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Defining Effective School Discipline in JPS

2015/05/13 – On May 6, Jackson Public Schools seemed to be suffering from a split personality.

That morning, at Wingfield High School in south Jackson, education advocates and school officials hailed the school for lowering discipline problems by 94 percent between 2013 and 2014 without kicking students out of school. Meanwhile, JPS officials have also beamed about a decrease of 1,000 discipline incidents across the district between last year and the current one.

“Suspensions and expulsions don’t work. They’re coming back, and they’re coming back behind,” Willie Killins Jr., Wingfield’s principal, told reporters seated at desks in a second-floor classroom, referring to the students who get kicked out.

A report titled “Classmates Not Cellmates” from the Mississippi-based group “Fight Crime: Invest in Kids” concluded that because kids who are not in school are more likely to interact with law enforcement, schools should come up with other ways to respond to less serious situations.

The afternoon painted a much different picture of discipline in JPS, however. Seated in the chairs that city council members usually occupy, members of the Jackson Federation of Teachers, a labor organization, unveiled their own report, titled “Reclaiming the Promise of Great Public Schools.”

The report grew out of a questionnaire JFT circulated among teachers and staff members in JPS that included narratives of unnamed workers who say they were threatened, insulted and harassed by students. A survey revealed that two-thirds of the 1,021 people who responded said their work environment is out of control daily or weekly.

Todd Allen, who teaches history at Wingfield and is a member of JFT, believes JPS’ reaction to the school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon, where kids who get pushed out of school end up in the criminal-justice system, was a “pendulum swing—from over-policing to under-policing.”

“I just don’t think there was a major revival that caused 90 percent of students to improve their behavior,” Allen said during the city hall press conference.

Defining Effective

As Allen pointed out, school discipline has come into sharp focus in Mississippi and around the nation in recent years.

In 2013, the Washington, D.C.-based Advanced Project said the state was “mired in an extreme school discipline crisis.” In 2012, the U.S. Justice Department said Meridian was running one of the worst school-to-prison pipelines in the nation. Also, in 2012, JPS settled with students whom district officials regularly handcuffed as punishment for discipline issues.

On April 28, attorneys from the Advancement Project filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against the DeSoto County School District, challenging discipline policies that 
disproportionately affect African American students. While African Americans make up 32 percent of the population in DeSoto schools, they make up 55 percent of suspensions, proof, according to the complaint, that the district’s policies “subject Black students to a different and more harmful standard of discipline” that echoes Jim Crow.

Similar actions have been taken across the nation. The negative press they’ve brought, combined with the high cost of fighting the legal battles and the rising cost of incarcerating people, ushered in new approaches to school discipline.

In January 2014, a letter from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice advised elementary and high schools on how to address discipline issues without discriminating on the bases of race, ethnicity or national origin. In JPS, 23 percent of all black students received at least one out-of-school suspension between 2011 and 2012, according to the Classmates Not Cellmates report. “Successful programs may incorporate a wide range of strategies to reduce misbehavior and maintain a safe learning environment, including conflict resolution, restorative practices, counseling, and structured systems of positive interventions,” the letter states.

Thena Robinson-Mock, project director of the Advancement Project’s Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track Campaign, said restorative justice has caught fire in the past five years as data of its effectiveness have improved. “Initially, when people thought restorative practices, they had this image of something that seemed touchy feely, that felt too soft for dealing with some of the real issues and needs that students were bringing into the classroom,” Robinson-Mock told the Jackson Free Press in a telephone interview. “What we know now is that there is a science to sitting down with young people, talking to all parties in a conflict and finding out what’s going on. It’s not just hand-holding—what it is, is the opposite of zero tolerance.”

Supporting Teachers and Students

From the view of JFT members, JPS should have a zero-tolerance policy, at least when it comes to assault on staff members, and there should be strict adherence to district policies and state law for certain behaviors.

“Bullying, harassment, and violent behavior are prevalent,” the JFT report’s authors write. “This affects both students and school personnel, whom are subject to disrespectful language, behaviors, physical assault, sexual harassment, threats and intimidation. Inaction when these issues are reported is dehumanizing, and cruel. The health and safety of school personnel should be of critical importance to JPS. There must be consequences for students who demonstrate such behavior.”

And the interventions that are in place are ineffective, the teachers said. JPS campus enforcement, an internal police force the district created in 2012—one of about zero school districts to do so—is a way to deal with discipline flare-ups without necessarily involving law enforcement right away.

“The role of campus enforcement is something we’re not quite sure about,” Allysha Patrick, who teaches at Capital City Alternative School, said. “We’re not sure who does what.”

The teachers say that another ineffective tool is the district’s Positive Behaviors Interventions and Supports, or PBIS program, mandated in 2007. The idea behind PBIS is that all district personnel, including bus drivers, front-office support staff and top administrators, would receive training on how to reward students for good behavior with praise or prizes, but JPS has not implemented whole-school training.

While Killins and the Fight Crime: Invest in Kids group said PBIS is a key cog in reducing suspensions, they, along with the JFT teachers, agree that PBIS is far from perfect. In its survey, the JFT said only about half its respondents believe PBIS is effective—it works better with younger kids who are likely to behave for the promise of a candy treat—and half said they hadn’t received any training in PBIS at all. “If this something we’re supposed to be using, we need to be trained,” Rachel Mathieu, a first-year teacher, said.

Funding is a challenge for cash-strapped districts such as JPS, but some cities have found creative ways around funding shortfalls. In Cincinnati, for example, police decided to use all the money it seized in drug raids on youth programs. School districts in Broward County, Fla., Oakland, Calif., Denver, Baltimore and Chicago entered into collaborative school-discipline agreements with groups such as the NAACP that recognize the racial-justice issues inherent in the school-to-prison pipeline and seeks to address them head on. Those districts have seen the number of suspensions decrease since adopting the agreements. “Because there’s this real issue of teacher support and teachers feeling like there may not be other options, that’s when we see a highly punitive discipline environment,” Robinson-Mock said. “So because (teachers don’t have) the resources or the proper training to deal with outbursts in class, suspensions become the only route.”

She suggested that schools should also examine their security budgets to determine whether resources can be freed up and redirected to things like professional development. “We can’t improve academics if we have a negative school climate where kids are getting kicked out, where it’s highly punitive,” she said.

 

Source: Jackson Free Press 

R.L. Nave

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30 Years After MOVE: Law Enforcement Didn’t Learn Anything From One of America’s Worst Cases of Police Brutality

2015/05/13 – The events of May 13, 1985, are a case study in the failures of police, prosecutors and judges—failures that we continue to see today.

On May 13, 1985, police in Philadelphia—Pennsylvania’s largest city—dropped a powerful bomb containing military C4 explosives on a house occupied by six children and seven adults.

That aerial assault 30 years ago is one of the worst incidents of police brutality in modern America.

The bomb, dropped from a state police helicopter, sparked a fire.

Philadelphia’s then-Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor, along with then-Fire Commissioner William Richmond, barred firefighters from battling that blaze, pursuing a bizarre strategy to use the fire as a tactical weapon to drive the occupants from their barricaded house. Police had sought to arrest four adults inside the building on seven charges ranging from disorderly conduct to possession of explosives.

That decision to “let the fire burn” allowed the blaze to roar into a firestorm.

The inferno incinerated 11 inside the bombed building, including five children ages 7 to 13. That inferno also destroyed 60 other homes in the West Philadelphia neighborhood, leaving 250 people homeless. All of those killed in that inferno ignited by police were black, as were those left homeless by the inferno’s destruction.

Today many Philadelphia residents, particularly those under 30 years old, are unaware of that history-staining 1985 police attack on members of MOVE, an anti-establishment group founded in 1972. Authorities deemed MOVE a radical organization. The 11 people incinerated were MOVE members, including the organization’s founder, John Africa.

An Overlooked Atrocity

Incredibly, an aerial bombing of an American city by police rarely makes the lists of worst police-abuse incidents, despite its gruesome death toll and extensive destruction.

Many “worst lists” include the 1991 shooting of Amadou Diallo, who died during a 41-bullet fusillade from New York City police officers. Yet during the assault on May 13 that began at 5:50 a.m., Philadelphia police fired thousands of bullets into the MOVE house using a range of firearms, including machine guns. The confrontation went on until police dropped the bomb at 5:27 p.m.

The infamous 1985 bombing is far from an isolated incident in a dim past. The failure to hold Philadelphia authorities accountable for that deadly, destructive episode contributed to the impunity that drives the persistence of police brutality—brutality that has triggered massive protests across America since last year, after prosecutors in St. Louis and New York City manipulated grand juries away from indictments against the police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

In America, prosecutors control the grand jury process without input from judges and other lawyers. Legal experts repeatedly criticize the failure of local prosecutors to charge police even when evidence documents indictable offenses. A 1991 article in the American Bar Association Journalcriticized the “unwritten code” that prosecutors will not bring charges against police.

After that fatal 1985 raid, Philadelphia prosecutors manipulated a grand jury away from indictments against police. Prosecutors even refused to file perjury charges against police officers caught lying to the grand jury. Not a single Philadelphia police officer or city official faced prosecution for the death and destruction on May 13, 1985.

Philadelphia prosecutors saw no police wrongdoing in the deaths of those children. Their stance contradicted findings of a special investigating commission appointed by Philadelphia’s then-Mayor Wilson Goode (the first African American to hold the position) that described the deaths of the five MOVE children as “unjustified homicides.”

The city’s prosecutors claimed that bombing children was not illegal because the force from the police bomb “was applied only against” the adults, according to a May 1988 Philadelphia grand jury report. That convoluted reasoning rested on the pretense that the blast from the bomb affected only the adults inside the bombed building and not the children.

Although prosecutors refused to charge police and city officials, they did vigorously charge the lone surviving adult MOVE member, Ramona Africa. She served her entire seven-year sentence for conspiracy and riot because she refused state parole-board demands to renounce her MOVE membership as a condition for early release.

Ramona Africa, along with a MOVE child, escaped the fire. Both sustained serious burns.

The special commission concluded that police gunfire drove other fleeing MOVE members back into the inferno. However, prosecutors—again employing convoluted reasoning—claimed that some MOVE members returned to the blazing building either because they wrongly believed that the police were shooting or because they intended to commit suicide.

An Incendiary History of Conflict

In many ugly ways, the series of conflicts between MOVE and Philadelphia authorities constitute a case study in the failures of police, prosecutors and judges.

Those conflicts with the MOVE organization began in 1972 when Philadelphia experienced epidemic-level police abuses under then-Mayor Frank Rizzo, an ex-cop. Police under Rizzo targeted the often-disruptive MOVE for harsh enforcement of minor infractions. Yet prosecutors and judges ignored that brutal enforcement.

An Aug. 8, 1978, clash between Philadelphia police and MOVE in which a police officer died led to 30- to 100-year sentences for nine MOVE members. Those nine included four MOVE women who police testified were unarmed, holding only small children during that clash.

The judge who convicted the MOVE 9 admitted that he could not determine from trial evidence which male MOVE member had killed the police officer, but the judge declared that all nine deserved the same sentence, whether they were armed or unarmed.

MOVE’s campaign to win release of the nine imprisoned members set the stage for May 13, 1985. MOVE’s campaign strangely included intimidating and harassing its neighbors on the 6200 block of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. The May 13 police raid on MOVE’s fortified 6221 Osage Ave. house was a belated effort to stop MOVE harassment of its neighbors, who had complained about the group for more than a year.

Afterward, Philadelphia prosecutors used a legally flawed premise to clear all police and civilian officials for their May 13 actions: No one possessed a clear intent to harm MOVE members. Although a legal prerequisite for crimes like arson or murder is intent, crimes like reckless endangerment and risking a catastrophe are based on results, not intent.

Prosecutors proclaimed that dropping a bomb on children was not reckless, and allowing the fire to burn did not cause a catastrophe. Like the Philadelphia prosecutors who had failed to see obvious crimes, federal prosecutors found no civil rights violations in the fiery deaths of those five children.

When Ramona Africa sued city officials for the bombing and firestorm nearly 10 years after May 13, 1985, a federal judge ruled the bombing legal but allowed a jury to determine the legality of the fatal fire. When the federal jury ruled against Sambor and Richmond and imposed modest $600 fines for allowing the fire to burn, the federal judge voided the jury’s action by ruling that the two officials had “official immunity” from any liability.

Today the 6200 block of Osage Avenue has a macabre feel. More than half of the rebuilt homes are abandoned.

The black residents of Osage Avenue in 1985, whose life possessions were destroyed in the inferno, received insult and inactions from city officials and federal judges.

The persistence of police brutality proves that authorities across America did not learn an important lesson from that deadly May 1985 incident: Lawless law enforcement harms society.

 

Source: The Root Magazine 

Linn Washington, Jr. 

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Poisonous Cops, Total Immunity: Why an Epidemic of Police Abuse is Actually Going Unpunished

2015/5/13-The death of Freddie Gray while he was in the custody of the Baltimore Police is just the latest police-involved death over the last several months that has prompted us to question just how widespread this kind of alleged misconduct really is. A couple of months back, in a seminal address on law enforcement and race, FBI Director James Comey told a Georgetown University audience that there could be no definitive answer to that question, because the federal government lacked even the most basic information on the number of civilian deaths in police custody.

“How can we address concerns about ‘use of force,’ how can we address concerns about officer-involved shootings, if we don’t have a reliable grasp on the demographics and circumstances of those incidents?” Comey asked.

But this national blindspot about the scope and scale of police misconduct also extends to the hundreds of millions of dollars paid out over the years by local, county, and state governments to settle thousands of civil cases prompted by allegations of police misconduct and the use of excessive and deadly force.

There is no federal requirement that the nation’s 18,000 police agencies report these settlements. Unless a local media outlet bothers digging, the public rarely learns just how expensive police misconduct can be. When a media outlet does digs in, and follows the money, these settlements can invariably help tell a bigger story.

Thanks to the reporting by the Baltimore Sun, readers learned that in a review of 100 lawsuits brought by civilians against the police, a sum of $6 million dollars was paid out to settle the claims. The paper discovered that the allegations that surfaced in the Gray case, that police failed to get Gray medical attention in a timely manner, were echoed in the civil suits, in which “dozens of residents accused police of inflicting severe injuries during questionable arrests and disregarding appeals for medical attention.”

The Sun also reported that, from June 2012 through up until April 2015, officials running the Baltimore City Detention Center refused to admit 2,600 detainees who were in police custody but in no physical condition to be incarcerated.

“There’s just no effort to track nationally the allegations of police misconduct that these suits and settlements reveal,”says Joanna Schwartz, a professor of law at UCLA and one of the nation’s leading experts on police misconduct civil litigation. “These costs from lawsuits translate to money lost for other priorities in a time of austerity for local governments.”

No matter how big the settlement might be, Schwartz notes that police officers enjoy a qualified immunity that shields them from personal liability for whatever actions they take while on the job. Schwartz asked 70 of the nation’s largest police departments to submit the total amount they paid out to settle police misconduct cases from 2006 to 2011. Forty-four of the 70 agencies responded. All told, they paid out $730 million to settle 9,225 civil rights suits. Yet in just one half of one percent of those settlements were officers required to pay anything.

Schwartz says few local governments mine the lawsuits for critical data on patterns of police behavior that generate the lawsuits in the first place. Schwartz points to the NYPD’s CompStat program as an applicable model that tracks major crimes by precinct on a weekly basis and is credited with helping the New York City significantly reduce crime. “What gets measured gets managed. Why not use the same strategy when it comes to police misconduct revealed through lawsuits?”

In New York City alone, during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s three term tenure, NYPD payouts were in excess of $1 billion dollars. In FY 2013 the City of New York paid out more than $138 million. In FY 2014, that number spiked to nearly $217 million, just to settle claims from allegations of false arrest, excessive force and civil rights violations. Just imagine what the national total of these settlements must be.

Schwartz’s idea of a CompStat approach to tracking police misconduct suits already is being implemented in New York City. Getting a handle on the huge dollar amount in annual NYPD payouts, as well as zeroing in on the police behavior that prompted them, has become a major focus of the city’s comptroller, Scott Stringer. Stringer has inaugurated ClaimStat, modeled on the NYPD’s crime tracking precinct based CompStat, that tracks the law suit settlements made on behalf of all of the City’s agencies including the NYPD.

“For far too long, big cities and small towns across the country have accepted rising claims and settlements—and the injuries and injustice that precipitate them—as the cost of doing business,” says Stringer. “ClaimStat is designed to change that by using data to help identify hot spots before they become problems, just as the NYPD did with CompStat two decades ago. As a result, my office is working closely with Commissioner Bratton’s Risk Assessment Unit to share claims data in real time and obtain evidence that helps us to separate legitimate claims from frivolous suits.”

Stringer’s ClaimStat webpage cites Portland, Oregon’s, police department as an example of an agency that used their settlement data to effect meaningful and timely reforms. He explained: “[W]hen the police auditor observed a pattern of claims that suggesting that officers did to understand the basis to enter a home without a warrant, the City Attorney’s office made a training video on the issue, and the problem practically disappeared.”

Last month, the recently established office of the Inspector General for the NYPD issued a report which found that, even though the NYPD was doing a better job using data from the claims against it to track officer performance, there still was “no simple way to determine what percentage of the 15,000 lawsuits filed in this five years resulted in legitimate findings of excessive force, despite the obvious value of such information.”

“There is still a total disconnect between these payouts and an officer’s career,” says Andrew Stoll, a Brooklyn based plaintiff lawyer whose firm has specialized in police tort claims. “We have seen generations of officers who go on to become a sergeant and then a Lieutenant who we successfully sued five times.”

The New York’s Daily News reported in 2014 that one “hard charging” Bronx narcotics detective was named in 28 lawsuits going back to 2006 that cost the city $884,000 to settle. The newspaper identified 55 other officers out of the NYPD’s 34,000 who were each sued at least ten times and cost the City $6 million in settlements.

Lawsuits and settlements are just one way to track police credibility and performance. Cynthia Conti-Cook is a staff attorney with the special litigation unite of New York’s Legal Aid Society, and she’s working on a database that includes not only NYPD officers whose names have surfaced in lawsuits, but also those whose sworn testimony was found by the courts to be not credible, or who gathered evidence that was thrown out because the manner in which they collected it was unconstitutional.

“There maybe just a few bad apples, but they are poisonous, because they can teach younger officers ways to write things up to avoid scrutiny,” says Conti-Cook. “We don’t want to believe it. It’s hard to acknowledge that police officers that have so much power over people’s lives are capable of abusing it.”

Perhaps, this is one of those issues where budget hawks and police accountability advocates can find common ground. The only thing worse than paying out hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars, for bad police conduct, is to fail to learn from the human pain and suffering the payouts represent.

 

Source: Salon

ROBERT HENNELLY

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Email: Elected Official Uses Office Staff to Campaign

2015/05/13 – An anonymous email to Hinds County officials accuses elected official of using his office and staff in his reelection campaign.

An anonymous email to Hinds County officials accusing an elected official of using his office and employees to campaign for reelection has prompted a resolution from the Board of Supervisors to all county officials that Hinds County falls under the federal Hatch Act, which prohibit certain campaign activity.

A major component of the Hatch Act is that it protects federal employees from political coercion in the workplace. The Hatch Act prohibits a person from engaging in political activity while on duty, in a government office, wearing an official uniform, using a government vehicle and wearing a partisan political button on duty.

The anonymous email sent to members of the Hinds County Board of Supervisors and others accuses Tax Collector Eddie Fair of using his office to campaign for reelection and is forcing employees to wear his t-shirts.

Fair denied Wednesday that he is using his office to campaign. He aid he doesn’t force any of his staff to campaign for him, but he said some do campaign when they are off the clock or after work or on the weekends.

“My former councilman, Frank Bluntson, was ridiculed for having a campaign car in front of city hall while he campaigned for mayor, while Eddie Fair is allowed to park his personal vehicle with “Re-Elect Eddie Fair” campaign magnets, in a short blue truck with an Omega Psi Phi tag plate out front of two courthouses and hand out campaign literature from the trunk of his county vehicle,” the email said.

The person in the email said calls have been made from supporters of Fair with his office’s phone number asking for support on his campaign. Fair denies the claim.

“Our tax dollars are not available for his campaigning efforts. On top of him making them tell each customer to remember to support them, make them have customers fill out forms to get their email and phone number info, and hand them cards with “Re-elect Eddie Fair” is unprofessional and illegal. They are wearing his shirts and have been threatened that if they don’t wear them, they will be sent home without pay or possibly terminated.”

Fair said employees wear his office t-shirts on Fridays and have done so for the last 12 years. He said employees of other county elected officials also wear their office’s shirts.

Board of Supervisors Attorney Pieter Teeuwissen said the Board of Supervisors has no authority over other elected officials, but recommended the board adopt the resolution he drafted that has language from the Hatch Act.

“We are covered under the Hatch Act because we used federal funds to run this county,” Teeuwissen said. “If you use federal funds, you have to abide by the law. As a policy-making body, we can say you are required to abide by applicable law.”

Teeuwissen said the Board of Supervisors will be sending with the resolution the message that if an official violates the Hatch Act, it will be upon that individual to face the consequences.

 

Source: The Clarion-Ledger 

Jimmie E. Gates 

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Democrats Celebrate U.S. House, Biloxi Mayoral Election Results

2015/05/13 – Mississippi Democratic leaders today are celebrating a Tuesday-night victory by Walter Zinn Jr. in the first round of the north Mississippi U.S. House race, in a district considered staunchly Republican.

They were also celebrating results of the Biloxi special mayoral runoff, where a former longtime Democrat – now Republican — beat out a candidate who had the backing of the state’s GOP leadership, including Gov. Phil Bryant.

Zinn led a field of 13 candidates in votes, taking 17 percent in unofficial results. He will face Republican Trent Kelly, who had 16 percent, in a June 2 runoff. Zinn was the lone Democrat in the race and most prognostications had him as a long shot. He was at the bottom of the pack in campaign financing, with many of the Republicans sinking lots of their own money into the race.

“That’s the funniest thing in the world to me, how people who are consistently wrong in their predictions, keep on making predictions,” said Democratic Party Chairman Rickey Cole. “… With the miniscule resources he had, Walter did a wonderful job in turning out his voters. Republicans did a poor job of turnout yesterday … I believe the election on June 2 will be right down to the wire.”

Cole said he was working the phone Wednesday, drumming up support and financing for Zinn from state and national party sources.

“I love a special election,” Cole said. “It’s like playing poker with aces, deuces and one-eyed jacks wild. We are going to support (Zinn’s) successful grass-roots efforts and expand on them.”

The third-runner in the race, Republican northern Transportation Commissioner Mike Tagert, has endorsed Kelly in the runoff as “a person of honor and integrity who will move the ball forward on our conservative principles in Congress ….”

In the Biloxi special election runoff to replace longtime Republican Mayor A.J. Holloway, FoFo Gilich took 60 percent of the vote to defeat Windy Swetman III.

The special election was nonpartisan, but Gilich, a former longtime Democrat, said he switched to Republican several years ago.

But Republicans Gov. Phil Bryant, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and U.S. Rep. Steven Palazzo endorsed Swetman. So, apparently, did state GOP Chairman Joe Nosef, in an e-mail on state party letterhead that included a photo of Gilich with former President Bill Clinton at a rally for Hillary Clinton for president.

It’s unusual for either state party to endorse one member of their party over another in a race for an open seat.

Gilich, who could not immediately be reached Wednesday, has shown political bona fides to the Sun Herald newspaper and others, including a membership card from the Harrison County Republican Club. Supporters have sent around an e-mail of a 2015 MSGOP membership drive letter to Gilich and his wife from Nosef thanking them for their “loyal support of the Mississippi Republican Party.”

But Gilich formerly ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Holloway as a Democrat, and is former chairman of the Harrison County Democratic Party. In Tuesday’s runoff, he was endorsed by the Democratic third-runner from the first election in April.

Bryant in a statement about his endorsement of Swetman said: “Looking more at all of the facts and differences between the two candidates, it just became increasingly clear that there’s only one Republican in the race, and that’s Windy Swetman. And a few days ago, the local Democrat Party endorsed (Gilich), which made the political ideology differences even clearer.”

Nosef, in Arizona for a Republican National Committee meeting on Wednesday, could not immediately respond but said he will shortly.

State House Democratic Leader Bobby Moak called Gilich’s victory despite the endorsement of state Republican leaders “a resounding message … Keep your partisan politics out of our ballot boxes.”

“Two years ago, the state’s leaders attempted to meddle in the mayoral races in Ocean Springs, Starkville, Tupelo, Oxford and Meridian,” Moak said. “In all five races, Mississippians chose the candidates who provided the best leadership for their future.”

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Gilich said, “Everybody knows when you push Biloxi, Biloxi pushes back.”

 

Source: The Clarion-Ledger 

Geoff Pender