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U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche presented Jackson Mayor John Horhn with a symbolic $64 million check Monday, possibly giving Mississippi’s capital city a surge of funding to hire more police officers, rebuild its forensic lab and expand drone surveillance of suspected criminals and abandoned properties.
Under Jackson’s form of government, the city council must now decide if it will accept the money. Council members authorized the Jackson Police Department to apply for the U.S. Department of Justice’s new Model Cities initiative grant earlier this year.
The Jackson City Council earlier this year authorized the police department to apply for the grant. Under Jackson’s form of government, the council must now decide if it will accept the money.
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche presented Jackson Mayor John Horhn and Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney with a $64 million check after a press conference announcing the city as one of four recipients of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Model Cities Initiative grant. Credit: Molly Minta/Mississippi Today
Horhn heralded the potential investment, saying at Monday’s press conference at City Hall that Jackson “is dealing with scarce resources.”
“We are ideas rich and we are money poor,” Horhn said.
The mayor’s comment drew chuckles from state officials, including Gov. Tate Reeves, whose presence at City Hall is a rare sight. Reeves, a Republican, has sometimes clashed with leaders of the Democratic-led city over policing.
“Today is a good day for the people of Jackson, which means today is a good day for the state of Mississippi,” Reeves said. “And, also, today is a bad day for the criminals who wish to do us harm.”
Blanche said the widespread support among state officials for Jackson’s application is why the Justice Department selected the city out of 47 applicants. He said the money would become available early next year and that residents would see results “almost right away.”
“You’re going to have more cops on the street, and the cops on the street will be working with better equipment, better technology and better information,” Blanche said.
In its grant application, JPD wrote that it hoped to use the federal money to expand its network of cameras housed at the Real-Time Command Center and create a database linking 911 calls to abandoned properties in the city.
Taken together, Police Chief RaShall Brackney said these efforts will reduce violent crime “before it arrives” in Jackson.
“We have to change the conditions” that foster violence, the chief said. “Not simply manage the consequences.”
Hours before the press conference, the ACLU of Mississippi released a statement saying the partnership could trample civil liberties.
In an email, Candi Richardson, the ACLU of Mississippi’s communications director, expressed worry that Horhn and other Jackson officials were too trusting of the Trump administration in respecting the rights of Black Jacksonians, low-income communities, immigrant families and unhoused individuals.
“The more likely outcome: The Trump administration will hijack this funding to increase control of Jackson law enforcement agencies and communities and push its ideological obsession, racism, and approach of loyalty over law,” Richardson wrote.
Horhn previously told Mississippi Today that he had not heard concerns from any constituents about a potential federal takeover of the Jackson Police Department.
Two residents of the Jackson metro area whose family members had been killed spoke at the press conference in support of the grant.
Violet Horne, who lost two sons to gun violence in 2024, said she hoped the grant would lead Jackson to “a chapter where jurisdiction and boundaries do not become barriers to justice.”
In addition to Jackson, the Justice Department also awarded grants to Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Jacksonville, Florida; and St. Louis.
Unlike other federal law enforcement grants, the Model Cities Initiative will be administered through a “cooperative agreement,” giving the DOJ an active role in implementation. The grant requires participating cities to comply with certain Trump administration priorities, including immigration enforcement and efforts to ban homeless people from sleeping in public.
Voting rights demonstrators gathered near the Hinds County Courthouse in Jackson, Monday, Nov. 9, 2026. Chanting from the unrelated protest prompted a press conference on the federal government’s Model Cities Initiative to be moved inside City Hall. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
That is why the initiative has proved controversial in other Democratic-led cities, including Charlotte and New Orleans.
During the press conference, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward alluded to controversies in cities that ultimately decided against applying for the grant, saying that “public safety is not controversial.”
Another concern from civil liberties advocates: The Justice Department has touted its Memphis Safe Task Force as a prototype for the Model Cities Initiative grant. In one year, officers working under the task force fatally shot four people and made more than 23,000 arrests, mostly for nonviolent offenses following traffic stops conducted on one in three residents.
In a letter supporting the grant application, Horhn wrote that Jackson had seen “meaningful reductions in homicides and other violent crime” under Brackney.
However, statistics show otherwise. By Aug. 3, the date on the letter that Horhn submitted to the federal government, 54 homicides occurred in Jackson. During that same period in 2024, the city had 44 homicides in Jackson, according to WLBT’s Homicide Tracker.
“That’s not what we looked at,” Blanche said. “What we looked at is, do we have motivation and commitment from leadership that we can work together?”
JPD’s grant application sought $125 million over three years. The department proposed to use most of the money to create a specialized gun-crimes unit focused on “repeat shooters.”
“We cannot arrest our way into community stability,” Brackney said. “We cannot technology our way into trust.”
The press conference was scheduled to be held on the steps of City Hall, but officials moved it inside because of an unrelated demonstration by voting rights advocates chanting “count every vote” outside the Hinds County Courthouse.
