Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office is working with the Mississippi Department of Homeland Security to stand up a program that Sheriff Eddie Hawkins thinks can educate law enforcement — including corrections officers — about gangs and gang culture.
It will also eventually analyze the information officers gather to help guide enforcement efforts in some of the county’s most high-incident areas.
“We can’t just sit on our hands and wait for our problems to go away,” said Lowndes County Sheriff Eddie Hawkins. “By putting this together, we can be a role model for the whole state.”
The program, which will be funded by Homeland Security, is a pilot that Hawkins hopes will later serve as a model for the rest of the state. It will have two prongs, he said, and the first will focus on law enforcement officers themselves.
“We’re going to educate law enforcement to teach them the ins and outs of gang activity,” he said. “How to identify gang members, things of that nature.”
Corrections officers are going to be a major focus of that effort, he said, because they are uniquely positioned to gather data.
“The jail is really our best resource when it comes to identifying (gang members),” he said. “One of the things we do when we book them is ask them if they are affiliated with any gang or organization that could be considered hostile against another. …They proclaim a group for safety reasons because they don’t want to be housed in the opposing group’s unit.”
Once the program is up and running, people will be assigned to interview inmates about their affiliations, Hawkins said.
“We want to identify their associates and enemies from an analytical standpoint, as well as look at what they are involved in,” Hawkins said. “Once we have that we can look at the violations they commit and focus our enforcement to combat the problems we’re seeing, whether it’s car burglaries or whatever the case may be.”
Jail is “the best time in the world” to talk to the inmates, Hawkins said, because it’s one of the few times they will actually answer questions, often because they don’t want to be housed with certain people or with inmates known to be shooters.
Columbus Police Chief Fred Shelton said knowledge about local gangs and how they work would be a great boost to his department’s investigations.
“It would be very helpful to have someone who knows that culture and can give us more information about what’s out there and what’s going on,” he said. “We can start identifying (gang) members and their MO, and that will help us to deal with it more effectively.”
The second prong of the program is working with school resource officers to better identify at-risk youth, Hawkins said.
“We want to identify the kids who could one day become part of a gang,” he said. “Then we can try to intervene and give them alternatives — mentoring programs, sports, stuff to keep them active in school. There are a lot of organizations out there that are willing to volunteer their time.”
Hawkins said school-age children are rarely out-and-out gang members themselves, but may be slowly being pulled into that orbit.
“They’ve got brothers or cousins or relatives that are already gang members, who are trying to recruit them at a young age,” he said. “They won’t admit they are in gangs, but they hang out with gang members and learn the ins and outs of gang activities.”
It can be much more obvious on social media than in the classroom, he said.
“If you look at their posts it can be obvious they are affiliated because of the different colors they wear, their tattoos, their hand symbols,” Hawkins said. “But very few of them will self-proclaim.”
Shelton agreed that it can be hard to tell with students whether they are affiliated with a gang.
“They disguise it more,” he said. “They use different names, they mix up the colors they wear. Blue used to be affiliated with the Black Gangster Disciples, but now it may mean something else.”
Hawkins said it was hard to tell how much violent crime is actually gang affiliated.
“We have a lot of retaliation shootings, but people won’t talk (to law enforcement),” he said. “Even the victims won’t talk. So it’s hard to say whether something is gang related. Sometimes victims won’t even tell us their own names. They just want to administer street justice. It’s a big hurdle for law enforcement.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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