(NewsNation) — A trio of law enforcement leaders from across the country say they face similar issues in their communities: mental health problems, crowded jails and familiar faces.
“It’s the same people in and out constantly,” Lauderdale County, Alabama Sheriff Rick Singleton said on “Banfield.”
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article highlighting the rise in small-town crime. Some statistics show the big cities you may associate with crime (Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, for example) are not facing crime on a scale similar to smaller towns you may not be able to pick out on a map.
The panel was dubious of that idea.
“Oftentimes they can be skewed,” Vanderburgh County, Indiana Sheriff Dave Wedding said of those types of statistics. “It depends on who’s gathering the data.”
“Small communities have the same issues as big cities, it just doesn’t happen as frequently,” Singleton said.
But they also agreed that crime is generally going in the wrong direction.
“We’re looking for violence reduction measures,” Harvey, Illinois Acting Police Chief Cameron Biddings said. Crisis management teams in his department have been created to try to get at the root cause of the issues.
Wedding says his jail isn’t nearly big enough to house all the people that are a danger to his community. He advocates for bigger jails and case workers to help the criminals once they’re inside.
“Our jails across the country are the biggest mental health institutions in the country,” Singleton said. “Several of our inmates have mental health issues. We’re not equipped for it, we’re not trained for it and the last place they need to be is in jail.”
Their departments all deal with budget constraints. Wedding asked his government to use some leftover pandemic relief money to make improvements to the jail, but said it wasn’t allowed. Still, creativity will be key to solving the issues small-town police departments face.
“Trying to come up with these innovative ideas and innovative ways to suppress crime is just a new wave of policing, and that’s what we need to do,” Biddings said.