By the final day of “100 Days of Peace” in Jackson Friday, the city once called America’s deadliest had recorded a marked decline in violent offenses — 35% fewer homicides and nearly half of shootings — compared to last year.
But amid instability at the city’s fledgling violence prevention office, the exact reason for the recent respite eludes city leaders.
The reduction in violence was one goal of 100 Days of Peace, also known as 100 Days of Action, an initiative launched earlier this year by the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery.
From Feb. 27 to June 6, the office planned to host events to raise awareness and loosely create an atmosphere of peace in Jackson. It also announced $150,000 in grants, which began in January, to three community violence intervention organizations, Strong Arms of Mississippi, Living With Purpose and Operation Good.
The plan was to collect data to document how their work reduced violence outside of police involvement or incarceration. It was a fitting opportunity for the office, which was only launched in 2022 with a $700,000 grant from the National League of Cities, to justify why the city should allocate its own resources to these efforts, instead of simply increasing the police budget.
But before that could happen, the city fired Keisha Coleman, the director of the office who was spearheading these data collection efforts.
“We didn’t make it there,” Coleman said. “And I would like to get that information cause I still can look at it from a violence standpoint. We know homicides are down, but we can’t say with 100% accuracy what’s contributing to that.”
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba awarded grants from the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery to three community organizations outside of City Hall Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025. From left to right: Mayor Lumumba, Terun Moore of Strong Arms of Mississippi, John Knight of Living With Purpose, Bennie Ivey of Strong Arms of Mississippi, and OVPTR Community Outreach Specialist Kuwasi Omari. Credit: Courtesy City of JacksonIn other words, Coleman said she’d hoped to “prove that because of the 100 Days of Action and the initiatives that came from the office, it was a critical piece to keeping peace in the city.”
To do that, Coleman said she had asked the three organizations to submit reports to her describing the number of people served, including their age and city zip code, what service they received, and how long they had been in each organization’s program.
With Coleman gone, it’s unclear if the city of Jackson is hip to what data has been collected or if it plans to analyze it to determine what programs are most effective moving forward. When the city fulfilled Mississippi Today’s requests for data analysis after Coleman was fired, it only provided one report that Living With Purpose completed in February, before 100 Days of Peace began.
But the city should have possession of more data than that. Benny Ivey, a co-lead of Strong Arms, told Mississippi Today his organization had submitted reports to Coleman detailing the work they were doing.
“We’re constantly in the community working with kids,” he said. “We’ve got a bunch of parents that reach out to us weekly wanting to get their boys enrolled in their program. We pick them up, they play ball, we have group sessions.”
Ivey did not seem to know that data analysis had been a goal of 100 Days of Peace.
“100 Days of Peace was something that Keisha and the Office of Violence Prevention came up with just to bring awareness,” he said. “But events and barbecues and cookouts and waterslides, all that’s fun, but we’re out there on the ground with our boots trying to make real change.”
Fredrick Womack, executive director of Operation Good, said his organization is working to make Jackson safer whether or not the city is able to collect data.
“We work every day to have peace,” Womack said. “We want 365 days of peace.”
In some cities, the impact of solutions to violence that do not involve police has been straightforward to qualify: The mayor meets with rival gang members, and they agree to a ceasefire, in exchange for job training.
But in Jackson, a variety of organizations are working to reduce violence outside of the police, and they employ different methods. In general, it can be difficult to show through crime data reported by the police how these organizations are impacting violence in the city — precisely because their work is intended to prevent people from becoming a statistic.
Operation Good uses a variety of models, including an approach called “it takes a village,” to prevent interpersonal conflicts from turning violent and reduce the social conditions that lead to such conflicts. Strong Arms and Living With Purpose primarily work with credible messengers, folks in the community who have been involved in the criminal justice system, to encourage youth to take a less violent path in life.
When the city launched the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery more than two years ago, the goal was to help these organizations grow by offering support through additional grant funding and technical assistance, such as how to collect data.
Coleman said, when she showed Ivey the data she intended to collect earlier this year, he was ecstatic because he had not yet figured out how to do that.
“Their passion exceeds their administrative duties,” she said. “They were doing the work, but they just hadn’t conditioned themselves to record it.”
But the first monthly deadline to submit data came and went with nothing submitted, she said. As part of the memorandum of understanding with the city, these three organizations were supposed to be submitting data to Coleman.
Strong Arms ended up submitting a quarterly report, Coleman said. She also met with Womack at Operation Good’s office to talk to him about the data she was needing, leading Womack to show her that he collected more data than she was asking for.
“When she saw our spreadsheet and saw that it was more detailed and so forth, she just said that would be sufficient,” Womack said.
But when Mississippi Today requested this information, the city only provided one report from Living With Purpose. Titled “OVPTR performance management meeting report,” the form shows that between Jan. 1, 2025, and Feb. 28, 2025 — the start of 100 Days of Peace — the organization reported 11 individuals had received a “ceasefire communication” outside of custody.
The organization also conducted 19 mediations. While this term is not defined in the document, the spreadsheet notes that 80% were conflict mediations, with “two sides,” as opposed to “conflict intervention conversations,” which only had “one side.” (In Womack’s case, a mediation occurs after an Operation Good staff member intervenes in a potentially violent situation and helps the people involved leave with mutual understanding.)
The form does not include location data, so it is not clear in which areas of the city these mediations took place in.
Keisha Coleman, executive director of the City of Jackson’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, shows the t-shirt for Denim Day, an event raising awareness and supporting survivors of sexual assault, held at City Hall Wednesday, April 30, 2025 in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayMultiple statistics show that violence and crime have fallen in Jackson. The Jackson Police Department recorded 17 homicides from Feb. 27 to June 6 of this year, compared with 26 in the same time frame last year.
The Gun Violence Archive, a national nonprofit, documented 33 shootings in Jackson, compared to 61 last year.
But JPD was not an official arm of 100 Days of Peace, and the department has its own explanation for why the city’s violent crime rate plummeted this year.
“Well, crime is down because a lot of people are still in jail,” Deputy Chief Sequerna Banks said.
That’s because many people are receiving high bonds they cannot pay, preventing them from returning to the community.
“We’ve had some low bonds, something we’re not happy with, but that’s out of our control as far as setting bonds,” Banks said. “But most definitely the high bonds play a part. People are in jail on high bonds and not having to worry about them getting out and that plays a very high part in crime being down.”
Ask Operation Good, Living With Purpose or Strong Arms why crime is down, they will say it’s because they are working to prevent people from committing crimes.
For instance, Womack noted that Operation Good has actually intercepted more violent incidents this year compared to last, because Operation Good’s area has grown beyond south Jackson, and Womack has been able to hire more mediators.
To support Womack’s point, Coleman said she had envisioned creating a series of heat maps of Jackson. She wanted to look at crimes committed in previous years and compare that to the past 100 days in Jackson to see if there was a reduction in the areas of the city served by the three organizations.
“I explained that was gonna be the role of the Office of Violence Prevention, that once they collected their information or recorded their data, we would take it and synthesize it collectively, and we would create the stories and the narratives that go along with the data to show how the credible messengers and violence interruption organizations are real drivers of crime reduction in Jackson,” she said.
Coleman never got that far, and confusion persists among city officials about what data can actually be provided to the public.
“I don’t know if your public records request would account for all of their work,” outgoing Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said on Tuesday after the city council meeting, when asked if the city had any data on 100 Days of Peace. “It wouldn’t account for everything that they – you would only have access to the public information of us giving to them.”
“I’m talking about communicating with them and understanding where they were engaged and what their engagements yielded,” he continued. “None of that would be recovered by a public records request, which is the meat of that type of work. The meat of actual violence interruption, you don’t go talk to gang members and say okay I need you to sign this document. It is actually about the connections, so that would never be connected by a public records request.”
Safiya Omari, the mayor’s chief of staff, said that a number of offices around the country have been working to prove the efficacy of non-police approaches to violence.
“There’s a lot of information that we collect,” she said. “What we have is a disconnect between data and actual work and now we are trying to bridge that disconnect.”
Omari noted one example of data the city has obtained to support the office’s work.
“For example, we know the six zip codes that have the highest amount of gun violence in the city,” she said. “The work is supposed to center around programmatically addressing what’s happening in the community. Events are good in terms of raising awareness, but you actually have to have some boots on the ground kind of work taking place.”
A document analyzing those six zip codes was never provided in response to Mississippi Today’s records request for data.
Other details are missing. Coleman said she distributed gun safety locks at the Westside Community Center as part of 100 Days of Peace, but that handout was not documented in the records provided to Mississippi Today. The public records request instead yielded flyers for two events — a grief art party and a sexual assault awareness demonstration called Denim Day — but no information on participants was included.
Coleman described several planned events, such as a sneaker ball to cap off the initiative, that never took place.
If done right, Womack said events like the ones associated with 100 Days of Peace can improve community dynamics, but it was not clear to him if that was the main thrust of the city’s recent initiative.
“If the 100 Days of Peace was about events, then that’s the data,” he said. “Events.”
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