Jackson’s Water Treatment Facility, an Emergency Management Problem, and the State of Mississippi’s Environmental Protection Act. Reply to the Mississippi Senate Appropriations

“We believed that we provided enough evidence to show the state of Mississippi had deliberately starved the city of Jackson of the necessary resources to maintain it’s water infrastructure,” Johnson said. We want the EPA and administration to do something about it because we want this to happen again in Mississippi.

The announcement came days after leaders of two congressional committees said they were starting a joint investigation into a crisis that left most homes and businesses in Jackson without running water for several days in late August and early September.

Heavy rainfall in late August exacerbated problems at Jackson’s main water treatment facility. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves declared an emergency Aug. 29, and the state health department and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency have been overseeing operations and repairs at the facility since then.

The majority of Jackson’s 150,000 residents are Black and a quarter of the population lives in poverty. By the time Reeves issued the emergency order, Jackson residents had already been told for a month to boil their water before to kill possible contaminants.

The NAACP President believes the EPA investigation is a step in the right direction after the state has been withholding federal funds needed for the city’s water system.

“We believe that all citizens of this country should be entitled to clean, fresh drinking water,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately, we live in a state that is still dealing in racial politics. And as a result of that, you have state leaders who seek to penalize African American residents of the city of Jackson in a very discriminatory way.”

Taken together, the changes in the House bill would put White, conservative state officials in control of much of the criminal justice system across a significant swathe of Jackson. That prospect has mobilized opposition in a city where more than eight in 10 residents are Black.

The ethnic makeup of the current CCID has not been determined by CNN, but it is thought that it will be more than 50% Black under legislation passed by the state House.

The Louisiana House Appropriations Against HB 1020: A Pseudo State Strikes to Dilute the Right Way for Jackson, Mississippi

The GOP lawmakers pushing the bill say it’s needed to address huge court backlogs and stem violence that spiked in the city in recent years. Jackson reached a record number of homicides in 2021, with one of the highest murder rates in the US, although the number fell last year.

Lamar told CNN he hates that race was used as much as it was. “The bill is totally racially neutral. It is only designed to assist the court systems in Hinds County by helping a portion of Jackson, the Capitol Complex Improvement District, which was carved out back in 2017 and had full support of the Democrats back then.”

The new version of the bill, which was approved by the Senate committee on Thursday, dropped the Capitol Complex district and the new court system. Five new temporary judges will be appointed by the State Supreme Court chief justice. Those judges would be replaced by a single new locally elected judge starting in 2027.

Critics say that in a state where older African Americans still remember the struggle to gain access to the ballot decades ago, the bill is a paternalistic attempt to intrude on local decision-making and voting rights in the capital, which has the highest percentage of Black residents of any major U.S. city.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Action Fund echoed this statement in a tweet posted Friday, saying, “HB 1020 is authoritarian and a blatant state effort to dilute the rights of Jackson, Mississippi, residents. Jacksonians would not be able to choose judges and district attorneys because of it.

The bill was denounced by the Senate and House Democrats as being like modern-day Jim Crow.

The Democrats pushed for seven amendments, including making the judges elected instead of appointed and requiring the judges to reside in the county where they work. Lamar said that allowing judges to come from other areas would ensure the best and brightest were able to serve.

“The question has been raised whether the state is trying to take over the City of Jackson,” Democratic state Sen. John Horhn told WAPT. If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

Jackson Capitol Criminal Justice Invs: What the House Version of the Mississippi Public Works Bill Can Tell Us About The Future Of The State Capitol

Lamar told CNN that he expects the bill to get to the floor of the Senate in the next three weeks.

In the parking lot of New Jerusalem Church in Jackson, Mississippi, volunteers handed out free cases of bottled water to a line of arriving cars last week – a new normal in a state capital that has struggled with the fallout of a failing water system.

But inside the church, a parade of pastors and organizers addressing the crowd railed against another threat they described as dire to the city’s future: their state legislature.

She wore a shirt that underscored the political mood at the event, while the siege mentality of city leaders was also underscored. Everyone.

Power struggles have taken place between Republicans in the state legislature and Democrats in the big city governments in many states in the last few years.

The bill stripped of some of its most controversial provisions passed the state Senate on Thursday, but they could be brought back in if the two houses come to an agreement.

Some locals say they’re also concerned about how both versions of the bill would lead to a dramatic expansion in the jurisdiction of the state-run Capitol Police.

“It is taking us back in time and it puts us on the wrong side of history,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba said in an interview. The worst of what Mississippi can be is colonization.

Cliff Johnson, a University of Mississippi law professor and the director of the university’s MacArthur Justice Center, said the House version of the bill stood out for its audacity.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/27/us/jackson-mississippi-capitol-criminal-justice-invs/index.html

The State Capitol Complex Improvement District – a Redlining Map from the 1960s to a Problem of Legal Justice in Jackson’s Hinds County

In order to help support the city, state legislators created the capitol complex improvement district in which government office buildings sit near empty storefronts.

The legislature added funds for policing in that district last year, with the help of bipartisan support. Since the middle of last year, the department has doubled in size and its SUVs are a familiar sight downtown.

There is a significant number of criminal cases in the county courts which leave some defendants waiting months or longer for trials.

The expanded district includes the museums and Capitol building, as well as important institutions like Jackson State University and the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

More than 50% of the people in the district are Black, compared with almost all of Jackson as a whole. The district includes the most dense White neighborhoods in the city and some of Jackson’s most affluent areas.

The proposed district “looks like a redlining map from the ’60s,” Johnson said, referring to the decades-old discriminatory practice of denying loans in minority neighborhoods.

“There are too few law enforcement officers, too few prosecutors, too few public defenders, and too few judges to effectively administer justice,” Lamar, who represents a rural community two and a half hours north of Jackson, wrote in a recent op-ed.

But local leaders argue that the legislature should increase the number of judges who are elected locally in Jackson’s Hinds County – not bring in appointed judges.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/27/us/jackson-mississippi-capitol-criminal-justice-invs/index.html

The Jackson Police Department is a police department: Critics have spoken out against the Jackson Police Charged with the Lewis and Lewis-Lewis shootings

Assuming the amended bill passes the full Senate, the two legislative houses would have to iron out the differences in a conference committee in the coming weeks.

A coalition of activists and faith leaders have organized against the bill, holding rallies on the Capitol steps and at churches around the city, and are planning to fight it out in court if it becomes law.

The bill is on solid legal ground because the new court in the House version would be supervised by the elected judges, which makes it sound like it is legal.

But Jarvis Dortch, the executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi, argued that proposal would violate the state constitution by diluting the authority of elected judges, and go against Voting Rights Act provisions protecting representation for minority groups.

In a city where Black people are going to be second-class citizens, they will not have any say over the police or the judicial system. “It’s blatantly unconstitutional.”

The city-run Jackson Police Department has also faced allegations of excessive force in recent years, and has suffered from understaffing and long 911 response times. Residents say that the department is accountable to their elected officials unlike the state-run Capitol Police.

The Capitol Police didn’t respond to any questions related to the criticism. At a community meeting shortly after Lewis’ shooting, state Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, who oversees the department, said that “anytime there is a loss of life, it’s tragic,” but defended the Capitol Police’s practices as “doing policing the way it’s supposed to be done.”

The department says that the shooting is still under review by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and it can’t release more details until that investigation is complete. The other four incidents were also reportedly investigated by the MBI, but the department didn’t respond to a request seeking details about them.

More broadly, there’s a significant divide in how some White and Black residents of Jackson see the Capitol Police. The department was viewed by many of the professor’s White friends as an answer to a pressing problem, that they wish everyone in Jackson could have. But some Black friends, he said, have told him they were “scared to death for their Black sons to even drive through” the department’s jurisdiction.

Critics say the plainclothes unit’s aggressive tactics make them just as dangerous as the Scorpion Unit of the Memphis Police Department, which was dissolved last month amid national outrage over the beating death of a teenager.

Latasha Smith, an officer who shot her in the arm during a high-speed chase: A case study in Jackson, Tennessee

A friend of Lewis’ who was in the car with him during the shooting told his family that they had realized they were being followed but didn’t know they were a police vehicle behind them.

In December, a high-speed chase through the city that ended in gunshots came about when a car was stopped by Capitol Police. A bullet punched through the wall of Latasha Smith’s apartment in northwest Jackson, sailed over her 13-year-old daughter asleep in bed, and then hit Smith in the arm as she slept. Smith has two bullet holes in her wall and a bullet in her forearm.

Smith, who lived a few blocks from where Medgar Evers was killed, believes that Capitol Police officers shot the bullet that hit her. She said that night after she ran outside, she saw a Capitol Police officer holding a gun.

Dwayne Pickett, a local pastor at a Black church, said he’s had parishioners call him and ask him to stay on the line with them when they see a Capitol Police cruiser pull up behind them on the road.

The city, which has experienced a water quality crisis that has forced residents to rely on neighborhood distributions of bottled water, received about $800 million in federal funding for water infrastructure upgrades, most from a spending bill that passed Congress last year.

The governor and lieutenant governor would have control of the water and sewer system in Jackson under a proposal currently being debated in the state legislature. That has raised the alarm of the federal monitor appointed to oversee the system.

The governor would have the power to take away the prosecutors’ power to handle violent crime cases. The move comes as the state attorney general is trying to oust the Democratic St. Louis prosecutor from office over allegations of neglect, which she denies.

In North Carolina, GOP legislative leaders have signaled that they may block Charlotte, the state’s largest city, from issuing a sales tax that would pay for a major expansion of its public transit system. The plan was called impractical by the state house speaker.

And in Tennessee, the state legislature is moving forward with bills that would effectively cut Nashville’s city council in half and take state control over the city’s airport and stadiums – after the city council killed a bid for the 2024 GOP convention.

At the same time, local leaders in conservative corners of blue states have also clashed with their state governments – from California sheriffs who refused to enforce mask mandates during the pandemic to New Mexico’s Democratic attorney general suing local towns that have passed restrictions on abortion.

While tension between city halls and state capitols has long been a fixture of American government, experts say the fights are becoming more frequent – and more high-stakes – as the nation’s politics become more polarized and acrimonious.

One 2021 study found that GOP legislators were more likely than their Democratic colleagues to vote for proposals to limit local governments’ authority, and that those efforts were most common over “hot button” issues like guns and LGBTQ rights.

In some instances, rural legislators target liberal cities as a way to score political points and/or show their support for the culture wars, according to a political science professor who co-authored the paper.

The bad blood among locals over the criminal justice bill will persist even if the farthest-reaching proposals do not make it through the legislative process.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/27/us/jackson-mississippi-capitol-criminal-justice-invs/index.html

The Jackson vs. Wade Law: Democrat-Maniatov Sen. Brice Wiggins of Pascagoula and a New High-Energy Judge

After she had finished speaking, she started chanting “kill the bills!” at the church rally last week, Holmes, the activist in the “JACKSON VS. He sat in the front pew and looked at the situation.

She said that it feels like some of the leaders want to get their own piece of Jackson. It is very important that we keep saying that Jackson is not for the taking.

“This bill is vastly better from where it started, but it is still a snake,” Horhn said during the debate.

Supporters of the bill say they are trying to improve public safety in Jackson, which has had more than 100 homicides during each of the past three years.

We all know the nation is watching. They have been,” Republican Sen. Brice Wiggins of Pascagoula said before Tuesday’s Senate vote. “And with this bill, we are standing up for the citizens of Jackson and for our state capital.”

The Senate version removed the permanent new courts. Instead, it would allow the chief justice to appoint one judge to work within the existing court system through December 2026.

Hinds County, which is home to Jackson, currently has four elected circuit court judges who handle criminal and civil cases. Some of the federal COVID-19 relief money will be used to pay for four appointed judges to help with the court cases that became stuck when courts closed due to the Pandemic. The Senate bill would add a fifth temporary judge.

The state-run Capitol Police would be given the permission to patrol the entire city of Jackson. Currently, Capitol Police officers patrol in downtown and some nearby neighborhoods where state government buildings are located. Officers from the city-run Jackson Police Department patrol the entire city.