Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story.
Gulfport receives more opioid settlement money than any local government in Mississippi. On Tuesday, its city council voted to spend $250,000 of its funds to improve the police department’s video surveillance.
In late April, Gulfport Police Chief Adam Cooper requested that the city transfer that amount from the city’s roughly $1.3 million in opioid settlement funds for his department’s Real Time Information Center. The center receives information from surveillance cameras and helps police respond to crimes, according to Cooper.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Cooper and another Gulfport Police Department employee told council members the $250,000 would update the center’s equipment and the dispatch center. Cooper said the opioid settlement money would also pay for 10 more cameras.
The department submitted an application to the state’s opioid settlement advisory council to help fund the center last fall, but it wasn’t ultimately funded. Cooper, a member of that council, told the city that the $250,000 of local settlement money would pay for a similar effort.
“This is the brain for the real time crime center,” he said at the meeting Tuesday. “Bringing all those cameras into the one room, the drone and everything else we’ve been talking about, to bring all that together.”
Cooper and council members didn’t immediately return calls from Mississippi Today on Wednesday about this request and decision.
Since 2022, Mississippi cities and counties have been receiving payments from settlement of lawsuits that states filed against companies accused of using dangerous business practices to catalyze the opioid epidemic. Local governments’ share is expected to total about $63 million by 2040, and Gulfport should receive about $5.3 million of that.
Each year since 2022, Mississippi has been paid tens of millions of opioid settlement dollars, money that is supposed to help respond to the overdose public health crisis. But 15% of those dollars — the money controlled by the state’s towns, cities and counties — is unrestricted and being spent with almost no public knowledge. Mississippi Today spent the summer finding out how almost every local government receiving money has been managing the money over the past three years. Read The Series
Before the payments started, Attorney General Lynn Fitch wrote an agreement with cities and counties that they could spend their opioid settlement money on anything, not just public health efforts to address the opioid epidemic. Many have followed that advice, spending on purposes other than lowering rates of addiction. The governments also don’t need to publicly report how they use the money.
In this year’s Mississippi legislative session, some lawmakers tried to require local governments to spend future opioid settlement money for addiction treatment, prevention and recovery. But legislators removed that requirement after a few spoke with Fitch’s office.
Her office has said the state’s portion of opioid settlement money should be used for overdose death prevention but local money can be used by governments to pay themselves back for two decades of expenses related to Mississippi’s addiction epidemic.
Rep. Jeffrey Hulum III, D-Gulfport, asks questions of Mid-South Association of Independent Schools (MAIS) Executive Director Brett Donahoe during a meeting of the Education Freedom Select Committee at the State Capitol, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025 in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Rep. Jeffery Hulum III, a Democrat from Gulfport, expressed concern when his colleagues removed the local opioid settlement restrictions. On Wednesday, he told Mississippi Today that while he would prefer Gulfport spend the money it manages on addiction treatment and recovery, he is in full support of the council’s decision.
Hulum, who’s running for a U.S. House seat this year, said crime is a big problem in the city’s marginalized communities, and he wants people he represents to feel safe. He said he doesn’t think Gulfport police would use the cameras to arrest people struggling with addiction or homelessness, although surveillance tools have led to such arrests in other places.
“If they’re not going to use the money for treatment, fixing addiction, put it into public safety,” Hulum said.
After Mississippi Today published an investigation of how local governments were spending opioid settlement money, some officials voluntarily chose to spend it for overdose prevention efforts. But others, such as Gulfport, have continued to consider using it for unrelated purposes.
In 2023, the city used $4,000 of opioid settlement dollars for a Thanksgiving and Christmas feeding program. At the Tuesday meeting, some council members seemed surprised the police department was requesting settlement funds.
“Not the opioid money?” Council Member Ella Holmes-Hines asked.
“Yes,” Council President Rusty Walker IV responded.
Holmes-Hines shook her head. She said that plan wasn’t clearly outlined in her council meeting notes — it only said the opioid settlement money would come up for discussion.
“We need to use opioid (money) for those who need the treatment,” she said to the other council members. “And you’re saying that what this project is going to do is to bring in all of the cameras?”
“Yes,” Cooper responded, and went on to further explain the information center.
Before the proposal was approved, Walker said spending opioid settlement money for the surveillance center is the most effective way to leverage law enforcement. He said no one else wants to do some of the work officers must do, such as help to address difficult mental illness cases.
“It is a huge gain for the city,” he said.
Melody Worsham, a peer support specialist with the Mississippi Recovery Advocacy Project, has spent years working in Harrison County to address mental illness and addiction health needs. She said it’s not true that police are the only people who want to take on the addiction crisis in Gulfport, and they’re often not the right response to help someone struggling with addiction.
“There’s a lot of people who want to address this,” Worsham said.
She said she’s worked with a lot of organizations, including the Mental Health Association of South Mississippi, that connect people struggling with opioid addiction to treatment and recovery options.
Worsham said city council members knew about and embraced these efforts in the past, which makes their Tuesday decision surprising.
