The Greenwood City Council once again discussed the issue of crime in the city Tuesday, particularly focusing on how to improve the effectiveness of CrimeStoppers, the anonymous tip line.
Explaining the function and background of the tip line to the City Council during its Tuesday meeting were Trish Bosarge, the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety’s CrimeStoppers division, and Kimberly Smith, a board member of Greenwood-Leflore CrimeStoppers.
Before the meeting, Bosarge said, she spoke with investigators from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and asked what type of crimes are posing the most serious problems for Greenwood.
She said she was told that the city struggles with crimes stemming from drug and gang activity as well as homicides.
“A lot of the murders are either drug-related or gang-related,” Bosarge said. “The problem that we come into — and nobody seems to know how to solve it, from the state, the FBI down — (is that) the families and the friends are not going to call in and report who killed their family member or their friend because they’re afraid of retaliation.”
The tip line allows people to report crimes anonymously and later collect a financial reward if a tip leads to an arrest. Tipsters who call have their numbers scrambled, Bosarge said.
Boards of local CrimeStoppers chapters throughout the country, which are composed of residents from the communities, work with law enforcement agencies and the media in order to encourage residents to report crimes.
The Greenwood area of the CrimeStoppers tip line was formed in 2007.
There are currently nine members on the local CrimeStoppers board, Smith said, and only one member is Black.
The question of the races of the board members came about after Ward 6’s David Jordan said that most of the crime that occurs in Leflore County affects Black residents. Of the 19 reported homicides that have occurred in the county this year to date, all of the victims have been Black, and all but one were men.
Because of this, Jordan said more Black representation is needed on the local CrimeStoppers board in order to increase the effectiveness. “We don’t want to lose another person,” he said.
His request was not directly answered. Instead, Bosarge said that crime is carried out across racial and economic barriers.
Smith told Jordan that she’s a Christian and that “every life taken in this town and Carroll County matters to us.”
In recent weeks, Leflore County Supervisor Anjuan Brown shared his concerns about the tip line with the rest of the supervisors as well as the City Council. The supervisors passed a resolution last week to have Brown speak with the council as well as the Greenwood Police Department.
Police Chief Jody Bradley had said in a council meeting earlier this month that local phone calls to the tip line had been directed to Tennessee.
The last meeting the local CrimeStoppers board had was about two weeks ago, Smith said.
Bosarge said that “CrimeStoppers is a great tool” but that the City Council, both counties’ boards of supervisors and local law enforcement agencies must help publicize the tip line to make it effective.
“We need the community’s involvement, we need the police’s involvement,” Smith said, adding that the media can play a big role in CrimeStoppers’ effectiveness.
“We want to see CrimeStoppers active. We want to see billboards. We want to see TV commercials,” said Ward 3’s Ronnie Stevenson, the council’s president. “We need Greenwood-Leflore County to step up. We need to get aggressive.”
The CrimeStoppers number is 1-800-222-TIPS.
In other business:
• Don Brock, the city attorney, explained a resolution that the council will vote on during its meeting next month that would repeal Greenwood’s anti-panhandling ordinance.
Beginning in 2018, the Mississippi Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sent letters to various cities across the state, including Greenwood, requesting that they remove their anti-panhandling ordinances.
Using the findings of a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision, the ACLU argues that cities cannot prohibit people from soliciting money peacefully in public areas since that’s considered free speech.
Though the city has not enforced its ordinance, removing it from the code would allow the city to avoid any litigation issues, Brock explained.
He also clarified to council members that there are other portions of the city’s code that address groups soliciting for money, as well as solicitation that can obstruct traffic or endanger people.
The City Council’s next meeting will be Nov. 5. It was originally scheduled to meet Nov. 3 but voted to reschedule in order to avoid conflict with the general election.
• Mayor Carolyn McAdams said the city has gotten $356,000 in federal aid under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.
• Contact Gerard Edic at 581-7239 or gedic@gwcommonwealth.com.
