“Try Us If You Want To”: Claiborne County Sheriff warns youth and parents

CLAIBORNE COUNTY, Miss. (VDN) — Sheriff Edward Goods and the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department have had enough—and they’re calling out not only the troublemakers, but also their parents.

In a series of posts made on the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Facebook page yesterday, the department referred to the “YN” as well as their parents, and Sheriff Goods is standing by the department’s choice of words.

“We’re gonna put it back on the parents, because it starts at home,” Sheriff Goods said to the Vicksburg Daily News. “The YN thing can stand for anything, so if you took it that way, then that’s on them. Our plan, our goal, is to be proactive and bring light to the situation, because most of the time law enforcement gets blamed for everything. If we look at what’s really going on—all these parents have to do any given Friday night or Saturday, tell me if I’m wrong, is check their kids’ rooms, check their vehicles. And if they can’t get their child under control, then call us and let us come visit your house. Let us take the guns. Let us talk to them. Letting them come out of the house unsupervised—we’re not going for it anymore.”

The department’s first post read:

The next two posts addressed parents directly:

Sheriff Goods said that while some found the posts unprofessional, the message was necessary and effective.

“When you hear about our department talking like that, that’s their language,” he said. “The people that it’s intended for—they get it. But then you’ll always have somebody on the opposite side trying to make it more than what it really is. They don’t want to face the music. Some people said that it’s unprofessional, but then at the same time, we’ve tried that approach. They [the people they are addressing] don’t understand professionalism, so we’re out there with them. We’re walking the streets with them. We see them at the club. We see them at the party. And we’ve got to talk their language to get their attention—and it worked. Nobody came out last night.”

Goods also said community support has outweighed criticism.

“We’ve got more people that support it than people that don’t,” he said. “It works for us. We get calls and text messages telling us where the problems may be throughout the night. We actually have people buying in to what we’re doing.”

The most recent post, published this morning, read:

Whether praised or criticized, the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department has made it clear: they intend to meet street-level challenges with streetwise messaging. And for now, at least, a night of silence may have spoken volumes.