A suburban police officer was caught on camera dropping off a problematic homeless woman in Jackson, Mississippi after crossing city limits, prompting outrage from the city's mayor.
Surveillance video timestamped 9.58am Saturday shows a Ridgeland Police car pull into parking lot in Fondren, a Jackson neighborhood a few miles south of the city's border with Ridgeland.
An officer gets out and waits as a woman emerges from the backseat. She seems to arrange her baggage as the cop drives off.
Surveillance video from a Jackson parking lot timestamped Saturday morning showed the incident
A woman seems to emerge from a Ridgeland police car, which drives off as she arranges her bags on the pavement
'There have been reports that this has been going on for a long time,' Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told WLBT. 'This is the first time we've gotten a video. This is evidence of what people have been seeing.'
Jackson Police said they were called later to pick up the woman up at a nearby coffee shop, reported WLBT.
The department sent its crisis intervention team to that location, a Jackson Police spokesperson said.
Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee told the news station Monday that police picked up the woman after hearing complaints that she was harassing people.
He would not say whether she was panhandling.
'We got a complaint of her harassing customers. That was the complaint,' he told WLBT.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said video of a suburban cop dropping off a homeless woman in his city exemplifies an ongoing practice, that 'multiple jurisdictions' have been dropping off vagrants in his city 'for a long time.' Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee acknowledged one of his police officers dropped off the woman in Jackson after 'harassing' people in his city
McGee said the woman initially asked the officer to drop her off at two locations in the city - but one was a known drug spot and another was an area known for panhandling.
After the cop vetoed those choices, he took her to the parking lot as a 'safe place.'
'Apparently, this person has been a problem for some time,' McGee told WLBT. From what I'm gathering, she has been arrested before.'
Lumumba said in a news conference Monday that the incident underlines the fact that homelessness is a regional problem.
'This is not the first time it has happened. This is the first time it has happened on video,' he said. 'And it's not just one jurisdiction, but multiple jurisdictions that bring people to Jackson.'
Jackson Mayor Lumumba said in a press conference Monday he had spoken to his counterpart in Ridgeland, and the two agreed that shuffling people from one jurisdiction to another was not a solution to homelessness
A lay leader in a church that serves the Jackson homeless population estimated in 2018 that 800-900 homeless people downtown were regularly sheltered, reported the Clarion-Ledger.
The Jackson mayor said he had spoken to his counterpart in Ridgeland, and the two agreed that shuffling people from one jurisdiction to another was not a solution to the problem of homelessness.
But, he said, if other jurisdictions were to persist in bringing vagrants into the city, then Jackson should receive more funding to care for them.
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