Just off the top of my head, I don’t think Mississippi is behind the times on that. I think every community in the country is dealing with youth crime. Some of them may be prosecuted differently or have different statutes on the books for prosecution. When I left the Department of Corrections, there was somewhere between 25 to 40 youthful offenders in the youthfuloffender unit, who had been convicted as adults under that statute, and all of those that I was aware of were heinous crimes. I can’t think of anything that we could do differently except from the top-down. Every district, every district attorney, the judges—and I’m not telling the DAs or the
us to exercise that power and that authority properly. If not, we are no better than the bad guys that we’re after, and I believe that. How should a community come together to address youth crime?
I’ve never run a municipal police department … so I don’t want to come across like I’m trying to tell (JPD Chief) Lee Vance or somebody how to run his police department. But rubbing shoulders with these guys—I’m active with the International Association of Chiefs of Police—and talking to those people and what they’ve conveyed to me is that it’s a top-down approach. You’ve got to get to know the people in the community; you want your officers having dialogue with people in the community. You want to develop officers who are approachable and that people aren’t afraid of. I always like it when I see photos of officers stopping and shooting a few baskets with some guys on the street or buying popsicles for kids. One of the ways you earn people’s respect is you talk to them, and you get to know the people in the com-
DPS Commissioner Marshall Fisher speaks at one of the several town hall meetings his agency and several other state boards and departments are hosting to educate the public about the opioid epidemic. He now believes in investing in prevention, but didn’t in the past, he says.
But we look at it. I had a fellow prosecutor tell me several years ago when I was a young federal narcotic agent that we have a lot of power in this business. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it because we’ll lose a case or lose charges on an offender, but most of the time, we blame it on the system. But most of the time it may be that we didn’t do our job as good as we could have done it—not every time—but some of that comes from experience, but what’s that old saying? Rather, 100 men go free who are guilty than one man go to prison who’s not guilty. It’s up to
munity, but anything you want to do starts at the top. It’s leadership, you know, pushed down. And you can’t just say it—you’ve got to show it. ... We cannot arrest our way out of this (opioid drug abuse) problem— it’s impossible, we don’t have enough cells to put people in, and we don’t believe that putting somebody in jail who’s an addict is going to fix that. It’s like painting your house when it’s on fire. Now that doesn’t mean that people that are addicted don’t commit heinous crimes and wind up in jail. … . But I think that it sends a message that we’ve done seven of these (town halls) now. … I went down there because I think it’s
important that the commissioner of public safety show up there because it sends a message that this is an important issue; it is an epidemic; people are dying. Michael Connelly, who was a police beat reporter in LA, (writes) novels. He’s got one character in a series he’s written called Harry Bosch. He’s an LA (homicide) detective. I know this because I’ve been reading them for over 20 years. In one of the books … he (Bosch) is talking to somebody who says, “Why are you working on this murder, basically just some low-level somebody who got killed, just as hard as you would work on it if the mayor’s son?” And (Bosch) said, “Everybody matters, or nobody matters,” and I’ve adopted that, and I believe that. It just struck me. It’s kind of like the scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” where Gregory Peck’s character is walking out of the courtroom, and the old black gentleman in the balcony tells the kid, “Stand up, your father is passing.” It’s just one of those things that sticks with you, and I believe that: everybody matters, or nobody matters. When we had little Kingston Frazier murdered out here, my MBI agents worked (the case) that shook every one of us to our core. My colonel couldn’t sleep for four nights in a row, and so I’m telling you cops have hearts, too. .... Those were youthful offenders involved in that; one was 19, and the other two were 17. For the life of me, I can’t see how somebody gets to that (point) where they’re that young, and they get that much … whatever is going on in their head. I can see it if they’re 19 years old, and they’re in the rice fields of Vietnam, or they’re in Afghanistan and seeing their buddies blown up, and they develop issues like PTSD and what have you, but again, it’s accountability. We like to say it starts in the home; schools can’t fix it, and that’s the truth. It does start in the home. If your role model is somebody with a 9mm stuck in his jeans and a roll full of hundreds and a hot car and a good-looking girlfriend—if that’s your role model, that’s what you’re going to be. And I wish I knew how we could fix that, but I do believe that some of it starts with accountability. I know it starts on the street level, getting respect for authority. You respect authority in high school, and if you don’t, there’s a penalty to pay: you get suspended or … go sit in detention, or you go to alternative school or something like that. Again, it’s got to be accountability, but I think some might have started with everyone on the team gets a trophy. That means nothing. I am sure there are people who will argue with that.
September 13 - 19, 2017 • jfp.ms
Youth is one of our big focuses, and we’ve had lots of recent examples in Jackson of kids and teenagers charged with violent crimes and adult offenses. Where does our kids-tried-as-adults laws stand compared to other states? Are other states doing things differently when it comes to those teenagers?
judges what to do—but you’ve got to hold people accountable. If there’s no accountability, if there’s no prosecution, if there’s no respect for the law, then there’s no respect. I’m not saying we need to have a policeman on every street corner like a hall monitor, but you have to have the respect of your community, and I think you have to earn that, too. I think there’s far too much media attention to the negative side of law enforcement. I’m not telling you that everyone who wears the badge, uniform and gun is a perfect, wonderful person. They’re not, but neither is everyone who graduated from dental school. We (at DPS) police our own, and we take it very seriously. I tell my officers that work for me that if we get a complaint on you, we’re going to investigate it even if we think it’s a bunch of malarkey because if we don’t, it lends credence to people’s suspicions that we’re covering something up. Even if I don’t believe it, I have to do a paper trail to say we looked into this complaint. More times than not, we disprove the allegation; it’s unfounded.
Courtesy Mandy Davis, Department of Public Safety
result of a state-targeted response grant for opioids that the Department of Mental Health wrote. A portion of that went to naloxone for officers, and I’ve had people ask, “Well, highway-patrol officers, they probably wouldn’t come across a lot of drug addicts.” Well, probably not … but the truth is, we’ve also had officers who have been exposed to things like fentanyl and carfentanyl, which are really deadly. I would tell the guys: “If you’re not carrying it thinking about saving the life of somebody who is an addict, think about saving your life or the life of a partner.” The other reason I (pushed for NARCAN) was to try to get the message out that, as commissioner of public safety, I think this is important because it’s a publicsafety issue. It’s a public-health issue. About a month ago, I was up in Southaven at a town-hall meeting, and the sheriff up there is Bill Rasco, who is solid as a rock. His deputies had been carrying naloxone for six months at that time, and they’ve saved five peoples’ lives. To those that would argue why are we wasting our money on saving those lives, I don’t think we get to make that choice. Police officers get in pursuit of people all the time: criminals, sometimes people trying to avoid getting a ticket and for whatever reason they run off the road into a pond or a creek, and what happens next? That same officer who was chasing them takes off his gun belt and bails off out there and tries to rescue them—it’s no different. We don’t get to pick and choose who we’re going to rescue, and who’s to say that some 21-year-old young man or woman that gets revived doesn’t get their act together and winds up being the person who finds the cure for cancer?
more FISHER, see page 16 15