Sid Salter: Sheriff Malcolm McMillin was A Tough but Big-Hearted Old School Lawman

When I learned of the death of former Hinds County Sheriff Malcolm McMillin – a tough, old school lawman whose friendship I came to appreciate during my years covering crime in central Mississippi – my initial thoughts went back a day spent riding some of the most crime-ridden areas of the city of Jackson.

Many will remember that McMillin also served for a brief time as chief of police in Jackson while simultaneously serving as county sheriff. That fact unnerved and angered McMillin’s political opponents.

McMillin taught me early on during my Clarion-Ledger days that I would be pretty safe at night walking from the State Capitol back to the C-L offices down on Pearl Street. “That’s because at night, there’s no one on the streets in that area other than the homeless, the mentally ill, chronic alcoholics.””

But McMillian said dangerous areas weren’t hard to find and that race didn’t have as much to do with those crime-ridden locales as most people thought. Despite his frustration with both city and county government in Jackson and Hinds County, “Mac” loved the place and most of the people.

I remember trying to choke down a pig ear sandwich at the Big Apple Inn while listening to Mac and Geno Lee catching up on local gossip in the Farish Street area. The pig ear sandwich – made famous by Geno’s grandfather – is simply a Mississippi experience not to be missed.

Taste like bacon, chews like, well, an ear. I think Mac enjoyed carrying novices to Geno’s place to watch them deal with their first taste of that peculiarly Jackson, Mississippi cuisine.

I also knew Mac through charity work in the Jackson area. We did several Diabetes Walk events together. We’d get about a quarter-mile into the walk and he’s look around and say: “Are we walking past any place that serves candy bars or ice cream?”

Burly, brawny, and not averse to physical violence when required, Malcolm McMillin could be a hard-nosed, formidable one-man wrecking crew. He also possessed a tender heart for children, the aged, the sick, the poor, and those who could not defend themselves.

During his five terms as Hinds County’s top law enforcement office, McMillin battled the Hinds County Board of Supervisors over budget disagreements, jail overcrowding and jail funding. McMillin grew up in Natchez, but spent his summer on a truck farm with his uncle and aunt on Turkey Creek near Dentsville.

In an interview more than a decade ago, McMillin said: “My father died when I was seven, and I don’t have many memories of him, so I can’t say that I really learned any lessons from him. One thing I remember my mother telling me that’s stayed with me is that you can always tell a lot about a person’s character by the way he treats people who wait on him or work for him. My mother was a waitress, who worked very hard to raise my sister and me after my father died.”

After high school, McMillin said his “senior trip” was a tour of duty in Southeast Asia as an 18-year-old military policeman in the U.S. Air Force.

In 2012, after being unseated in a re-election bid, he was Gov. Phil Bryant’s choice of as the new chairman of the State Parole Board – one that empowered a career law enforcement officer who also has had to deal with the realities of jail overcrowding and management.

McMillin’s true gift as head of the Parole Board was his up close and personal understanding of the relationship between the state’s judicial system, corrections system, and the parole process as it relates to impacts on local jails.

In 2003, McMillin offered this assessment: “It’s difficult to determine beyond the short-term needs essentially what our jail space needs are, because in the years I have been in office, we’ve never had a criminal justice system that worked. We’ve been plagued with overcrowding caused by the state housing its inmates in county jails throughout the state. Now we are dealing with overcrowding as a result of the increasing numbers of pre-trial detainees who have yet to be indicted, tried, sentenced, and moved into the state system.”

Finding the formula between maintaining a “tough on crime” posture while managing the finite amount of jail space in Mississippi has – as McMillin noted – been almost a constant problem.

Again, in his own words, McMillin can also see parole decision from the perspective of law enforcement: “I answered a domestic disturbance call one night. I knocked on the door and stepped to the side as I’d been trained to do and someone in the house fired a shotgun through the door. I have fired my weapon and been fired upon. Given the option, I would rather not do either again,” McMillin said.

Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him sidsalter@sidsalter.com.

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