JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – Law enforcement authorities met with local and state representatives at Thursday’s Metro Crime Summit Roundtable.

Jackson State University (JSU) hosted the summit for officials to discuss best practices for making the community safer. The topics included youth violence, mental health intervention, and cross-agency cooperation.

The roundtable discussion was closed to news media, but leaders did speak beforehand.

“Some of the key issues are juvenile crimes, violent crimes, homelessness, mental illness and some other factors, as well. We are all faced with these issues. We need to be able to discuss these issues, but not necessarily today, be able to identify people that we feel are responsible for this, and we’re also sharing best practices to be able to address some of these issues,” said Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones.

Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens said his office is doing its part. He said if someone is arrested, they can now be indicted in less than 30 days.

“But if we looked at the system of prosecution, because all of your efforts cannot be wasted, if our system does not work for you, we are a problem for you. And we fixed our grand jury backlog after four years of trying to make it make sense,” stated Owens.

Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba announced the city will select an executive director for Jackson’s first office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery before the end of August 2023.

“We want to better aid our law enforcement and create an example that can be replicated across the state of Mississippi to make sure that we are more efficient and proactive, not only in capturing those that are violent or capturing those that are committing crimes, but making sure that we see an end to the violence we see,” said Lumumba.