‘Who Got Busted?’

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor B ack before the internet took everything digital, I would often go into one of the local gas stations to pay for my gas (again, back in the days before pay-at-the-pump was a thing), and there would often be a stack of tabloid-sized newspapers, right there alongside the National Inquirer and Weekly World News.

It was called “Who Got Busted?” and it was just mugshot after mugshot.

So, if, in addition to finding out if Burt and Lonnie were getting divorced (they were), or if Elvis and JFK were secretly living on a moon base together (they were not), you could also pay a buck or so to see all the arrest reports from Crittenden County, Shelby County and DeSoto County.

No stories, no context… just page after page of a mugshot, a name, and a list of charges. I never did get the appeal, but people seemed to be really into it.

Even my Dad would scoop one up every now and then along with the Weekly World News. I guess finding out if anyone we knew was just as important as finding out if Bigfoot was a secret alien spy… any know what? It probably was.

I suppose there was some rationale behind getting the latest copy of “Who Got Busted?” each week. I remember someone picking one up while I was waiting in line behind them and saying, “I wonder if I’m in this one!” Certainly something to be proud of, right? I’ll admit there is some sense of morbid curiosity in finding out if any of your friends and neighbors, old school classmates or ex-boyfriends have run afoul of the law, but I don’t know if we need a whole newspaper devoted to that.

Of course, I say all of this knowing full well that people also read our newspaper to get a weekly rundown of all the local police reports. I’d like to think it’s more of a matter of public safety than anything else. We also do, admittedly, run five mugshots a day in the online edition of the paper, so I guess we’re sort of keeping the “Who Got Busted?” tradition alive.

We certainly don’t run all the mugshots. I try to limit it to felonies, violent crimes, drug charges and other arrests that really are a matter of public information and safety.

The thing is, I’ve been doing this for more than 12 years now. As part of collecting those mug shots from the Sheriff’s Office, I have, sadly, seen several faces multiple times. And when I say “multiple” I don’t just mean like two or three times. We are talking, in some cases, of a dozen or more. Just this past Monday afternoon, I was going through the latest batch of arrests and I came across another familiar face, a West Memphis man in his late 40s who I promise you I have seen close to 20 times now in the list of bookings.

I won’t give his name here (that’s not what this column is about) but I will say that he has been arrested for drugs, robbery, public intoxication, breaking and entering, loitering, trespassing, resisting arrest, petty theft and more.

No, none of these are particularly heinous crimes, but they are crimes. Some of the charges are only a few weeks apart, so it’s clear that getting arrested is not a deterrent to his criminal activities.

One name I will name, though is a fellow by the name of Justus Smith. I first knew this kid when he was just a kid because my wife and I both taught him in school. She in junior high and I, briefly, in high school. I say briefly because he was rarely in attendance and eventually dropped out entirely.

A few years later, I saw his mug shot for the first time in the arrest reports.

It would not be the last.

I saw it repeatedly over the years for increasingly violent and more serious crimes, going from theft to drugs to assault to armed robbery. I would often report seeing him in the arrests again to my wife and we would lament that someday something bad would happen to him.

And sure enough, it did.

One day, a few years ago now, I got a report that he was missing. A while later, he was found, dead in a field outside of West Memphis. He was 31 and his life did not end well.

He went from the “Who Got Busted?” page to the Obituary page.

Like Justus Smith, and like the other fellow I mentioned above, there are dozens of people living in this community who are constantly in and out of jail for various crimes.

How (and why) do they get out so quickly? What can be done to break this cycle of crime-jail-release-repeat in our community? Yes, these are grown people making their own decisions but there has to be a better way that what we are doing now.

Who got busted? The system … the system got busted. And we need to fix it.