Jackson City Council passes hate crimes ordinance

The Jackson City Council passed today a hate crimes ordinance requiring training and adequate resources to help local enforcement accurately report and document hate crimes committed in the city.

The proposed city ordinance will require local law enforcement to complete training on the nature of hate crimes, identifying victims and perpetrators of hate crimes and the procedures for recording hate crime statistics. The ordinance also provides that adequate resources are devoted to these efforts and that an annual report be provided to the city council on the occurrence of hate crimes in Jackson.

"When we started started this, I asked how is that we know so much about drug dealers than those who commit hate crimes," said City Council President De'Keither Stamps, who proposed the ordinance.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups in the United States, supports the ordinance.

The council adopted the ordinance today on what would have been James Craig Anderson's birthday.

In 2011, Anderson, a black man, was killed in Jackson when he war ran over by a pick up truck driven by a young white male from Rankin County. Deryl Paul Dedmon and other young whites were charged and pleaded guilty to hate crimes in Anderson's case. Also, other young whites were charged and pleaded guilty to hate crimes for coming to Jackson to harass black citizens.

According to the FBI's most recent annual hate crime report, which is based on voluntary reporting by law enforcement agencies across the country, there were 5,928 hate crimes committed in 2013, including four in Mississippi. But according to the Department of Justice's Bureau of Statistics, those numbers vastly underestimate the problem pointing to flaws in our national system for collecting and reporting this data. A comprehensive analysis in 2013 showed that about 260,000 people are victimized each year by hate crime, according to the Southern Poverty Law center.

Councilman Tyrone Hendrix said the ordinance will serve as a model for other cities in the state.

Contact Jimmie E. Gates at (601) 961-7212 or jgates@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @jgatesnews on Twitter.