Category: Editorial

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Crime and Punishment and Societal Problems

The issue of public safety is sure to surface sooner or later in this city election season. Fodder for it was provided on Tuesday during an address to the Rotary Club of Memphis from Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings.

MPD director Mike Rallings

As is usual under such circumstances, the head of MPD was prepared with plenty of statistics. In a nutshell, there were two sets of measurements: 1) the state of criminal incidents since last year, and 2) the state of things since the city’s high-mark for violent crime in 2006 — the year that the data-driven policy of Blue Crush took hold in the department.

By the second measure, progress is undeniable. The incidence of crime is down 6 percent since the advent of Blue Crush — and, as Rallings noted, that means 1,625 fewer victims per annum. As for violent crimes, there were 36,859 by this point in 2006; there are some 26,000 in 2019, thus far, an impressive decline.

Now for the bad news: “Homicides are still a challenge,” Rallings said. The number of murders has picked up this year by a margin of 13 percent over last year. Another issue is a drastic increase in the number of firearms stolen from vehicles since the passage of state legislation several years back that allows guns belonging to licensed owners to be left in automobiles. Rallings pointed out the irony that the state’s lawmakers were much more scrupulous about banning the use of cellphones in cars than they have been regarding guns.

The director said the ideal number of MPD officers is 2,600, adding that there are 2072 officers currently. He said he expects to see the force reach 2,300 officers by the end of 2020.

But, as Rallings noted, the best means of lowering the crime rate is not that of merely buttressing the police component. He pinpointed three predominant facts common to offenders: 1) the fact of being a high school dropout, 2) the subjection during one’s upbringing to an atmosphere of domestic violence, and 3) the incidence of transience in the life of offenders’ families. The best means of curtailing crime, Rallings said, would be to find solutions to these insufficiencies in the lives of the city’s less fortunate citizens.

This year’s mayoral candidates might take heed of Rallings’ findings, particularly his syllogism that “to improve literacy is to reduce crime.” That relates particularly to his first point. As for his second point, Rallings said there was a direct correlation between “intimate-partner violence” in the home to crimes committed later on by youths raised in those circumstances. Clearly, an increased emphasis on reducing domestic abuse is as relevant to crime control as it is to culture in general in the #MeToo era.

All in all, Director Rallings made obvious the connection between social attitudes, insufficient housing, poverty and its attendant social problems, and the crime rate. It behooves the mayoral candidates of 2019 to consider the facts and come up with strategies to improve the situation on all fronts.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Harris, Biden, and Busing

We have no objection to the sudden rise to viability as a presidential contender of California U.S. Senator Kamala Harris. As the sentient world knows, Harris’ ascension to contender status was shaped last week by her strong performance during the second nationally televised debate of Democratic candidates.

Former Vice President Joe Biden

It came at the expense of former Vice President Joe Biden, the putative Democratic front-runner, who was slow on the uptake when challenged by Harris for his previous remarks regarding his ability, while serving in the Senate, to co-exist and seek common ground with out-and-out segregationists like then-Senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, “old bulls” who, due to the prevailing seniority system, had outsized power over the Senate committee system and could obstruct or facilitate legislation.

Biden’s point was that he retained the ability to work constructively with political figures of different persuasions from his own — something likely to be highly relevant in post-2020 Washington. Still, Harris’ well-stated rebuke was on point and timely, given today’s different sense of priorities and impatience with foot-dragging on matters related to human justice.

And we like Harris’ prosecutorial style, hitherto in her public interrogations of disingenuous functionaries of the Trump administration.

We are not so enamored of Harris’ follow-up point in her confrontation with Biden, wherein she took him to task for having, as she alleged, opposed busing back in its heyday as a means of desegregation. The fact is that, in urban locales ranging from Boston in the northeast to our own case in Memphis, the ultimate outcome of court-ordered busing, however well-meaning, was to foster, not integration, but resegregation via a host of hothouse private schools and new residential enclaves beyond the reach of judicial orders. Court-ordered busing in the Memphis case in 1972 was upheld 2-1 by a federal appeals court, but, as former Flyer writer John Branston noted in a retrospective years afterward, “History would show that it was dissenter Paul Weick who got it right: ‘The burden of eliminating all the ills of society should not be placed on public school systems and innocent school children.'”

In 1973 and 1974, as Branston further noted, “Some 30,000 students left the Memphis public school system in white flight in reaction to court-ordered busing for integration.” That out-migration, augmented by a generous number of middle-class blacks, increased year by year, to the point that what remains of the Memphis City Schools system, now reorganized ironically as Shelby County Schools, is virtually segregated, serving an impoverished population, while most white students are cloistered in a small network of “optional” schools or attending classes in private institutions or in public schools operated by the county’s suburban municipalities.

Perhaps the best verdict on busing was rendered by the federal judge who ordered it, Robert McRae, who recalled in his retirement, “I was disappointed in the reaction to Plan Z. But I had to keep a stiff upper lip because this [reaction] was an act of defiance. Still, I was disappointed that we hadn’t come up with something that worked.”

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The Brandon Webber Case: Work To Be Done

CREDIT: Facebook

As noted elsewhere in this issue, the major local news of late has focused on the tragic death in Frayser of young Brandon Webber at the hands of U.S. Marshals, followed by an immediate and widespread community reaction to the presence of law enforcement officers dispatched to the scene for crowd control.

The fact that in the ongoing mayhem of that confrontation numerous officers were injured by thrown objects was alarming in its own right. Along with the precipitating incident — yet another fatal encounter between law enforcement and an African-American youth — there is more than substantial evidence that we as a community have passed some threshold in social dislocation that must be addressed.

Facebook

Brandon Webber

Although racial tension is a major ingredient of the problem, it does not by itself explain why the problem exists. As was to be expected in our cybernetic age, there was a barrage of online reactions to the tragic incident, with whites and blacks to be found on both sides of the dividing line. Certainly, a generous number of the MPD and sheriff’s department officers dodging rocks, bottles, and bricks — and, commendably, avoiding overreaction — were black. And, for all the white commenters sympathizing with the protest emanating from the African-American community, there were a fair number of African-American commentators both online and in the broadcast media deploring Webber’s seemingly suicidal provocations, and inveighing against opportunistic efforts to exploit the crisis.

Though the temptation to make Webber a martyr may have seemed a stretch, given the circumstances of the precipitating crime he was suspected of — car theft and assault with a deadly weapon — that fact should not diminish the human instinct to mourn his fate and to empathize with his loved ones left behind. And it should not prevent us from realizing that the outpouring of rage and grief generated by Webber’s passing is the understandable and even proper residue of sentiment that developed over time in relation to previous victims of fatal encounters with law enforcement, many of those victims being wholly or relatively blameless. In a sense, society is reaping a whirlwind now from discord sowed in those prior ill winds.

The dark clouds have gathered, and they will persist. If there is a silver lining to be found in them, it is in the fact of an ongoing awareness in governmental councils of a need for criminal justice reform — not just in relation to the easing of penalties for nonviolent offenders and the facilitation of their re-entry into productive society, but of a change underway in official attitudes toward offenders and an increasing tendency to see them as fellow citizens needing a hand up. We have not yet fully come to grips with the specter of class division and income inequality — as significant factors in social dislocation as race, if not more so. There is work to be done — by all of us.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Spring “Blessings” from Our Lawmakers

CREDIT: REUTERS | Leah Millis

Spring has come, if you can call it that, what with the more-than-occasional nippy morning, the on-again, off-again temperatures that have been confusing dogwoods’ attempts to blossom, and the sporadic rainy torrents that somehow still feel more wintry than not.
Even so, let us count our current seasonal blessings. The document that presumably contains the truth about some alarming allegations against our president (the so-called Mueller Report) remains a distant, inaccessible mystery under the misleading cover of a four-page attorney general’s gloss. Meanwhile, that president is free to resume his assaults on human dignity, including, reportedly, a new plan by his dead-eyed special assistant Stephen Miller to resume separating children from their immigrant parents along our southern border. (Emma Lazarus and her do-goody inscription on the Statue of Liberty to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” be damned).

REUTERS | Leah Millis

Stephen Miller

And, as if to spread the blessings of Trumpism to those of us who are native-born, the president continues to vow to kill off entirely the Affordable Care Act, which he has so far only managed to cripple or inconvenience, here and there. Never mind the consequences for those rascals among us who have been blessed hitherto by the ACA’s coverage of pre-existing conditions. They can make do, as before — with thoughts and prayers.
There are developments on our state government front, too. Among the bills that have been hurtling toward passage in these last few weeks of the 2019 General Assembly are measures to impose a new state charter-school commission (read: bureaucracy) with the ability to override the wishes of local school boards on charter-school applications; state grants for parents to use in private Tennessee schools, called “education savings account” rather than the justly tarnished term “vouchers,” so as to confuse diehard defenders of public school education; a variety of anti-abortion measures, all anticipating that Trump judicial appointees will at some point achieve the specific gravity needed to ward off judgments of unconstitutionality; more end-run attempts to keep transgenders out of gender-specific restrooms; a bill permitting teachers with carry permits to take their guns to school; and one would-be constitutional amendment attributing all these and other splendors of man’s domain and God’s universe to, well, God.

The legislator who gave us this last one is an East Tennessee guy named James, though he calls himself Micah, after the prophet, something he would have us believe was a suggestion emanating from his personal pipeline to the almighty.

Maybe we expect too much and are ungrateful to the point of ignoring our real blessings like the ongoing presence of spring football and that avatar of the sport known as Johnny Manziel. Wait. It’s over with already? Oh, well, at least it’s stopped raining. Sort of.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

TN GOP Legislators Propose Another Voter Suppression Measure

CREDIT: JB

Those readers of even moderate faculties of memory will recall a pair of legal set-tos last year pitting the Shelby County Election Commission against plaintiffs who were charging either disproportionate voting processes favoring suburbanites or outright voter suppression. Both issues were decided in favor of the plaintiffs, against suppression, and for the maximum possible enabling of the voting franchise.

JB

Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett

The sad fact is — regarding this, as on a whole panoply of other matters — state government is attempting to intervene against the results of decision-making at the local level (in this case, against decisions in Shelby County Chancery Court). A bill backed by Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and state Election Coordinator Mark Goins would not only penalize new-voter applications that are incomplete but would hold individuals and organizations responsible for helping turn them in via voter registration drives, saddling those individuals and organizations with fines of up to $8,000.

This issue of incomplete ballots, of course, was the one adjudicated last year in the courtroom of Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins, who directed the Election Commission, which had thrown out various incomplete applications, to extend its deadlines long enough to allow those applications to be completed and/or amended.

Democratic members of the General Assembly held a press conference at the Capitol on Tuesday to protest the measure (House Bill 1079/Senate Bill 971), which is pending this week in both the House and the Senate. They were backed up by representatives of the Tennessee Equity Alliance and the Black Voter Project. State Representative John Ray Clemmons (D-Nashville) went through a brief history of prior voter suppressions, including the photo ID law and the prohibition of college IDs in connection with it. He said, “Ask Tre Hargett and ask Mark Goins what they’re afraid of? Black students? Brown students?”

Another Nashville Democrat, Vincent Dixie, followed that up: “If they’re not afraid of competition, why are they afraid to let people vote? What is this legislation really addressing?”

Those two were followed by state Senator Brenda Gilmore (D-Nashville), who provided the interesting (and alarming) fact that, in the interval since Tennessee’s adoption of the Voter ID law, the state had fallen from number 27 in its ratio of voter turnout to dead last. And finally Representative Bob Freeman (D-Nashville) issued the compelling truism: “We don’t need to do anything to rebut people’s right to vote.”

It remains to be seen, of course, if the Republican supermajority that controls the General Assembly can be brought to re-examine its premises. And even if the bill should pass muster in both chambers this week, there would remain the hope that Governor Bill Lee, who is capable of common sense and compassion despite his ever more obvious conservatism, could issue a veto.

And, if worse should come to worst legislatively, there are always the courts — and the hope that the judgment of Chancellor Jenkins can be replicated on a statewide scale.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

No Backing Down. Release the Mueller Report.

Yes, we are dismayed, but not for the reasons you might think. We are not troubled by any imagined derelictions of the mainstream media or by any presumed credulousness on its part or by any putative conspiracy, in tandem with the Democratic Party, to mislead the nation about a fictitious involvement of Donald Trump, his campaign, or his administration with the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin.

What concerns us instead is the tail-between-the-legs attitude of some of our brethren in the Fourth Estate, or the chastisement of fellow journalists by the likes of The New York Times‘ David Brooks or gonzo progressive Matt Taibbi.

No, we have nothing to apologize for, those of us who pointed out the practical symbiosis between the Trump campaign and administration and the organized conspiracy of the Russian government to undermine both our democratic (small d) processes and the electoral chances of the Democratic Party.

No, we were not deceived, and we had no difficulty discerning a pattern in the ever-proliferating number of relationships between the Trumpians and the Russians, even if, bafflingly, special counsel Robert Mueller, who unearthed so many of them, supposedly did. (And we pause here to observe that, in these first few days of shocked reaction to the hands-off conclusions attributed to the Mueller report, what is being reacted to is William Barr’s summary of that report, an interpretation of its contents by an attorney general hired by Trump, in effect, to serve as the personal presidential lawyer that Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first AG, declined to be.)

Michael Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, did have conversations with Russian officials, which he later lied about, promising them relief from sanctions properly applied by former President Barack Obama. He pleaded guilty.

Earlier, Trump’s most intimate campaign assistants, including a son, a son-in-law, and his campaign manager Paul Manafort, took a meeting — in Trump Tower in New York, no less — with Russian emissaries who promised them help with the campaign and dirt on Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Even earlier than that, Manafort had agreed to share the campaign’s polling information with a Russian oligarch close to Putin, and presumably close also to the cyber-sabotage being organized and conducted by Russians, a dozen of whom would go on to be indicted at Mueller’s behest.

It goes on and on, the litany of relationships and the network of lies told in both countries to conceal them. In more recent weeks we have learned about Trump’s hopes for an extravagant payoff from Putin via the Russian dictator’s approval of a Trump Tower to be built in Moscow.

We have all been lessoned as to the fact that the word “collusion,” indicating an intimate working relationship, is not a legal term. Fine, we accept it for what it is, an indication of an intimate working relationship. And everything we have just described, along with much more that we don’t have space for here, is collusion on the face of it. We — and others in the media — have nothing to apologize for in having pointed this out. Let the American people know the truth, one way or the other. Release the Mueller report.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Trump Lite: Governor Bill Lee’s State of the State Address

So what to make of our newly elected governor’s State of the State message, delivered Monday night?

Governor Lee

The case could be made that it was Trumpism, put forth via good manners and a likeable disposition. What else could be made of Lee’s “unapologetic” vow to propagate the doctrine of “American exceptionalism?” Or his masking a call for compulsory teaching of unbridled capitalism in Tennessee schools as “civics”? Or as a corollary to this curriculum, his endorsement of pedagogical hunt-and-destroy missions against “socialism,” as if economic policies adopted in some moderate measure by virtually every country allied to America — and in minute quantities in various eras of American government — amount to some pernicious form of enemy infiltration, needful of extirpation.

Does he not realize that the education vouchers he disguises as “education savings accounts” are the same sour spinach that most good Republicans in the suburbs of Shelby County recognize as serious threats to the health of the municipal public school systems they now willingly spend tax money on? As for his evangelism on behalf of charter schools, these were regarded as subversive of education by the self-same suburbanites who controlled the old, pre-merger Shelby County Schools system.

The weakest part of the State of the State, and the part to which Lee offered only minimal, even desultory attention, was health care. A key portion of that — the key portion in that it indicates the way in which the professed opponents of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act beg the question — was this line: “Another way to lower health care cost is to combat Medicaid fraud.”

This is, of course, the usual right-wing delusion — expressed most bigly by the current president — that all governmental problems stem from “waste and abuse” and all can be solved by curbing them. It is a belief, contrary not only to common sense but to all practical experience, that the administration of public affairs is really only a matter of working around the edges, of sealing the leaks caused by big-government wastrels.

Oh, and there’s this: “We will also be exploring ways to build off the important efforts of the Trump administration to promote price transparency.” The governor would be well advised not to hold his breath waiting to see such efforts become real. We would suggest that they will appear about the same time as does the “great” replacement for “Obamacare” that Trump once promised would cover “everybody.”

Never mind that the number of Tennessee hospitals closed  for lack of funding is now in the double digits. Easy to remedy, says Lee: “Despite the closure of rural hospitals across the state and country, there are many opportunities to transform care in these communities through smart reforms, increased innovation, and a new business model.”

To be sure, Lee offered some encouragingly salvific rhetoric about easing the re-entry of released prisoners into society and making expungement of nonviolent criminal records less expensive and troublesome.

There were places in Governor Lee’s address that contained good sense. If we have emphasized the less salutary moments here, it is out of simple caution.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Small Steps Toward Progress in Nashville

What is it they say? Two steps forward and one step backward? That’s sometimes cited as a formula for the pace of social and governmental advance in this country.

And in this state, for that matter. Those who followed the moves of the Tennessee state government in the wake of last year’s election can certainly see the formula at work. Multiple bills to legalize medical marijuana in the state, one way or the other, have been introduced in the General Assembly, and, while opposition remains and none of the bills are guaranteed to pass, all of them have received serious consideration on the front end.

Governor Bill Lee

Count that as a plus, maybe one of two whole steps. On Capitol Hill in Nashville, the air has cleared to the point, for that matter, that the subject of recreational marijuana can be joked about by members of the legislative leadership, as happened in a recent session of the Senate brass with the press when a caucus chair had to endure teasing by his peers when he claimed that he knew no pot-smokers in his county.

But while legislative attitudes have relaxed on that issue, they have firmed up on another one that seemed to have been given a decent funeral only last year. This is the matter of private school vouchers — or, as newly configured, “education savings accounts.” State Senator Brian Kelsey introduced voucher legislation for something like 16 straight years before opting not to do so last year, perhaps because of feedback from his East Shelby County constituents, many of whom now see vouchers as a threat to the municipal school districts they are paying tax money to maintain. But new Governor Bill Lee likes the idea of what he calls school “choice,” and so does Speaker of the House Glen Casada, who, like Lee, hails from Williamson County, a posh Nashville suburb where the idea of privatizing things traditionally part of the governmental sphere is regarded with equanimity.

So maybe at least one step back. (That could turn into multiple steps if any of the education bills dealing with “choice” gets some traction.) The real advance in this year’s session of the legislature is happening in the domain of civil justice, where — as was noted in a recent Flyer cover story — there have been a plethora of bills with bipartisan support seeking to minimize or ameliorate criminal incarceration and to ease the re-entry of convicted felons into society once they have completed their sentences in a satisfactory manner. Criminal justice reform has always been a concern of the political left. That politicians of the right are now also aboard the reform bandwagon is a genuine step forward. Speculations as to their motivations range from the idea that cost-effectiveness comes with reform, to the fact that welcome additions to the labor force are thereby made possible.

In any case, the partisan nature of support for criminal justice reform is one gift horse that should not be looked in the mouth. This is progress, pure and simple, and only the most flagrant kinds of failure could set it back.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Electrolux Deal: Time to Rethink the Industrial-Development Process

The catastrophic news late last week of the imminent closing of the Electrolux plant at Pidgeon Industrial Park underscored the importance of long-overdue efforts currently underway to examine the incentives policies employed locally to recruit industry and, more generally, to reform the industrial development process.

It was not even a decade ago that the announcement was made, in mid-December 2010 at a gala year-end Chamber of Commerce banquet at the Peabody, that the giant Swedish appliance manufacturer would be building a 700,000-square-foot installation on Presidents Island. Numerous luminaries were present, including Electrolux executives, Mayors A C Wharton and Mark Luttrell of Memphis and Shelby County, respectively, and then-Governor Phil Bredesen.

Bredesen said the enterprise would represent a $190-million investment and would bring some 1,200 jobs, in addition to supplier jobs and other ancillary benefits. The facts, as things turned out, were a little different: The supplier jobs never really developed; the ancillary benefits remained theoretical; the job numbers totaled out at 1,100 and had subsided to roughly half that number at the time of last week’s announcement; and only the $190-million investment turned out to be entirely real.

Except that $190 million was the amount paid out by local and state taxpayers, not a measure of bounty to be received by the local economy. And, most worrisome of all, there was no “clawback” provision in the contract with Electrolux mandating that the company would be liable to refund any of this investment in the case of any default in its commitment to Memphis, Shelby County, and Tennessee, all of whom played the role of marks in this one-sided transaction. All that Electrolux had consented to do by way of recompense is to pay the standard tax rate, deferred to this point, for the remaining year or so the plant will be doing business in Shelby County.

How could such a deal have been made? To be sure, all the governmental principals had reasons. A basic fact of life for an elected official is the need to demonstrate results. The two mayors were facing elections, the exiting Bredesen was understandably eager to crown his gubernatorial legacy, and for the then-incoming Governor-elect Bill Haslam, who gave the project his approval, it no doubt had the looks of a godsend on a platter.

For current Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who was a member of the city council that gave the deal its blessing, it must look now like a joke at his expense. The Electrolux deal was not of his making, but it is a setback that may count against him in his reelection campaign. It is not to his advantage that his own explanations for the debacle dovetail with the company’s: a troubled economy, blowback from Trump tariffs, the going belly-up of Electrolux super-customer Sears.

All of that may be so, but none of it explains the embarrassing and costly predicament facing Memphis and Shelby County now. The fact is, our civic guardians undertook an enormous gamble without elementary protection. They bet on the come — and it came and went.

Any valid reform of our industrial recruitment process must include safeguards against any possible recurrence of this disastrous deal.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Grading Government on the Curve

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It is probably too early to give out report cards on our various branches of government, but before we move deeper into what could turn out to be a crucial year, a little preliminary judgmentalism might serve a constructive purpose.

Justin Fox Burks

Lee Harris

To start with the national government: Now, that is an unruly classroom. As a collective institution, it gets an Incomplete, and that’s grading charitably. The president, Donald Trump, gets an F, and that, too, is almost an act of charity. It almost implies that Trump is trying to succeed at something. There’s no question that the president has failed singly — to articulate and carry out a coherent, productive theme of government, as well as to accomplish any of his sundry private goals, notorious among which is his insistence on building a wall on our southern border. One of the first things most of us learned in school was the folly of the Great Wall of China. At enormous expense, an impenetrable barrier was erected across that Asian nation’s northern frontier, preventing potentially troublesome access from without but also dooming a once thriving kingdom to hundreds of years of isolation and stagnation from which it is only now recovering. Trump would have us repeat that doomed experiment. Meanwhile, he is failing at various other assignments and seems not to know the meaning of homework.

On the score of conduct, he also fails at working and playing with others — having made a mess of our relations with long and trusted allies and simultaneously permitting — or inviting — outside bullies of his acquaintance to nose into our classroom and creating enough mayhem of his own to shut things down altogether. All in all, some form of expulsion may be the only option here.

At the level of state government, we’ve just begun what amounts to a new semester, and from the looks of things [see cover story], the various students involved in the  process seem entitled, at the very least, to an A for effort.

We have a city council that is just getting reorganized after several of its members transferred to other institutions. The reconstituted group is about to undergo crucial exams in the form of an election year, as is Mayor Strickland, whose authority to lead the body is about to be tested as well. The final grades here will come decisively this fall.

County government is off in a brand new direction under the tutelage of a new mayor, Lee Harris, who is proposing what amounts to a new curriculum based on re-evaluating the nature of justice. So far the body of commissioners he’s working with seem inclined to follow his example and are working in harness, keenly exploring the new group project. This effort, too, needs some additional time for evaluation, but we are impressed so far.

Government is an inexact science, and opinions about it are famously subjective. All grading is, more or less, on the curve of our relatively modest expectations. We will periodically  look in on the various branches of government in this space and let you know what progress, if any, is being made.