Our community has recorded 17 homicides this year and we have only made three arrests with two of those turning themselves in.
Our most recent homicide was an alleged burglar shot by homeowners. While there are many who feel like justice has been served, a civil society requires us to send the case to a Coahoma County Grand Jury for review.
Which brings this newspaper to the issue of demanding justice in Clarksdale and Coahoma County.
Do you remember the shooting in downtown Clarksdale early Sunday morning May 21, 2023 where 12 people were hit by bullets, but nobody was ever arrested or held responsible for that crime.
Do you remember the 15-year-old shot and killed in a house on Choctaw Street this year and the murder of a longtime grocer at his store on Good Friday.
And this newspaper hopes you never forget the 10-year-old shot and killed by sombody on Christmas Eve in Friar Point.
Can’t we find and arrest those responsible for these crimes?
We look with disgust at more than $250,000 in SkyCops cameras that the city has purchased about the time the police department went from 40 officers to about two dozen. We hope you also will remember the good-ole boy contract that brought us SkyCops, the level of the technology purchased and the training our police force received to use this quarter-of-a-million-dollar tool?
We think the money could have been better spent hiring police officers.
You see, SkyCop will never arrest anyone. It will be a Policeman or Deputy with a badge, gun and a desire to make this world a better place that makes that arrest.
Your Clarksdale Press Register also wants to know where are the noble contacts and brave informers in this community who help police keep a lid on the bad guys?
Our mayor has held several high profile meeting with school officials, churches and even cried in a video on Facebook. But we still have more than a dozen unsolved murders in this town.
Where is the concern by the business community, tourism community, church community, Black community and White community over the shooting of young people in the very heart of our city?
It seems nobody is responsible for any of this.
Your Clarksdale Press Register prefers to bring you answers and the facts but these events leave us all with few of either.
Your Clarksdale Press Register also tries to bring you ideas and solutions to community problems. But they are just ink on paper if elected officials and community leaders only shake their heads as they drink their coffee and read the headlines.
We are headed into the holiday season and hope our police and sheriff’s department will be more visible on city streets, the downtown area and at events where people might become unruly.
We hope city leaders, civic leaders and readers of the Clarksdale Press Register will find answers and solutions and act to stop deadly crimes in Clarksdale.
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