An Alabama jury convicted Bobby Cherry of taking part in the Ku Klux Klan’s 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls. Cherry received four life sentences — one for each slaying. In 2004, he died in prison.
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Major changes to the state tax code, including reducing the grocery tax and eliminating the personal income tax over time, will be considered during the 2025 legislative session, House Speaker Jason White said Monday.
White, R-West, who recently completed his first session as House speaker, met with media late Monday afternoon to answer questions about the recently completed 2024 session and to discuss his agenda for the 2025 session.
White said he will form a select committee to study the state’s tax laws and to make recommendations before the 2025 session. But it was obvious that he already has an idea of what he believes should be considered.
“It would be a net (tax) reduction,” White said, but he added if both the grocery tax and the income tax were cut that taxes would have to be increased in other areas to ensure enough revenue to provide state services.
White said he would like to see the state’s 7% grocery tax, the highest statewide tax of its kind in the nation, be cut at least in half as soon as possible. He also said his goal would be to completely eliminate the personal income tax, which provides just under one-third of the state general fund revenue. But he said that would be done over time.
“We have to be smart how we do it,” White said.
It seems that White is eyeing reviving at least portions of the tax reduction plan first proposed in the previous term by former House Speaker Philip Gunn, then-Speaker Pro Tem White and Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar. That plan included reductions in the grocery tax, elimination of the income tax over time and increases in the general sales tax on other retail items.
That plan drew criticism from many, including Gov. Tate Reeves, because of proposed increases in the sales tax on some items. White said the reason for the select committee, in part, would be to meet with outside groups to try to develop consensus on what taxes could be raised while enacting an overall net decrease in taxes by cutting the grocery tax and the income tax.
While the earlier plan to eliminate the income tax and to reduce the grocery tax was rejected, it did lead to a $525 million income tax cut – the largest in state history. It will not be fully phased in for two years. When the cut is fully phased in, the income tax still will generate close to $2 billion a year in state revenue.
The income tax cut is just the latest in a series of tax cuts totaling more than $1 billion a year the Legislature has passed over the past decade.
White’s goal also would be to provide the Department of Transportation with a new stream of revenue to fund infrastructure. Transportation is currently funded through an 18.4-cents-per-gallon fuel tax. But Transportation officials have contended for years they need more money for road and bridge projects and maintenance.
The speaker said the state could afford another major tax cut – pointing out that for the past two years the state has experienced unprecedented revenue surpluses. White acknowledged that unusual circumstances caused by billions in federal COVID-19 relief spending and by revenue generated by high inflation have helped lead to the large surpluses.
“That is why we have moved slowly,” said White.
White also said that Medicaid expansion would again be a major topic during the 2025 session. Efforts to expand Medicaid to provide health care for the working poor died during the 2024 session when a consensus could not be reached between the Republican majority House and Senate on the issue.
“I do think we got a pretty clear picture of the lay of the land” on Medicaid expansion in the 2024 session, White said. “A consensus did develop among the health care community, faith community, Mississippians in general and certainly the backing of business leaders as a whole.
“… That brought people around to the position to take it (Medicaid expansion) seriously and try to make it work. I think that lends itself to we will continue to push that. What that looks like I don’t know.”
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CLARKSDALE — On a Tuesday afternoon in the fall, Jessica Johnson held up index cards of words as students crowded around the table to identify the type of vowel sound and sort them into buckets.
In another classroom, Shalandria Ivy guided students as they identified images, sounded out the first letter of the item in the drawing, and found that letter in their cards. These teachers at Kirkpatrick Health & Medical Science Magnet, an elementary school in the Clarksdale Municipal School District, are also tutors in the Reading Roadmap after-school literacy program.
Johnson and Ivy are among hundreds of Mississippi reading teachers and leaders that helped create a rise in test scores after the passage of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013. Mississippi, which has long struggled with reading outcomes for students, has been showered with international acclaim for its gains that some dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.”
But in several school districts across the state, including here in Clarksdale, the drastic reading gains haven’t been as strong. For the teachers and students, the effects have felt less than miraculous, for reasons ranging from resources to teacher turnover.
“We’re in a space where students need hardcore remediation, (we) can’t really teach the grade-level themes because their comprehension is not there,” said Janice Citchens, a first-year English teacher in the West Tallahatchie School District. “My students are 100% capable, if they had the resources and the right people … then the sky is the limit.”
The 2013 state law created a more robust infrastructure around helping children learn to read and holding them back at the end of third grade if they didn’t hit a certain benchmark. While the law did not create a mandatory curriculum, the State Board of Education promoted, and in some cases required, teacher training on the principles of the “science of reading.” This term refers to a body of research that demonstrates the importance of phonics instruction in learning to read.
The success of the new system, which includes targeted teacher training, more parent communication and interventions for lower-performing students, brought much national attention to the state.
These test score improvements have come primarily on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test administered by the federal government in the fourth and eighth grades that is often used to compare between states. A decade ago, Mississippi ranked near the bottom of the list for its fourth-grade reading scores. In 2019, the state made headlines for making the most gains in the nation on fourth-grade reading. Again in 2022 and 2023, Mississippi has been lauded for surpassing the national average in this area.
Nearly every district in the state has seen some amount of improvement: A recent analysis by Mississippi First, an education policy nonprofit, found that 97% of school districts improved third-grade reading scores since the passage of the 2013 state law.
Despite this success, many districts across Mississippi are still struggling to get all their students to be successful readers, with 24 having 10 percent fewer students passing the third-grade “gate” on the first try than the state average. Teachers and policy experts attribute the challenge to multiple factors, including higher teacher turnover rates and fewer resources in low-income communities.
“One of the things I think we did with the Literacy-Based Promotion Act is prove … that Black kids and low-income kids can learn to read just like everybody else,” said Kelly Butler, former CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute that workeds to improve Mississippi students’ pre-literacy and reading skills. “So when you think about those districts that still have big pockets of low performance, I think part of it has to do with being able to attract (educators) in these hard-to-serve schools.”
Citchens, the West Tallahatchie teacher, said she can see in the data that many of her seventh- and eighth-grade students have regularly been behind grade level. She attributes this to her students receiving inconsistent reading instruction and a disparity in resources.
Citchens also said the teaching coaching she received has been some of the most influential training in her career, as it covered resources and best practices as well as how to use them in her classroom. She believes the benefits of these trainings are stemmed when teachers regularly leave a district.
“They’re pouring into the teacher, they’re getting these coaches, but if (the teachers) don’t stay long enough to perfect these practices … then the students are still at a disadvantage,” she said.
A recent Mississippi First analysis had similar findings. Its review of state testing and teacher turnover data for the 2022-23 school year found districts with higher rates of turnover were more likely to have low proficiency on state tests. While this analysis does not prove one factor is causing the other, it also points to research on the negative impacts on student learning when teachers leave.
Other educators have also observed this pattern. Rosemary Collins, a reading interventionist working in Leland, said that, while some districts have more resources, knowledge and experts to implement new tools, other districts are “asked to do more with less.”
Collins works with third-grade students who are projected to fail the reading assessment, or “third-grade gate” as it is colloquially known. She said she would like to see a highly structured literacy curriculum implemented for all students, not just those she works with, as she believes it would decrease the need for intense intervention. She also discussed the need for effective and equitable teaching training to make this happen, something that is stymied by turnover.
“To keep teachers in the classroom, it has to be a mindset change about what educators are and who they are for the community,” Collins said. “You have to feel respected and valued as an individual to want to stay in an environment.”
Both Citchens and Collins described an increased investment from parents in helping their children pass the third-grade test after all of the discussion and positive press related to Mississippi’s “reading miracle.”
“With the growth, and with all of the positive promotion of the growth, I see parents in my community … willing to be more active in their child’s education because they’re not only proud for their child, it’s like a sense of pride for themselves as well,” Citchens said.
Reading Roadmap, founded in Kansas, came to the Mississippi Delta in 2017. The interactive program places students in small groups based on their skill level and uses instructional materials that follow the “science of reading” principles promoted by the state education board.
“Mississippi as a whole has done it successfully, but here in this area, an area that’s sort of marginalized or stigmatized, I think we wanted to bring equity and bring a better light to this area,” said Taurean Morton, Mississippi state director with Reading Roadmap.
The excitement and investment around reading is something Clarksdale Municipal Superintendent Toya Harrell-Matthews said Reading Roadmap helped bring to her district. While COVID-19 interrupted some of it, she said she is working to see the energy return and help the program thrive.
“The first training they did in that little boardroom right over there, just the excitement (of) the teachers learning a new approach and the science of what they were actually going to be doing … I want to get back to that,” Harrell-Matthews said.
Morton, the state director for Reading Roadmap, said the program uses the local district’s benchmark testing results to sort students into skill groups and track their movement to ensure they are getting the interventions they need. Activities at each skill level are interactive or gamified, which allows students and teachers to reset from the school day.
He also said he’s noticed a gap in higher education teacher training programs around phonics and “the science of reading.” Morton said he hopes that if they can show the effectiveness of these strategies in their work, it will help create a shift at the post-secondary level.
Butler, the former CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute, also said strengthening Mississippi’s teacher training programs remains one of her key focuses. She said the programs have made improvements but there is still a lack of accountability for higher education programs.
“Until they are required to do something differently, we’re always going to be retraining teachers,” Butler said.
The Mississippi Department of Education attempted to address this issue in 2016 by requiring candidates to pass the Foundations of Reading assessment to receive an elementary education license.
Morton is excited by the growth students in the program are experiencing, with some of the schools they serve in Clarksdale also seeing improvements in their accountability grades. But even in the years where the program hasn’t seen huge improvements, his team still considers it a success.
“Each year we’ve seen movement and growth,” said Becky Nider, director of programs for Reading Roadmap. “Maybe a kid doesn’t go from being in the red to the green like we want, but we see them move through the red… We get to celebrate those small successes because it’s not a small success for that child.”
This mindset of incremental progress is one that some teachers would like to see more consistently represented in discussions of the so-called “miracle.”
Langly Dunn, an elementary librarian in the West Tallahatchie School District, said her district can have both a celebratory attitude and a clear understanding of the work they have left to do. It’s something she wishes politicians would also embody instead of “weaponizing and politicizing” the reading gains for their own benefit.
“When it comes to reading, the gains aren’t zero-sum,” she said. “It’s not like ‘we solved all problems and the way that we teach reading in Mississippi is perfect in every district, in every school, in every classroom all the time’ or ‘the results are unreliable’. It doesn’t have to be one of those two things. We can have made great strides and still interrogate what’s left for us to do.”
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Despite a recent Mississippi Supreme Court ruling allowing $10 million in public money to be spent on private schools, 2024 has not been a good year for those supporting school vouchers.
School-choice supporters were hopeful during the 2024 legislative session, with new House Speaker Jason White at times indicating support for vouchers.
But the Legislature, which recently completed its session, did not pass any new voucher bills. In fact, it placed tighter restrictions on some of the limited laws the state has in place allowing public money to be spent on private schools.
Notably, the Legislature passed a bill that provides significantly more oversight of a program that provides a limited number of scholarships or vouchers for special-needs children to attend private schools.
Going forward, thanks to the new law, to receive the vouchers a parent must certify that their child will be attending a private school that offers the special needs educational services that will help the child. And the school must report information on the academic progress of the child receiving the funds.
Also, efforts to expand another state program that provides tax credits for the benefit of private schools was defeated. Legislation that would have expanded the tax credits offered by the Children’s Promise Act from $8 million a year to $24 million to benefit private schools was defeated. Private schools are supposed to educate low income students and students with special needs to receive the benefit of the tax credits. The legislation expanding the Children’s Promise Act was defeated after it was reported that no state agency knew how many students who fit into the categories of poverty and other specific needs were being educated in the schools receiving funds through the tax credits.
Interestingly, the Legislature did not expand the Children’s Promise Act but also did not place more oversight on the private schools receiving the tax credit funds.
The bright spot for those supporting vouchers was the early May state Supreme Court ruling. But, in reality, the Supreme Court ruling was not as good for supporters of vouchers as it might appear on the surface.
The Supreme Court did not say in the ruling whether school vouchers are constitutional. Instead, the state’s highest court ruled that the group that brought the lawsuit – Parents for Public Schools – did not have standing to pursue the legal action.
The Supreme Court justices did not give any indication that they were ready to say they were going to ignore the Mississippi Constitution’s plain language that prohibits public funds from being provided “to any school that at the time of receiving such appropriation is not conducted as a free school.”
In addition to finding Parents for Public Schools did not have standing to bring the lawsuit, the court said another key reason for its ruling was the fact that the funds the private schools were receiving were federal, not state funds. The public funds at the center of the lawsuit were federal COVID-19 relief dollars.
Right or wrong, The court appeared to make a distinction between federal money and state general funds. And in reality, the circumstances are unique in that seldom does the state receive federal money with so few strings attached that it can be awarded to private schools.
The majority opinion written by Northern District Supreme Justice Robert Chamberlin and joined by six justices states, “These specific federal funds were never earmarked by either the federal government or the state for educational purposes, have not been commingled with state education funds, are not for educational purposes and therefore cannot be said to have harmed PPS (Parents for Public Schools) by taking finite government educational funding away from public schools.”
And Southern District Supreme Court Justice Dawn Beam, who joined the majority opinion, wrote separately “ to reiterate that we are not ruling on state funds but American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds … The ARPA funds were given to the state to be used in four possible ways, three of which were directly related to the COVID -19 health emergency and one of which was to make necessary investments in water, sewer or broadband infrastructure.”
Granted, many public school advocates lamented the decision, pointing out that federal funds are indeed public or taxpayer money and those federal funds could have been used to help struggling public schools.
Two justices – James Kitchens and Leslie King, both of the Central District, agreed with that argument.
But, importantly, a decidedly conservative-leaning Mississippi Supreme Court stopped far short – at least for the time being – of circumventing state constitutional language that plainly states that public funds are not to go to private schools.
And a decidedly conservative Mississippi Legislature chose not to expand voucher programs during the 2024 session.
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Renada Stovall sat on the back deck of her rural Arkansas home one evening, contemplating life when she had a life-altering epiphany…
“I gotta get out of these woods.”
She heard it as clear as lips to her ear and as deep as the trees surrounding her property. Stovall’s job as a chemist had taken her all over the country. In addition to Arkansas, there were stints in Atlanta, Dallas and Reno. But she was missing home, her parents and friends. She also knew, she needed something else to do.
“I thought, what kind of business can I start for myself,” said Stovall, as she watered herbs growing in a garden behind her south Jackson home. Some of those herbs are used in her all-natural products. “I know when I lived in Reno, Nevada, where it’s very hot and very dry, there really weren’t products available that worked for me, my hair, and my skin suffered. I’ve got a chemistry degree from Spelman College. I took the plunge and decided to create products for myself.”
In 2018, Stovall’s venture led to the creation of shea butter moisturizers and natural soaps. But she didn’t stop there, and in December 2022, she moved home to Mississippi and got to work, expanding her product line to include body balms and butters, and shampoos infused with avocado and palm, mango butter, coconut and olive oils.
Nadabutter, which incorporates Renada’s name, came to fruition.
Stovall sells her balms and moisturizers at what she calls, “pop-up markets,” across the state during the summer. She’s available via social media and also creates products depending on what of her ingredients a customer chooses. “My turmeric and honey is really popular,” Stovall added.
“The all-natural ingredients I use are great for conditioning the skin and hair. All of my products make you feel soft and luscious. The shea butter I use comes from West Africa. It’s my way of networking and supporting other women. And it’s my wish that other women can be inspired to be self-sufficient in starting their own businesses.”
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“Unfortunately, some only support it when it equates to campaign contributions. Sadly, through the line-item veto of the appropriation, Mississippians will once again wait another year for the opportunity to benefit from state investments for the greater public good.” – Secretary of State Michael Watson. Read the whole article here.
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For help, call or text the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262) or contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.” Spanish-language services are also available.
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — Milagros Aquino was trying to find a new place to live and had been struggling to get used to new foods after she moved to Bridgeport from Peru with her husband and young son in 2023.
When Aquino, now 31, got pregnant in May 2023, “instantly everything got so much worse than before,” she said. “I was so sad and lying in bed all day. I was really lost and just surviving.”
Aquino has lots of company.
Perinatal depression affects as many as 20% of women in the United States during pregnancy, the postpartum period, or both, according to studies. In some states, anxiety or depression afflicts nearly a quarter of new mothers or pregnant women.
Many women in the U.S. go untreated because there is no widely deployed system to screen for mental illness in mothers, despite widespread recommendations to do so. Experts say the lack of screening has driven higher rates of mental illness, suicide, and drug overdoses that are now the leading causes of death in the first year after a woman gives birth.
“This is a systemic issue, a medical issue, and a human rights issue,” said Lindsay R. Standeven, a perinatal psychiatrist and the clinical and education director of the Johns Hopkins Reproductive Mental Health Center.
Standeven said the root causes of the problem include racial and socioeconomic disparities in maternal care and a lack of support systems for new mothers. She also pointed a finger at a shortage of mental health professionals, insufficient maternal mental health training for providers, and insufficient reimbursement for mental health services. Finally, Standeven said, the problem is exacerbated by the absence of national maternity leave policies, and the access to weapons.
Those factors helped drive a 105% increase in postpartum depression from 2010 to 2021, according to the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
For Aquino, it wasn’t until the last weeks of her pregnancy, when she signed up for acupuncture to relieve her stress, that a social worker helped her get care through the Emme Coalition, which connects girls and women with financial help, mental health counseling services, and other resources.
Mothers diagnosed with perinatal depression or anxiety during or after pregnancy are at about three times the risk of suicidal behavior and six times the risk of suicide compared with mothers without a mood disorder, according to recent U.S. and international studies in JAMA Network Open and The BMJ.
The toll of the maternal mental health crisis is particularly acute in rural communities that have become maternity care deserts, as small hospitals close their labor and delivery units because of plummeting birth rates, or because of financial or staffing issues.
This week, the Maternal Mental Health Task Force — co-led by the Office on Women’s Health and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and formed in September to respond to the problem — recommended creating maternity care centers that could serve as hubs of integrated care and birthing facilities by building upon the services and personnel already in communities.
The task force will soon determine what portions of the plan will require congressional action and funding to implement and what will be “low-hanging fruit,” said Joy Burkhard, a member of the task force and the executive director of the nonprofit Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health.
Burkhard said equitable access to care is essential. The task force recommended that federal officials identify areas where maternity centers should be placed based on data identifying the underserved. “Rural America,” she said, “is first and foremost.”
There are shortages of care in “unlikely areas,” including Los Angeles County, where some maternity wards have recently closed, said Burkhard. Urban areas that are underserved would also be eligible to get the new centers.
“All that mothers are asking for is maternity care that makes sense. Right now, none of that exists,” she said.
Several pilot programs are designed to help struggling mothers by training and equipping midwives and doulas, people who provide guidance and support to the mothers of newborns.
In Montana, rates of maternal depression before, during, and after pregnancy are higher than the national average. From 2017 to 2020, approximately 15% of mothers experienced postpartum depression and 27% experienced perinatal depression, according to the Montana Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. The state had the sixth-highest maternal mortality rate in the country in 2019, when it received a federal grant to begin training doulas.
To date, the program has trained 108 doulas, many of whom are Native American. Native Americans make up 6.6% of Montana’s population. Indigenous people, particularly those in rural areas, have twice the national rate of severe maternal morbidity and mortality compared with white women, according to a study in Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Stephanie Fitch, grant manager at Montana Obstetrics & Maternal Support at Billings Clinic, said training doulas “has the potential to counter systemic barriers that disproportionately impact our tribal communities and improve overall community health.”
Twelve states and Washington, D.C., have Medicaid coverage for doula care, according to the National Health Law Program. They are California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Medicaid pays for about 41% of births in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Jacqueline Carrizo, a doula assigned to Aquino through the Emme Coalition, played an important role in Aquino’s recovery. Aquino said she couldn’t have imagined going through such a “dark time alone.” With Carrizo’s support, “I could make it,” she said.
Genetic and environmental factors, or a past mental health disorder, can increase the risk of depression or anxiety during pregnancy. But mood disorders can happen to anyone.
Teresa Martinez, 30, of Price, Utah, had struggled with anxiety and infertility for years before she conceived her first child. The joy and relief of giving birth to her son in 2012 were short-lived.
Without warning, “a dark cloud came over me,” she said.
Martinez was afraid to tell her husband. “As a woman, you feel so much pressure and you don’t want that stigma of not being a good mom,” she said.
In recent years, programs around the country have started to help doctors recognize mothers’ mood disorders and learn how to help them before any harm is done.
One of the most successful is the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms, which began a decade ago and has since spread to 29 states. The program, supported by federal and state funding, provides tools and training for physicians and other providers to screen and identify disorders, triage patients, and offer treatment options.
But the expansion of maternal mental health programs is taking place amid sparse resources in much of rural America. Many programs across the country have run out of money.
The federal task force proposed that Congress fund and create consultation programs similar to the one in Massachusetts, but not to replace the ones already in place, said Burkhard.
In April, Missouri became the latest state to adopt the Massachusetts model. Women on Medicaid in Missouri are 10 times as likely to die within one year of pregnancy as those with private insurance. From 2018 through 2020, an average of 70 Missouri women died each year while pregnant or within one year of giving birth, according to state government statistics.
Wendy Ell, executive director of the Maternal Health Access Project in Missouri, called her service a “lifesaving resource” that is free and easy to access for any health care provider in the state who sees patients in the perinatal period.
About 50 health care providers have signed up for Ell’s program since it began. Within 30 minutes of a request, the providers can consult over the phone with one of three perinatal psychiatrists. But while the doctors can get help from the psychiatrists, mental health resources for patients are not as readily available.
The task force called for federal funding to train more mental health providers and place them in high-need areas like Missouri. The task force also recommended training and certifying a more diverse workforce of community mental health workers, patient navigators, doulas, and peer support specialists in areas where they are most needed.
A new voluntary curriculum in reproductive psychiatry is designed to help psychiatry residents, fellows, and mental health practitioners who may have little or no training or education about the management of psychiatric illness in the perinatal period. A small study found that the curriculum significantly improved psychiatrists’ ability to treat perinatal women with mental illness, said Standeven, who contributed to the training program and is one of the study’s authors.
Nancy Byatt, a perinatal psychiatrist at the University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine who led the launch of the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms in 2014, said there is still a lot of work to do.
“I think that the most important thing is that we have made a lot of progress and, in that sense, I am kind of hopeful,” Byatt said.
Cheryl Platzman Weinstock’s reporting is supported by a grant from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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The state’s officer certification and training board now has the power to investigate law enforcement misconduct.
Gov. Tate Reeves signed the bill making it official.
Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, who pushed for the legislation, said that House Bill 691 authorizes the Board of Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training “to launch its own investigations into officer misconduct. This change, along with the funding to hire two investigators, will improve the board’s ability to ensure officer professionalism and standards.”
The new law comes in the wake of an investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today and The New York Times into sheriffs and deputies across the state over allegations of sexual abuse, torture and corruption.
Tindell said the new law will “improve law-enforcement training in Mississippi by requiring all law enforcement officers to receive continuing training throughout an officer’s career.”
Under that law, deputies, sheriffs and state law enforcement officers will join police officers in the requirement to have up to 24 hours of continuing education training. Those who fail to train could lose their certifications.
Other changes will take place as well. Each year, the licensing board will have to report on its activities to the Legislature and the governor.
Tindell thanked Reeves “for signing this important piece of legislation and the legislative leaders who supported its passage, including the author of HB 691, Representative Fred Shanks.”
Shanks, R-Brandon, praised the “team effort with some very smart people who want a top-notch law enforcement community.”
The new law creates a 13-member board with the governor having six appointments – two police chiefs, two sheriffs, a district attorney and the director of the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers’ Training Academy.
Other members would include the attorney general or a designee, the director of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, the public safety commissioner and the presidents of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police, the Mississippi Constable Association, the Mississippi Campus Law Enforcement Association and the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association (or their designees).
“We obviously need checks and balances on how law enforcement officers conduct themselves,” said state Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson. “This is a good first step.”
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