Editor, Commonwealth:
The Leflore County Board of Supervisors needs to take Sheriff Ricky Banks’ advice and set up a drug task force.
Conventional policing is totally ineffective at stopping drug dealers in Greenwood and Leflore County. Their main worry is getting crossed up with each other. The sheriff’s local task force would be a big help, but it would be better if it had help from an areawide task force overseen by the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics. MBN should be less likely to pick winners and losers than elected and local officials.
There needs to be a solid effort by the citizens, supervisors, mayor, City Council, Delta Council, Bennie Thompson, David Jordan, Willie Perkins and all others with influence to help the sheriff and lobby for local, state and federal money to put this task force in place and keep it in place. They need to be professional, experienced, well-trained and well-paid. And we need to see results.
These guys are selling drugs anywhere they want to and in plain sight. The police know who they are, where they are and how they do it, and yet the dealers don’t get arrested. It’s a tough business stopping it, but it can be done.
The young people of Leflore County need to see that selling drugs is not an option because it won’t end well. More dealers will take the place of those arrested, and they eventually will be arrested. It can’t be seen as a way to get respect or to provide for your family.
I guess it takes killings in the streets to motivate some people. But these guys and those before them have been a huge contributor to addiction, untold family misery and some deaths of people we love.
David Howard
Sidon
