JACKSON, Miss. — Sometime before sunset, Mayor Frank Melton roared into a Kroger parking lot in the ungainly box-on-wheels that has become his signature vehicle.
Technically, it's known as a "Mobile Command Center" -- a tricked-out RV that was once used for SWAT team operations. Tonight, Melton was riding shotgun in the thing, with cop cars in front and TV news vans behind.
As the entourage rolled to a stop, an onlooker asked the mayor what he was up to.
"I'm gettin' ready," he drawled, "to raise hell."
Melton hopped out of his RV and sauntered into the store for some grape soda, a 9-millimeter Glock on his hip.
The soda was for the poor teenagers Melton would pick up a few minutes later and load into the back of the RV, giving them a chance to see a little excitement on a Wednesday evening. The Glock was in case the mayor ran into trouble on his primary mission: hunting down Vidal Sullivan, 33, a former murder suspect who was wanted on a kidnapping warrant.
"How you doin', Frank?" the Kroger security guard asked.
"No bullet holes," said the mayor, strolling toward the soda aisle. "You know how it goes."
A Wild West-style manhunt, a rolling media spectacle, an improvised field trip for inner-city youth: It was, in many ways, a typical night on the town for Jackson's mayor.
When he was overwhelmingly elected last summer, Melton -- a wealthy former TV executive who briefly headed the state narcotics bureau -- promised to do something dramatic about crime in this Deep South city, which has been battered by decades of white flight and black poverty.
His methods, and his message, have been anything but subtle. At his first City Council meeting, he passed out cowboy hats. Hours after his inauguration, he embarked on the first of his nighttime crime sweeps.
A year later, Jacksonians are used to the excursions. Melton leads them three times a week in a bulletproof vest, heading up roadblocks, conducting searches, looking for bad guys.
It is one of the more unusual displays of mayoral power in any American city, and it is certainly unlike anything anyone has seen in Mississippi's capital. People here are so frustrated with crime that even some of Melton's targets think he's on to something.
"He's all right," said Jermaine Butler, a 34-year-old former gang member, just moments after Melton had confronted him and asked if he was holding drugs. "He's just doing his job."
