Following the recent swearing-in of new sheriff and administration, officials from the Forrest County Sheriff’s Office have developed a new website designed to improve transparency and allow citizens and staff better access to matters regarding the sheriff’s office and jail.
The new website was rolled out March 26 and can be found at . The layout features a toolbar across the top of the page, including sections like “About Us” and “Divisions,” which entails sections for the administration, investigations, transport, warrants, specialized units and more.
To keep residents informed on matters regarding the current COVID-19 pandemic, the site also features a section which links directly to the website of the Mississippi State Department of Health. A link toward the end of the page allows visitors to submit an anonymous tip to authorities.
“Facebook is a great tool for social media, but we feel a website is more valid,” public information officer Scott Lees said. “A Facebook post gets lost in the news feed a lot of times, but if you go to our website, all the information is there, and we’ll have a crime map when we switch to our new system.
“We feel like to access more information, it’s going to be a lot more transparent, versus trying to scroll back in our (Facebook) timeline to find out what you want to know.”
The inmate roster remains a key feature of the site, where the names of incarcerated individuals – along with charges, bonds and other information – can be found.
The site also features a Crime Statistics link, which brings up a National Incident-Based Reporting System spreadsheet that shows the number of a wide variety of offenses in the county going back to August 2019. Those offenses are included, but not limited to, arson, fraud, bad checks, murder, trespassing and prostitution.
The spreadsheet also shows total calls for service, total cases, total arrestees, total suspects and total victims.
“That’s replacing (Uniform Crime Reporting) that the FBI has used for, I believe, decades,” Lees said. “It’s more thorough, overall, in the way you submit your crimes. “These NIBRS reports really break it down a lot more. We’ll update that monthly as the NIBRS reports are accrued by the FBI, and we’ll publish those stats on our website.”
The new site has so far been a success, with more than 7,000 views, 25 downloads of crime stats and 30 submissions of contact forms in the short time since its inception.
“We’ve seen a reduction in calls for questions,” Lees said. “Some of our most common questions were regarding booking and bonding for inmates, and now that information is online, so you can just do a quick search and it’s really easy to get to.
“So it’s already doing its job, and we encourage the public to use that. Obviously we have no problem with answering phones, but any way we can relieve dispatch from answering calls for administration purposes, we’d love to do that, because our dispatch team needs to be focused on 911 calls and calls for service.”
