Browse
Log in / Register
Share
JACKSON, Miss. (Updated June 1, 2026) – Two of Jackson’s largest city departments are grappling with missing vehicles, and the root cause appears to be a breakdown in basic asset management. During a special City Council meeting Tuesday, Police Chief RaShall Brackney revealed that the Jackson Police Department cannot account for four vehicles. The Public Works Department, led by Director Lorenzo Anderson, faces a similar problem—though the exact number of missing vehicles is unknown.
The meeting was called to fine-tune the city’s proposed $113 million general fund budget for the 2027 fiscal year. Council members approved several amendments before recessing after about two hours, with a final vote scheduled for Wednesday. But the discussion quickly shifted from dollars to discipline when Brackney took the floor.
“We’ve been doing our inventory of assets,” Brackney told council members. “The chief of staff, along with our individual assigned to that unit now, has literally been driving past garages, spotting our vehicles and recovering those vehicles.” She did not specify how many vehicles have been recovered from local repair shops or why they were taken there in the first place.
Brackney said she is also investigating what funding source—grant money or general fund—was used to purchase the missing vehicles, and who was assigned them. The goal is to ensure JPD is in compliance with grant and general fund requirements. “If you gave us general fund moneys for vehicles, were those vehicles actually being distributed within the JPD or were they being distributed throughout the city?” she asked. “I’m going to be very careful the way that I say this, but from the very first point of entry, we just don’t have a really good accounting system.”
Council President Vernon Hartley asked whether the council had previously discussed the idea of a centralized municipal garage—a proposal that could help the city better track its rolling assets. Anderson said he has recommended exactly that. Instead of outsourcing vehicle maintenance, he argued, the city could bring the work in-house and centralize it. “If you’re outsourcing a million dollars, bring it in-house and centralize it,” Anderson said. “I think you would save some money.”
Anderson agreed with Brackney that the city needs a far better inventory system. “Right now, it’s more like the wild, wild West, where people just get their oil changed when they want to,” he said. When pressed by council members on whether Public Works was missing any vehicles, Anderson replied, “I’m pretty sure I am... I don’t know what I don’t know.” He added that what’s really needed is “some type of inventory system and maintenance software.”
Hartley was surprised to hear that. “I thought we had approved something like that within the last couple of years,” he responded. That’s when Chief Financial Officer Jillian Caldwell dropped a key detail: the city already owns a tracking system called Munis, which can log vehicles, their assignments, and maintenance schedules. The problem? Nobody has been using it.
“You know, we’ve got the new administration on board, so we can reach out to them for some training on whoever will be responsible for that,” Caldwell said. “But we have the capability within our current system to track all of those things.”
The revelation highlights a broader pattern of administrative gaps in Jackson’s municipal operations. In 2024, a city audit flagged weaknesses in fixed-asset controls, but little progress has been made since. City management experts note that the inability to track vehicles not only risks financial waste but also opens the door to misuse or theft. “When you have a system that’s purchased but never implemented, it’s not a technology problem—it’s a leadership problem,” said Dr. Elena Torres, a public administration professor at the University of Mississippi who reviewed the city’s fiscal reports. “Jackson needs to move from ‘we can track’ to ‘we are tracking.’”
Council members are expected to take up the budget vote Wednesday, but the vehicle issue is likely to spill into future meetings. Some council members have already proposed adding a line item for mandatory training on the Munis system. Others want to see an independent audit of all city vehicles within 90 days.
For now, the city’s two largest departments are left with a simple, embarrassing reality: they don’t know where their own cars are. And the tool that could fix that has been sitting on a shelf, unused.
Want more WLBT news in your inbox? Click here to subscribe to our newsletter.
See a spelling or grammar error in our story? Please click here to report it and include the headline of the story in your email.
Copyright 2026 WLBT. All rights reserved.
