The City of Petal has rejoined the 12th District Metro Task Force, allowing the city to partner with law enforcement in Forrest County and Hattiesburg to combat illegal drugs in the area.
The measure was approved unanimously at a recent meeting of the Petal Board of Aldermen, when Mayor Hal Marx said being in the task force would allow police to do a more efficient job of coordinating efforts throughout the area.
“Obviously, when you talk about narcotics, we know they’re in every community,” Marx said. “With us being a metropolitan area around Hattiesburg, we know that those drugs flow from one city to the next, and from one county to the next.
“So it makes sense for us to work together, so that we all share the same information from confidential informants and things like that. We all know what’s going on as a region, instead of each individual department trying to work their own cases.”
Although Petal has not yet committed a member of Petal Police Department to work with the task force full-time, the city is committed to helping the task force with manpower.
“In the past, we actually had an officer that was assigned to the task force and worked there full-time, and he was paid by us,” Marx said. “We’re not doing that at this time right now. But anytime they need manpower, they can request it on a per-need basis.
“We could send officers to help with an operation if they wanted to do a search warrant, or if they wanted to do a drug seizure or something like that. So our membership right now is based on those qualifications – we’re not going to have a full-time person and it won’t cost us any money right now to be a member. We hope that in the future, we can commit when our resources allow us to commit an officer again full-time over there.”
Petal had been a member of the task force in the past.
However, the city withdrew a few years ago – along with Perry County – because officials didn’t believe the city was getting the benefit from some of the seizures that were taking place.
“And there were also some questions about general leadership, of how the leadership of the task force was chosen,” Marx said. “When Charlie Sims was elected (Forrest County) Sheriff, he reached out to us to see if we’d be interested in becoming a member of the task force again.
“Our chief of police, Matthew Hiatt, believes it’s a good time for us to get back in. We want to show that we want to work with the new sheriff and our area law enforcement agencies on combating drugs in our community.”
