Hotheads and Professionals

According to Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams, the 360 uniformed troopers of the Mississippi highway safety patrol are "professional officers--not hotheads." Yet last May, when they helped local police handle student demonstrations at predominantly black Jackson State College, the troopers did not bother to bring tear gas. Instead, they loaded their shotguns with 00 shot, the largest available. When the dust settled, a laconic voice came over the patrol's radio: "Better send an ambulance--we've got a few niggers down over here."

In the sweltering heat of Jackson last week, a county grand jury concluded its three-week investigation of that shootout by exonerating the patrol and indicting two unidentified participants in the disturbance. Though FBI reports had shown no evidence of sniping and many observers regarded the demonstrators as merely unruly, the grand jury declared that the troopers "had a right and were justified" in firing the 400-round fusillade that killed two black youths. Asserted the panel: "When people take the law into their own hands and engage in civil disorders and riots, they must expect to be injured or killed when officers are required to re-establish order."

Mississippi black leaders branded the panel's report a "whitewash." A federal grand jury and a special presidential commission will now continue their separate probes. But the troopers are not worried. During the past five years, 13 lawsuits have charged them with various kinds of brutal overreaction. Five are still pending; in all but one of the others, local judges and juries have never ruled against the patrol.

The force was founded in 1938 exclusively to patrol highways. But when the civil rights movement focused on Mississippi in 1964, the legislature gave patrolmen full power to enforce "all the laws of the state," including those supporting segregation. In 1965, the patrol handled the transfer of 250 civil rights workers to the Parchman State Penitentiary after they were arrested in Natchez. According to a lawsuit now before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the troopers encouraged harsh treatment of the prisoners, who were stripped and forced to take strong laxatives; one testified that she was made to use her slip as a sanitary napkin.

This spring's shooting at Jackson State was not the first on that campus. Three years ago, highway patrolmen fired their shotguns in warning, they said, over the heads of rock-throwing students; Ben Brown, a married student and father of a young child, was found with mortal wounds from 00 buckshot.

Mop Up the Blood. In February, a state patrolman stopped a truck containing 17 black students from Tougaloo College who were returning from a civil rights demonstration in the tiny town of Mendenhall. The officer accused Douglas Huemmer, a bearded, white civil rights worker, of reckless driving, and the students of interfering with an officer. In a sworn affidavit prepared for a suit against the patrol, Huemmer declared that one officer told him: "We are going to teach you not to fool around here in Mississippi." At the jailhouse, two black ministers showed up to arrange bail--and were also arrested. The Rev. John M. Perkins' affidavit states: "I was stomped on by members of the highway patrol. They . . . forced a bent fork up my nose, which caused some bleeding. With blood running all over my head, they made me go get a mop and mop up the blood . . . and they hit and beat me as I mopped."

Requirements for joining the patrol are a high school diploma, minimum height of 5 ft. 10 in., age between 21 and 35, and "physical and mental fitness and good moral character." Though blacks with those qualifications have applied, none has ever been accepted; two brought suit against the patrol last week, charging it with discriminatory hiring practices. Whites who get in receive none of the psychological screening that now keeps obvious misfits out of many police departments. Fayette's usually moderate black Mayor Charles Evers virtually spits when he discusses patrol personnel: "I believe that many are either Klansmen or Klan sympathizers who have come out from behind the sheet and gotten behind the badge so they can kill black folks legally."

Many local policemen also dread the arrival of the patrol's air-conditioned cruisers, which can be dispatched by the Governor even when municipal chiefs have not requested them. The patrol can make tense situations worse, explains Oktibbeha County Sheriff Bill Harpole. "I know all my local niggers and they know me. The state patrol are outsiders."

Commissioner of Public Safety Giles Crisler, 48, a veteran of seven years in the Army artillery and 20 years on the patrol, issues few written orders. His men operate without any clear guidelines in civil disturbances. This has prompted Kenneth Fairly, head of the state agency that allocates federal aid to police, to withhold funds for riot control from any force lacking "well enunciated command and control procedures assuring proper restraint in usage of lethal weapons." Crisler's men also lack any formal departmental disciplinary machinery. Tape recordings of radio transmissions are erased within a week, well before anyone with a grievance against the force can subpoena them.

Courteous Dishes. For all the complaints against it, the Mississippi patrol clearly has its strengths. In 1967, Mississippi had the worst highway death rate in the nation, but in the next year the patrol shaped up and led all 50 states in reducing traffic fatalities. One Northern motorist who was recently stopped by the patrol swears that its officers dish out the most courteous antispeeding lectures in the nation.

It is unfair to put all the blame on the patrol for its poor performance in racial situations, for the state's present leaders would have it no other way. To them, the force is an admirably efficient defender of Mississippi's traditional way of life. Under different leadership the patrol could doubtless become both fairer and more professional. Alabama troopers, for example, achieved an equally noxious reputation under Governor George Wallace, but they have performed far differently since he left the statehouse. The members of the Mississippi patrol are much like policemen everywhere, says Charles Morgan, Southeastern director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "They do what is expected of them or tolerated by their superiors--nothing more or less."

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