are completed annually by continuum-of-care service providers across the country in one day and gives an estimate of sheltered and unsheltered populations.
Lumumba said he would like data collected in Jackson to go further because the current point-in-time counts are insufficient to understand what circumstances people are facing. Better data can help determine who needs housing and maybe, additionally, services for mental health or substance addiction, he said.
Lumumba’s last data-related priority is about infrastructure needs and assessing the condition of roads and systems.
He said a need is clear if residents report a road needing to be paved or a burst pipe. But beyond that, he said there is more work to be done, such as how paving projects relate to each other and how to create more mobility within the city.
A program like the City Data Alliance can help cities make policy decisions, streamline services and look forward, said Dallas Breen, the executive director of the John C. Stennis Institute of Government and Community Development at Mississippi State University, which provides research, training and services to municipalities, counties and government agencies.
Like Jackson is doing, Breen said it is helpful to work with a data scientist who can help city leaders and staff and understand the data they are looking at and how to collect it.
“The more data you have, the more informed your decisions will be,” Breen said.
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Marshall Ramsey: Bill Walton
And I’m sure Jerry Garcia greeted him next.
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Magnolia State’s high school baseball has come long, long way
PEARL — So much about the Mississippi sports landscape has changed in my more than half century of chronicling all things athletic in the Magnolia State. Little, if any, has changed more – or for the better – than high school baseball.
That vast improvement has been on regal display for the past five days in the MHSAA State Championships at Trustmark Park, where the baseball was crisply played and often by superbly trained athletes, many of whom you will be watching and reading about for years.
There are several reasons why Mississippi’s college baseball teams are so successful year after year. Chief among them: The talent pool supplied by Mississippi high schools keeps producing top shelf talent.
Think about it: Mississippi State and Ole Miss have won national championships in the past three years. Southern Miss will play in its eighth straight NCAA Regional next week and leads the nation in both consecutive 30-win and 40-win seasons. Delta State is a perennial Division II national power. William Carey is currently playing in the NAIA World Series. Four – count them, four – Mississippi junior colleges rank in the nation’s top 20.
Baseball talent abounds in Mississippi, where the coaching, the facilities and the community support have all improved dramatically. Gone are the days when assistant football coaches who didn’t even understand the infield fly rule were forced to coach baseball and were more than happy to play only a dozen or so games a season.
Sumrall’s 44-year-old coach Andy Davis, whose Bobcats defeated Ripley 2-0 Saturday morning for the Bobcats seventh state championship over the past 16 years, has witnessed first-hand the sea change in Mississippi high school baseball. “It’s unreal how much better it’s gotten,” Davis said. “I’m talking about the skill level, the technology, the coaching, the support, the facilities, the emphasis on baseball.”
Davis’ baseball life has come full circle. Twenty-seven years ago, Andy Davis pitched Taylorsville to a state championship victory over Nettleton. This week, his 15-year-old, ninth grade son, Drew, helped pitch and hit Sumrall to a championship in a thoroughly entertaining and ultra competitive best-of-three series with Ripley.
Get this: Ripley’s Ty Long struck out 27 batters, allowed four hits and zero runs in 13 innings of a three-game state championship series – and he lost. Said Andy Davis, “I’ve been coaching baseball for 24 years and he’s the best pitcher any of my teams has ever faced.”
But this state tournament has been a showcase of remarkable talent. No telling how many games and championships Drew Davis will win before his high school career ends in May of 2027. He was Sumrall’s best pitcher as an eighth-grader, which is saying something when you realize the Bobcats’ No. 2 starter Leo Odom, a junior, already has committed to play at Ole Miss. Drew Davis, 13-0 for Sumrall as an eighth-grader, played and pitched for Team USA (under-15) in international competition last season.
Sumrall’s No. 3 pitcher Landon Hawkins, a junior who is also Sumrall’s football quarterback, pitched a four-hit shutout Saturday. “Landon’s our leader and he has played everything but catcher for us,” Andy Davis said. “I’d go to battle every day with him. He was a legend out there today.”
Future college and junior college stars were all over the Trustmark Park diamond throughout the week. Brandon lefty Walker Hooks, an Ole Miss signee, helped pitch the Bulldogs to the Class 7A championship, besting Hernando, which was led by Mississippi State signee Topher Jones and another Ole Miss signee, Thomas Mitchell. Junior center fielder Jaumaurion Jones, a Southern Miss commitment, scored the only run in Brandon’s 1-0 championship victory. St. Andrews won the Class 2A title, despite expert pitching from Mississippi State commitment Landon Harmon of East Union. There were so many more stars shining brightly this week, but that gives you an idea.
None shined more brightly than Ripley’s pitcher-shortstop Long, who has signed to play his college ball at Southern Miss. Ripley coach Joel Gafford called Long “the kind of player you are lucky if you get to coach one like him once in your career.”
Andy Davis, the Sumrall coach, embraced Long post-game and later told about their brief conversation. “I told him he’s a stud and that I can’t wait to watch him when he’s at USM. If they cloned him nine times, it’d be one heck of a baseball team because he pitches, he competes, he defends and he’s a tough out. You just have to tip your cap to that kid.”
And you can tip it to Mississippi high school baseball while you’re at it.
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Judge: Juries, not judges, should rule on officers’ ‘bad acts’
Desmond Green spent about two years behind bars charged with a capital murder he didn’t commit.
A Jackson police detective “used a lying, drug-impaired jailhouse informant to lock Green up,” U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves wrote Monday in response to Green’s 2023 lawsuit. “The detective also steered the informant to select Green’s face from a photo lineup. It was a horrifying wrong.”
Reeves wrote that the horror continued in the Hinds County Detention Center, which was “full of violence, rodents, and moldy food. He says there was ‘constant yelling, fighting and threats.’ Green ‘often did not have a mattress, or even a pad, to sleep on, and slept on the floor.’ He ‘constantly feared for his life.’”
The informant recanted. The state dropped the charges, but the ordeal still cost Green about two years in jail.
Last year, he filed a lawsuit against the city of Jackson and others.
“Green filed this lawsuit to seek justice for those two wrongs — his prosecution and conditions of confinement,” Reeves wrote. “He has sued the detective who locked him up, her employer (the City of Jackson, Mississippi), and the operator of the Hinds County Detention Center.”
Now, the judge wrote, Green is “on the precipice of being wronged a third time. Not by a rogue officer or jailer, but by the law itself. Because the detective says the legal doctrine of qualified immunity requires the Court to dismiss Green’s claims against her.”
“Qualified immunity is an unconstitutional error. It is past time for the judiciary to correct this mistake.”
— U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves
In his Monday decision, Reeves paved the way for the lawsuit to go forward. He rejected defense claims that the litigation should be dismissed because of the qualified immunity doctrine, which the U.S. Supreme Court created in 1967.
That doctrine “means persons wronged by government agents cannot sue those agents unless the Supreme Court previously found substantially the same acts to be unconstitutional,” the judge wrote. “A cynic might say that with qualified immunity, government agents are at liberty to violate your constitutional rights as long as they do so in a novel way.”
But Green didn’t stop at suing for justice and damages. He wants to bring an end to qualified immunity, and many lawyers, professors and judges have sided with him.
“The Court agrees with these calls for change,” Reeves wrote. “Congress’s intent to protect citizens from government abuse cannot be overridden by judges who think they know better. As a doctrine that defies this basic principle, qualified immunity is an unconstitutional error. It is past time for the judiciary to correct this mistake.”
On Feb. 13, 2020, someone shot Nicholas Robertson, who knocked on the door of Avery Forbes’ home in Jackson and died there.
Two months later, police arrested Samuel Jennings on an unrelated charge. He told police that Desmond Green told him that he had killed Robertson.
The accusation stunned Green, who told police he didn’t know Robertson, much less take part in his murder.
Despite that, Detective Jacquelyn Thomas and Hinds County prosecutors encouraged the grand jury to indict Green, who was jailed without bond, with armed robbery being the underlying felony that elevated it to capital murder.
Two years later, Jennings recanted, blaming the statement on meth abuse and told authorities he suffered from a variety of mental issues. He said he initially pointed to the first photo in a photo lineup, only to have the detective steer him instead to the fifth photo, which was Green.
As a result, prosecutors remanded the case to the file, and Green finally went free in 2022.
Green worked as a brick mason before suffering a series of tragedies. He had 28 inches of his colon removed because of diverticulitis. His mother died of kidney failure, and his father had stage 4 lung cancer that went into his brain.
“They died seven months apart,” said his sister, Jackie.
After that, Green was jailed in 2020 for capital murder in the killing of Robertson, a man he said he never knew and never met.
On the night of the homicide, he said, “I was at home, trying to do everything you do to not be in trouble. I was at home in my bed, asleep.”
Despite that, he was arrested, put in jail and refused bond.
Inside the jail, he said he was put on lockdown, sometimes going up to two weeks without a shower.
He lost the home he had for more than seven years, he lost time with his seven children, and he returned home with a limp. “It hurt me to walk,” he said.
His arms remained sore because of all the nights he slept on concrete. “The jail was overcrowded,” he said. “We sometimes had five or six people” to a cell intended for two.
The 43-year-old still suffers from nightmares from his time behind bars. “I saw people murdered in the jail,” he said. “I feel very paranoid, like I’m always being watched. It’s hard for me to be around a lot of people.”
He said another charge is still pending against him that he has yet to be indicted for — grand larceny.
“They claimed I was stealing water,” he said, “but that wasn’t true.” In reality, he said, there was no water to steal because firefighters shut off his water after his neighbor’s home burned down.
Law enforcement officers need to thoroughly investigate before putting people behind bars, he said. “There was no evidence showing I was involved, so why was I arrested?”
The system needs to be improved, he said. “My life was on the line the whole time, and I was never allowed to speak to the judge until two years later. I lost time that I’ll never get back.”
Tupelo attorney Jim D. Waide III, who is representing Green, said he thinks Reeves’ opinion comes closer than any previous opinion to making the Supreme Court review the doctrine.
In addition to the opinion of Reeves, who was nominated by then-President Barack Obama in 2010, Judge Don R. Willett of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of then-President Trump’s nominees in 2017, has also questioned the doctrine.
In 2018, Willett criticized “the kudzu-like creep of the modern immunity regime” and explaining how the doctrine “smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly.”
In other words, “it’s immaterial that someone acts unconstitutionally if no prior case held such misconduct unlawful,” Willett wrote. “Immunity ought not be immune from thoughtful reappraisal.”
In the years following the end of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists “unleashed waves of terrorism across the South,” Reeves wrote.
In response, he wrote that Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to help protect Black Americans because state courts “left the terrorism committed by various militant groups seeking control in the South unchecked.”
For decades, he wrote, the high court never recognized a “good-faith immunity,” but that changed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that Jackson police officers who arrested ministers who entered a whites-only waiting room were immune from litigation because the officers were acting in “good faith.”
In creating this qualified immunity, justices “protected the Southern officials still violating those federal rights 100 years after the War ended,” Reeves wrote. “Southern trees bear strange fruit, indeed. It is difficult to see qualified immunity’s creation as anything other than a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.”
Such “immunity,” he wrote, has led to the protection of correctional officers holding a person naked in a frigid cell, “covered in other person’s feces,” police officers stealing $225,000 in cash and rare coins, and police officers killing someone inside a car because “the law clearly established only that an officer would not shoot a person from outside a car.”
Reeves called for judges to let juries decide instead.
Jurors can be instructed that federal law gives people the right to be free “from unconstitutional action under color of state law” and also that unnecessary suits against public officers run the risk of diverting “energy from pressing public issues” and deterring “able citizens from acceptance of public office,” he wrote.
The Constitution is full of such tensions, he wrote. “Its authors in one breath declared all men to be created equal, and in the other calculated a slave to be worth three-fifths of a white person. Contradiction is in America’s DNA.”
Jurors “know the difference between those acting properly and those violating others’ rights,” he wrote. “Their work confirms that when it comes to fact-finding, ‘anything a judge can do a jury can do better. It takes a special type of arrogance simply to conclude that American jurors cannot.’”
As a citizen, “Desmond Green has suffered two injustices,” the judge wrote. “The judiciary should not impose a third. If qualified immunity would do that, closing the courthouse doors to his claims, then the doctrine should come to its overdue end.”
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6,000 U.S. doctors urge the Supreme Court to keep abortions in medical emergencies legal
Originally published by The 19th
Nearly 6,000 doctors, hailing from all 50 states, have drafted a letter asking the Supreme Court to uphold a federal law that requires hospital emergency departments to provide abortions when they are needed to stabilize patients.
The letter, organized by the left-leaning Committee to Protect Health Care and shared first with The 19th, concerns the case Idaho v. United States, which the high court heard in April.
In that case, the federal government has argued that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — a 1986 law known as EMTALA — requires that hospitals participating in the federal Medicare program provide abortions if doing so is the necessary treatment in an emergency. Idaho has contested that interpretation, and argued that its state-level abortion ban supersedes federal law. Idaho’s current ban allows an exception only if the procedure will save the life of the pregnant person, but not if it will otherwise preserve their health.
“We know firsthand how complications from pregnancy can lead very quickly to a medical crisis, requiring immediate care and treatment,” states the letter, which was signed by doctors across specialties whose abilities to provide care could be affected by a ban, including oncology, emergency medicine and anesthesiology. “These patients’ complications can range from a miscarriage to heavy bleeding, from placental abruption to a stroke from severe preeclampsia – and doctors and health professionals in emergency departments must be allowed to use the full range of medical options to save these patients’ lives, including abortion.”
The case is one of two abortion-related challenges the court has heard this term, and one of the first since the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. A decision is expected this June.
The court has held that, while this case is pending, the federal government cannot enforce EMTALA in Idaho. As a result, patients in the midst of medical emergencies have flown to Utah — the next closest state with abortion access — to receive treatment.
Abortions that would be covered by EMTALA constitute only a tiny fraction of terminations performed in the United States. Still, the case has sparked tremendous concern among physicians.
“If someone is having a crisis and part of the treatment involves an abortion — or any procedure or intervention that might be deemed an abortion by a prosecutor down the road — that is something we shouldn’t have to think about,” said Dr. Rob Davidson, a Michigan-based emergency physician and the committee’s executive director. “When I have a pregnant woman having a crisis, my first call should be to an OB, and not a lawyer.”
It’s not clear how the Supreme Court will rule, but their decision could have implications well beyond abortion. Already, the fear of violating strict abortion bans has deterred aspiring and practicing physicians from setting up shop in states with such laws — particularly in Idaho, which has seen an exodus of maternal-fetal medicine specialists in the almost two years since Roe’s fall. Physicians in the state worry a court finding in favor of Idaho might exacerbate that trend.
Legal scholars say that if the court finds EMTALA does not protect abortion as one form of emergency medical care, states could subsequently restrict other treatments — undercutting the law’s core holding that patients who present at emergency rooms are guaranteed to at least receive stabilizing treatment.
“The basis of Dobbs is states have the power to regulate medical care. If you extend that to EMTALA, you open up EMTALA to whatever drama a state wants to play out in its emergency rooms,” Sara Rosenbaum, a professor emerita of health law and policy at George Washington University who has written extensively about EMTALA, told The 19th last month.
This could theoretically include prohibiting hospitals from providing emergency care for patients with HIV or substance use disorder — treatment they would ordinarily be required to provide.
“What if someone says, ‘We don’t believe in harm reduction programs for opioid use disorder, so we don’t think we should provide naloxone kits when patients leave the ER?’” Davidson asks. “This is bad enough that I don’t have to imagine what could happen next, or what else they could carve out. But you’re opening a Pandora’s box.”
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FBI raids Hinds County DA’s business, office
On Wednesday morning, the FBI raided businesses owned by Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens II as well as his office.
“This morning, FBI agents came to our offices,” he said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating with their efforts.”
FBI agents raided his Downtown Cigar Company and other businesses, just blocks from the Hinds County Courthouse, where Owens serves as prosecutor.
“The FBI is executing federal search warrants at multiple locations,” FBI spokeswoman Marshay Lawson said in a statement. “The affidavit in support of the search warrants has been sealed by the court, and so I am prohibited from commenting further. There is no threat to public safety.”
Owens, who was first elected as district attorney in 2019, did not return calls, but said in a statement on Facebook that his office continues to “work on behalf of the citizens of Hinds County. That has been and will continue to be our primary focus.”
Owens, a native of Terry, previously served as chief policy counsel and managing attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi office. He attended Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., and worked for the late U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran as a legal intern for the Senate Appropriations Committee. Owens is a lieutenant intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves.
Sources close to a federal investigation say the FBI has been examining the city of Jackson’s garbage contract, though it’s not known if there is any connection to the raids related to Owens. Agents have questioned City Council members about that contract.
In recent years, the Jackson City Council and Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba have battled over garbage contracts, leading to multiple emergency contracts with Waste Management and Richard’s Disposal.
After City Council members rejected the mayor’s choice of Richard’s Disposal, Richard’s stopped collecting garbage.
That led to trash piling up on the streets of Jackson for 18 days in April 2023. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality later levied a fine of up to $900,000 against the city for failing to pick up trash.
In March, following a new request for proposals, Richard’s Disposal was awarded a $64 million contract over six years. The council voted 4-3 after two hours of discussion with the three no votes coming from Ward 1’s Ashby Foote, Ward 3’s Kenneth Stokes and Ward 5’s Vernon Hartley. Council President Aaron Banks, who had opposed awarding Richard’s the contract last year, sided with the majority.
Update 5/22/24: This story has been updated to include new developements.
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How many students are retained by the ‘third-grade gate’? No one knows
Mississippi has seen significant improvement in its reading scores over the last decade, bringing much national attention and leading other states to attempt to replicate the success.
Mississippi’s success, first drawing national eyes in 2019, is usually attributed to a state law from earlier in the decade that reformed reading instruction and testing, piquing the interest of other states. As reading reforms have become particularly popular, 38 states have added to or updated their laws in the last five years according to data collected by ExcelinEd.
These policies are not uniform across the country, however, and much of the debate around implementing them has focused on whether third-graders who fail a benchmark assessment should be held back. It is a key component of Mississippi’s law, the so-called “third-grade gate.” Sixteen other states have a similar requirement, but at least two states have also recently repealed it.
How many students actually get retained under Mississippi’s policy? It’s harder to know than you might expect.
When a student takes state tests at the end of third grade, they receive a score on a 1-5 scale: minimal (1), basic (2), passing (3), proficient (4) or advanced (5). Students are required to score a three or above to be promoted to the 4th grade per Mississippi law, and have multiple chances to take the test before being held back. Students can also still move up to the 4th grade even if they fail the test in a couple of extenuating circumstances known as “good cause exemptions.” These include a learning disability or being previously retained for two years.
It is up to local school districts to implement this law and determine if students qualify for an exemption or should be held back. Since each of Mississippi’s 138 school districts made this decision independently, the Mississippi Department of Education said they cannot easily track whether a student was held back specifically because of the law. The department’s data management system does not show a reason why a student was held back, merely whether they were held back.
Given that limitation, Mississippi Today requested data regarding how many students both failed the test and were held back, with the acknowledgment that there was no guarantee one caused the other. The number of students in this category has fallen in recent years, going from 9% of test takers in 2019 to 6.5% last school year.
Grace Breazeale, a K-12 policy associate with Mississippi First, an education policy nonprofit, said that, while these numbers may be in the ballpark, she has concerns they are not completely accurate since a student could have failed the test, received a good cause exemption, and still been held back for another reason.
Given this lack of clarity, Breazeale said the education department should adjust its data collection methods and publish official numbers of students retained because of the literacy law.
“That would be important information for them to have to maintain a more accurate narrative about the (2013 literacy law) and spreading awareness about how third-grade retention is only a small piece of it,” she said.
Other states with retention policies have seen a similar number of students affected. In Florida, about 7-8% of students were held back because of the literacy law before COVID-19 according to Cari Miller, chancellor of early learning for the Florida Department of Education.
A review of the academic literature on third-grade retention by FutureEd, a Georgetown education policy think tank, showed mixed or positive results. Holding students back in higher grades was found to be generally unsuccessful, leading to disengagement, but could be productive in younger grades, particularly if paired with interventions.
One study from Boston University specifically examined the Mississippi “gate” and analyzed students just above and below the cut score from 2015, the first year the policy was in effect. They found the students who were held back scored better on sixth-grade reading assessments than their peers who were not retained. The authors said that, while these results are positive, they “cannot entirely disentangle” the effect of holding a student back from the additional interventions Mississippi provides to retained students.
Those additional supports are essential for the success of Mississippi students in the eyes of Kymyona Burk, former state literacy director with the Mississippi Department of Education. Burk said the additional supports the Education Department provided, including teacher training, state reimbursement for universal screeners, full-time literacy coaches and parent outreach, eased anxieties when it came to the retention piece of the law.
“We showed, kind of for the first time, that we not only want kids to learn how to read, we’re going to help you get there,” she said.
READ MORE: Mississippi ‘reading miracle’ has been out of reach for some schools
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