Tag: Crime

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Fly on the Wall

The Recipe

From The Healthy Memphis Blog: “If Santa left a pet hamster under your Christmas tree, you might want to know … pet rodents, including hamsters, are an underappreciated source of salmonella infections in humans.” The HMB failed to report that hamsters should never be served raw or rare and should be cooked until the internal temperature is at least 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Serve with pesto or a nice chimichurri sauce.

Headline of the Week

After reading The Commercial Appeal article about Michael Frick, recently named market president for Bank of America in Memphis, it became clear that the 48-year-old banker was indeed a rising star in the industry. And yet, “Frick A Rising Star in Banking” reads a little too much like a euphemistic personal ad.

King’s Crown

According to WHBQ, the family of Henry Weiss, D.D.S., will auction off a model of Elvis Presley’s teeth and a crown made especially for Presley. Let’s all hope and pray the King didn’t have a proctologist.

Headline of the Week II

A clever headline can be a thing of beauty, but who at the Memphis Daily News thought it was a good idea to title a brief about the Memphis Area Limb Loss Support Group, “Out on a Limb”? At least there was no mention of a “hoppin’ good time.”


Innocent!

Your Pesky Fly would like to thank everyone for their concern and for all the offers of cake, cookies, and conjugal visits. But when the CA reported that “Authorities have identified Christopher Davis, 20, of Memphis, as the alleged robber who was shot while trying to rip off an armored car,” it wasn’t me. Still, if any of those offers still stand, I do hate to see a good cookie go to waste.

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Vital Signs

In a world of rankings, performance measures, and accountability standards, Memphis doesn’t always look good. Last fall, an FBI report said that Memphis was second in the nation in terms of violent crimes. Homes here are foreclosed at 2.5 times the national average. And I’m sure that if there was a ranking of cities with the most corrupt politicians, we’d make that list, too.

But CityVitals, a recent report from CEOs for Cities — a group headed by Memphis native Carol Coletta — puts the city in new perspective.

The study looks at a variety of (somewhat unexpected) factors such as self-employment, wireless Internet access, transit use, foreign travel, and how many people vote and uses those to measure how cities perform in four key areas: talent, innovation, connections, and distinctiveness.

“One single measure tells you so very little,” says Coletta. “It doesn’t tell you that there are ways that cities with certain demographics or certain geography win or lose. That’s the thing I like about this. It has a wide-ranging set of measures to help cities understand the things that are their strengths and where they need to work on things.”

In fact, the study reports that “one key insight from our work is that there is no single recipe for metropolitan success.” But even though there’s no one answer, Memphis doesn’t really shine in the study. Overall, the metropolitan area scored low in categories relating to talent, innovation, and connections.

“We ‘score well’ on distinctiveness,” says Coletta. “The reason is pretty clear: Our population is very different from populations elsewhere.”

If all the world is like high school, Memphis wouldn’t be a “brain” — only 26. 3 percent of the metro population 25 years old and older have a four-year college degree — or one of the “artsy” kids because we’re 47th on the list of cities with the most creative professionals. It wouldn’t be one of the popular people: The ratio of people attending cultural events to those regularly sitting at home and watching cable is slightly greater than 1 in 5. Actually, Memphis’ highest ranking — at number 19 — was on what the study wonkily calls the “Weirdness Index,” a measure of how the metro area’s 10 most distinctive consumer behaviors differed from those of the rest of the country.

In other words, we’re Napoleon Dynamite.

If you’ve seen the DVD or the T-shirts, the watches, the calendars, you know that Napoleon Dynamite sells.

“We are distinctive demographically. Therefore, we’re distinctive in terms of consumer behavior,” says Coletta. “This gives us an interesting opportunity to capitalize on.”

The study sites the case of a Eugene, Oregon, company that began because a group of people in that city took up jogging before anybody else did. The company began to sell imported sneakers.

“The result of that different consumer behavior lead to Nike, Portland’s only Fortune 500 company,” says Coletta. “The result of distinctive behavior is that you can recognize certain consumer behaviors other places might not.”

There are causes for concern in the study. Connectivity is one of the report’s key themes: “Cities thrive as places where people can easily interact and connect” both in the “interaction of local residents and the easy connections to the rest of the world.”

“On the one hand,” says Coletta, “we’re as connected as a city can be,” because of FedEx’s global headquarters. But while we might be connected by cargo, we seem to be trying to stay as separate as humanly possible.

Under the heading of “economic integration,” the study looked at what percentage of the population would have to move to distribute high-income and low-income households equally. Of the 50 metropolitan areas the report studied, Memphis had the greatest amount of separation between where rich people live and where poor people live.

“Previous research has shown that physical isolation of minorities is not just bad for minorities but bad for the entire economy. You don’t have to be motivated by a sense to do good to want to economically integrate,” says Coletta.

Unlike a number that says the city has more than its share of violent crime or that its residents are unnaturally obese, the study takes the city’s collective pulse.

“It’s really easy to get defensive about numbers like this. It’s easy for me to get defensive,” says Coletta. “I don’t want my hometown to show up number 48th or 50th on anything. If we don’t resist it, but learn from it, I think it’s a piece of work that can strengthen the city.”

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Little G’s

About 10 years ago, gangs in Shelby County were confined to impoverished communities and their members were mostly young, African-American men from broken homes. These days, that isn’t the case.

“There’s no place left in Shelby County where we don’t have gang members,” says Reggie Henderson, chief prosecutor in the district attorney’s gang and narcotics unit. “I prosecute kids who come from wealthy families where both the mother and father have goods jobs and nice homes. Some gangs that were traditionally African American have white members now. All the old restrictions are gone.”

Law enforcement officials in Memphis say gang numbers are on the rise, although there is no comprehensive research on exactly how many gang members live in the area. As part of the Operation Safe Community plan unveiled earlier this month, the U.S. Attorney’s office will lead an effort to answer that question.

But Shelby County district attorney Bill Gibbons estimates that there are about 15,000 gang members in Memphis. Gibbons keeps a database of known gang members — those who admit membership after being arrested — and there are approximately 8,000 individuals on that list alone.

“We have about 5,000 hardcore gang members whose day-to-day lives focus on gang activity,” says Gibbons. “Then we have another 5,000 who are active in gangs but may also have jobs or go to college. Then we have another 5,000 that we call ‘wannabes.’ They’re 12- to 14-year-olds seeking gang affiliation.”

If Gibbons’ numbers are accurate, 1.6 percent of the county’s 900,000 residents are involved in a gang. And rising gang affiliation may be behind a recent spike in violent crime. From 2004 to 2005, the number of reported violent crimes involving three or more suspects — an indication of gang activity — increased by 38 percent.

Not only is gang affiliation on the rise, but members are targeting younger children in their recruiting efforts.

“Our greatest concern should be that recruiting of new gang members is occurring in elementary and middle school,” says Mike Heidingsfield, director of the Memphis/Shelby County Crime Commission. “From the media, we get a sense that [gang members] are young men in their early 20s, but it begins long before that. Schools are the single biggest center for gang recruitment.”

Gibbons says older gang members wait until school lets out, and then they talk to the kids in the time before their parents come home from work.

Henderson says there are over 100 active gangs in Memphis, but many of them are neighborhood sects of nationally affiliated gangs, such as the Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples, Crips, and Bloods. Unlike in most major cities, however, gangs in Memphis do not have a problem working together to make the local drug and sex trades more profitable. In August, the Memphis Police Department raided seven drug houses on Given Avenue in Binghamton. Police director Larry Godwin said that the illegal activity in the neighborhood involved Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples working together.

“Money seems to bring people together in Memphis,” says Henderson. “If there’s something to be gained, they can get along with each other.”

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Price Check

An illegal gun on the black market … $500. One small rock of crack cocaine … $20. Price of fighting such crime under the new city/county Operation Safe Community crime plan … priceless. At least for now.

Last week, city and county leaders unveiled an elaborate crime-fighting plan to make Memphis the safest metropolitan area in the country by 2011. But, with almost 30 agencies involved, the plan does not yet have a cost attached to it.

Components of the plan include hiring more police officers and prosecutors, upgrading law enforcement technology, designing a gang strategy, expanding offender re-entry programs, and toughening state gun laws.

“It’s a huge undertaking,” said Memphis police director Larry Godwin. “It’s definitely not something one police department can do. It’s going to be really costly. But when it comes together, you’ll see an impact on the neighborhoods.”

The plan includes establishing a Memphis City Schools (MCS) police force and school-based probation counselors. In addition, Shelby County Schools (SCS) hope to provide mental-health services to some students, and the district attorney’s office will be expanding a mentor-based pilot program aimed at reducing school truancy.

That’s only a sampling of the strategies outlined in the large-scale plan, spearheaded by local CEO group Memphis Tomorrow.

When contacted, a representative from Memphis Tomorrow told the Flyer that they did not have an estimated cost for the safe-community plan yet. In an attempt to calculate the overall cost, the Flyer requested budget information from the individual agencies.

Only five of the 12 lead agencies — MPD, the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office, Juvenile Court, Shelby County government, and the Family Safety Center — had detailed budgets. Based on those responses alone, the plan comes to $72 million for its first year. The cost in additional years may be lower due to one-time start-up costs.

The $72 million accounts for hiring more Memphis police officers, toughening state gun laws, hiring more prosecutors, expanding the drug court and the D.A.’s mentor-based truancy program, expanding juvenile and adult offender re-entry programs, and establishing a Family Safety Center for domestic violence victims. The money would come from a combination of local, state, and federal public and private sources.

The number does not include the cost of upgrading police technology, strengthening law enforcement partnerships, developing a gang strategy, enacting a better code enforcement system for dealing with problem properties or launching a second “Gun Crime Is Jail Time” media campaign.

Neither MCS nor SCS officials knew the budget for their components of the plan. A representative from the JustCare 180° program, which will assign intervention services to the 12,500 youth coming through Juvenile Court every year, told the Flyer that its budget should be complete in 30 to 60 days.

Though the program will greatly exceed $72 million, that figure is lower than the $131 million combined annual total of incarceration costs at the Shelby County jail and the corrections center.

“As taxpayers, we all want a safer community. We all want better educated children,” said Jeune Wood with the Shelby County Juvenile Court. “All these quality-of-life issues can be obtained but not on the cheap.”

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Registration Required

Whitehaven resident Louis Sanders was charged with sexual battery in 1998, and though he served his time for that charge, he was back in jail last week for failing to sign up with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s sex-offender registry.

Sanders and 261 others in West Tennessee were arrested during Operation FALCON III, a nationwide fugitive search conducted by the U.S. Marshals Service last month. Though the marshals served outstanding warrants for crimes ranging from homicide to burglary, the main focus of FALCON III targeted sex offenders who were not registered.

Of the 10,773 arrests nationwide, over 1,600 were unregistered sex offenders. And officers in West Tennessee arrested 103 sex offenders — more than any other district.

“The fact that we were number one doesn’t mean we have more sex offenders. It just means we were more aggressive,” said David Jolley, U.S. Marshal for the Western District of Tennessee.

Operation FALCON III was fueled by the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in July. The act makes it a federal felony for sex offenders to move to a new state without registering in that state. The charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

“Say a guy moves from Tennessee to Missouri. Well, Missouri doesn’t know that he was a sex offender in Tennessee,” said Don Hankinson, public information officer for the U.S. Marshals office in the Western District of Tennessee. “The goal was to make sure these people stay registered so states would know where they are.”

However, most of the sex-offender-registration arrests in West Tennessee involved people who have remained in the area but failed to re-register from year to year or those who had failed to register a new address when moving within the state. Those charges do not fall under the Adam Walsh Act.

A week after the operation ended, a Flyer investigation of the online state offender database revealed that a number of offenders arrested for not registering were still missing from the database.

“If you’re out there and you’re unregistered, you’d better get back there and do it,” says Hankinson. “People demand to know where you’re at and they’re going to keep up with you. It’s better to register every year than have a warrant come out for you.”

But not everyone supports the statewide database. Nashville attorney Brent Horst represents sex offenders across the state and says the registry is unfair in some circumstances, such as in the case of statutory rape. He also worries that some offenders may be wrongfully convicted of a sex crime they didn’t commit, yet remain on the list for life.

“You’ve got some guy and a 12-year-old girl has accused him of rape, but he’s adamant that he didn’t do it,” said Horst. “But the state says, you can go to trial and face 20 years, or you can take probation. Rather than roll the dice and risk losing the trial, he chooses probation. And then he’s hit with these registration laws. Painting everyone with the same brush is really unjust.”

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Opinion

Dubious Distinction

St. Louis had only one weekend to enjoy its World Series championship before a survey came out naming it the most dangerous city in the United States.

Memphis knows the feeling. This summer, the Memphis metro area (including parts of Arkansas and Mississippi) was ranked the second-most crime-ridden among the 100 largest metro areas in the country, based on FBI crime reports. And, based on instances per 100,000 population, it was number one for burglary and robbery and number two for murder behind New Orleans.

People who study crime patterns — including Michael Heidingsfield and Tom Kirby at the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, Lieutenant Joe Scott at the Memphis Police Department, and the FBI — agree that city comparisons are badly flawed because of demographic differences. (The city of St. Louis, for example, includes only one-fourth the population of St. Louis County.) But they admit that they’re as inevitable as football rankings and can’t be ignored in a media age that bombards readers, viewers, and listeners with a steady diet of “best and worst” lists. And crime rankings are an illusion with a powerful impact. They clearly influenced Mayor Willie Herenton to ask for more cops and are driving people to leave Memphis.

The MPD and the crime commission look at trends within Memphis. Maps and trends tell stories. But a general statement about an increase or decrease in crime is meaningless. There are four main categories of personal crime (murder, rape, robbery, and assault) and three categories of property crime (burglary, theft, and auto theft).

Murder gets the most publicity, but your chances of being murdered by a stranger are miniscule. Over the last 15 years, the mean number of murders in Memphis was 160 a year, and Scott thinks Memphis, now at 137, will be below that in 2006. Of the 128 murders this year in which the perpetrator has been identified, 99 were black on black. In 71 percent of murders, victims knew their killers. There were 137 murders in all of 2005, 105 in 2004, and 213 in 1993.

“In the 1990s, we were a much more violent city,” says Scott.

Then there’s the problem of sample bias. What about gunmen who wound their victims, shoot and miss, or threaten someone but don’t pull the trigger? There is no single category for that, although the difference between a shooting and a murder is usually a quarter of an inch, as New York City police commissioner William Bratton notes in his book Turnaround.

Some bad news: The rate for aggravated assault has nearly doubled in 10 years and soared more than 30 percent last year alone. Larceny-theft has trended upward for 10 years. And the burglary rate is consistently one of the highest in the country. Overall, the FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) count of violent crimes for Memphis was up 25 percent in 2005 and, at the current pace, will be up about 3 or 4 percent this year.

Some good news: MPD clears 55 percent of felony assaults, a number Scott calls “amazing.” Burglary was down in the month of October compared to the first nine months of 2006. Car theft is down 15 percent this year because police busted some chop shops and manufacturers have made cars harder to steal. And forcible rape has dropped more than 60 percent in 10 years, although the crime commission says reporting procedures account for some of that.

“Over the last three months, the things we implemented have helped,” said Scott. “I think Blue Crush is slowly starting to make some type of difference.”

Like football rankings, crime stats can be maddeningly complex. The Survey That Slimed St. Louis, aka the Morgan Quitno Awards, is compiled by a private research and publishing company. The Shelby County district attorney general’s annual report looks at both Memphis and Shelby County. The UCR looks at metro areas. Television is preoccupied with the crime of the day. The crime commission would seem well-suited to bring some clarification to this, along with some policy recommendations.

Shoot the messenger if you like, or pick a different one, but the final measure of how dangerous a place Memphis is probably depends on your personal experience.

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Virtual Trip

I’m sitting on a public bus directly behind an overweight, aging driver. My goal is to get a prescription filled at the neighborhood pharmacy. Yet it seems to be taking forever to get there, and the noise on the bus is unbearable.

Kids are screaming and laughing. People are talking loudly, their voices overlapping in a maddening roar. It seems as if they’re shouting directly into my ears. I look up at the rearview mirror, and the bus driver begins talking to me in demonic whispers.

I notice that the passengers’ faces seem to change. One minute a little girl is sitting behind me, and then she morphs into a nurse. Then, like a weird acid trip, the bus becomes an ambulance, and I’m alone with the nurse.

“How are you feeling? Are you okay?” asks the nurse, as she looks at me quizzically. I don’t answer, and the ambulance becomes a bus once again.

Suddenly, the real world chimes in as Tony Mitchell asks me to remove my goggles and headphones.

“Do you see what it’s like for a schizophrenic? Can you understand what goes on in their minds?” asks Mitchell, the district manager for Janssen Pharmaceutical, the company behind Virtual Hallucinations Software.

I had been watching a short virtual-reality video intended to teach police crisis officers what it’s like to be schizophrenic, a mental illness marked by distorted thinking and hallucinations. The presentation is viewed through a headset with goggles and headphones attached to a laptop.

About 30 local officers viewed the video as part of training for the Memphis Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), a special police unit developed in 1988 to deal with mentally ill people.

This presentation marks the first time CIT officers have had any sort of virtual-reality training.

“These guys may have heard stories about people hearing voices in their heads, but this puts a whole new perspective on schizophrenia,” says Sam Cochran, who heads the CIT program. “Now officers can say, I know that what you see and hear is real to you.”

Before, officers being trained to deal with schizophrenia would sit in a chair with their eyes closed while three or four of their colleagues would chatter incessantly in their ears.

Janssen developed the video with the help of a schizophrenic who had suffered from the disease for 30 years. Mitchell says schizophrenics have a hard time distinguishing the voices in their heads from voices in the real world. Thus, they have a harder time following orders when confronted with a police scenario.

“I once had to deal with a guy in a delusional state. He was chasing people with a knife, and he didn’t know what was real,” says new CIT officer M.L. Clark, after viewing the presentation. “Now that I’ve seen this, I can sort of imagine what was going on in his head.”

The Memphis CIT was the first such unit in the U.S., and since its formation, other police departments around the country have followed suit in developing their own teams.

Officers from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, were at the training, in hopes of forming a similar CIT team there. This week, officers from New Jersey and Montana will also be in town studying the Memphis model.

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Opinion

Criminal Confusion

In addition to the crime problem, the police and sheriff’s department have a trust problem and a communication problem.

Victims can’t get their 911 calls answered or routed promptly. Community watchdogs can’t get officers to respond to known trouble spots. Prosecutors can’t lock up all the violent criminals they convict. City Council members don’t necessarily believe additional cops would be deployed wisely and well, and they’re reluctant to raise property taxes to pay for them. And the federal investigation of police corruption, Operation Tarnished Blue, has taken a toll on public confidence.

These are the messages that come out of community forums, press conferences, and interviews with elected officials and crime experts. To use a football analogy, Mayor Willie Herenton and Police Director Larry Godwin are backed up inside their 20-yard line as they push for 650 more officers over the next three years and a property tax increase of at least 50 cents to pay for them.

A community forum hosted by councilwoman Carol Chumney last week in East Memphis produced these comments:

From a neighborhood leader, speaking to a police captain: “What can we do if we know there’s a problem and we can’t get you?”

From Sheriff Mark Luttrell on the 911 problem: “Bartlett, Memphis, and Shelby County each have separate 911 systems. Consolidating it is expensive. It will be two years until it will happen.”

From Chumney: “At a Crime Commission meeting two months ago, Director Godwin told me point-blank they did not need more officers.”

From Shelby County prosecutor Tom Henderson: “We [Tennessee] have some of the weakest gun laws in the United States. Our laws suck.”

From former Police Director Buddy Chapman, now head of Crime Stoppers: “A community suffers only as much crime as it is willing to.”

A police captain and an inspector from Central Precinct listened and responded for nearly three hours, as did Chumney, Luttrell, Henderson, and Chapman. But there was no consensus on what works to reduce crime and what should be done.

Chumney, a likely candidate for mayor in 2007, couldn’t resist the temptation to lecture Herenton and Godwin, who, not surprisingly, had declined her invitation to attend the event. She thinks the police department’s problem is management more than manpower. It’s a fact that Godwin has done a complete turnabout on overtime and more cops this year, and Herenton’s plan looked slapdash. His cost numbers, for example, are based on 500 cops, but he asked for 650. But Chumney’s political digs aren’t helping. The issue isn’t who was first; it’s what to do now.

Chapman’s comment seemed to blame the victims. Was he suggesting Memphians are apathetic? That they should arm themselves? Move away? Spring for 650 more cops? Hire 650 more teachers instead? He didn’t say.

Henderson, when pressed, said Memphis needs a lot more cops. But the veteran prosecutor also noted that his office handled 100,000 cases last year. Even with tougher laws and stiffer sentences, locking up all the bad guys would require another jail.

The one we have processed 53,000 people last year. Luttrell said he would ask for 35 to 40 more deputies in his next budget because calls for service are up. But when he fielded a question about why crime is currently on the rise, he lapsed into banalities about social inequities. Everyone knows Memphis has poverty, gangs, and injustice. The question is why people in the same circumstances decide to start or stop committing crimes. The “broken windows” approach to crime epidemics says that context matters and that smart policing and swift prosecution can significantly influence behavior.

The Memphis Police Department answered 540,000 service calls during the first eight months of 2006. Godwin has said the manpower shortage is so severe that lieutenants are responding to calls because no officers are available.

Asked about the proposed 650 new cops, Michael Heidingsfield, president of the Memphis Shelby County Crime Commission, said, “It certainly can’t hurt, as long as they’re deployed properly. But the number of police is never the long-term solution.” He favors getting rid of the residency requirement but opposes relaxing the education standard. Corruption is a confidence killer, he said, and without public confidence “the cause is lost.”

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Juvenile Pall

At a glance, the charges against Alfredo Pavon and Abraham Nunes make them look like seasoned criminals: four counts of aggravated assault and four counts of attempted first-degree murder each.

Pavon and Nunes are accused of firing shots at four teenagers — wounding one — on September 27th near Kimball and Merrycrest. And at 17 years old, they are two of the most recent examples of juveniles involved in serious crimes.

So far this year, 143 adolescents have been transferred to Criminal Court to be tried as adults. Last year, 172 adolescents in total were tried as adults. The year before, 97 adolescents were. The numbers reflect an upward trend in juveniles committing serious crimes.

“We’re seeing a breakdown in parental oversight, and in many cases, the parents are involved in criminal activity themselves,” says Sheriff Mark Luttrell. “There’s a social web that’s woven in a family, and if you miss that, you have a tendency to run unfettered. That causes these kids to gravitate towards criminal activity.”

The District Attorney’s 2005 annual report, released last week, shows an almost 40 percent increase from 2004 to 2005 in adolescents prosecuted for “major violent crimes.” Those crimes include murder, rape, aggravated robbery, carjacking, and aggravated assault.

In 2005, 23 young people were prosecuted for first-degree murder, while only one was tried for that crime in 2003 and seven in 2004.

“We’re seeing a more aggressive effort on the part of gangs to recruit at the middle school level,” says District Attorney Bill Gibbons. “When [children are] recruited, they have to show their worth by committing violent crime.”

Gibbons estimates that many of these youngsters are between 14 and 15 years old. While gangs used to have an understanding that gang business was to be conducted outside of schools, he says, they’ve begun operating while school is in session.

“There’s less parental or adult pro-social engagement, so kids are just making it up,” says Leon Caldwell, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Memphis. “They’re all saying, I just want to belong to something. They’re getting bolder and brasher and that speaks to the level of emotional distress these kids are exhibiting.”

Though the numbers are increasing, they’re still lower than those exhibited in 1996, the highest year for juvenile incidents in recent decades. Comparing 1996 to 2005, there was an overall 35 percent decrease in the number of juveniles prosecuted for major violent crimes.

Luttrell says juvenile crime began to decrease in 1997, and the numbers didn’t begin to rise again until 2004. The sheriff’s office has begun training school teachers and resource officers in how to identify certain criminal characteristics in students.

“We’re going to every middle school and talking to student assemblies about the repercussions of violent crime,” said Gibbons. “We want to reduce the number of young people who want to commit violent crimes in the first place.”

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Opinion

2007: The Tipping Point

By now most everyone is familiar with the term “tipping point” thanks to the bestselling book by Malcolm Gladwell about how little things can make a big difference.

At a time when Memphis is being called the second-most violent urban area in America, when a fire has turned the next big downtown thing into the next bad downtown thing, when the City Council has been asked to raise taxes to hire 650 more cops, and when thousands of people leave the city each year for neighboring counties, it’s reasonable to wonder if Memphis is at a tipping point.

With a year to go until the next city election, the man who will have a lot to say about that is Mayor Willie Herenton. His 16th year in office could be either his greatest or his worst. Even though he sometimes gets booed at public appearances and blasted on the radio and in letters to the editor, a longer and more balanced view of Herenton’s career suggests that he will rise to the occasion and that 2007 will see him at his best, which is better than anyone else in local politics.

Here’s why: Before the tipping point there was the “tilt factor.” In Memphis, that term was coined by former Memphis City Schools administrator O.Z. Stephens, a colleague of Herenton’s when the mayor was a teacher, principal, and superintendent. The tilt factor was the point where white-student enrollment fell off the table and a school went from mostly white or mixed to all black. Stephens put it at about 30 percent. He saw it happen dozens of times in the 1970s and ’80s, after the onset of busing and the Plan Z desegregation plan, which Stephens co-authored.

As a young superintendent, Herenton’s response to the tilt factor was to start and support the optional-schools program. Its purpose, as former Grahamwood Elementary School principal Margaret Taylor recalled last week, was “to keep all the white students from leaving the school system.” This is the same man who is now accused of driving Memphians away to DeSoto County.

Over the next 25 years, all but about 10,000 white students would leave anyway. But Herenton’s advocacy was crucial to getting the program started and defending it against opponents. His next big move as superintendent was to close 18 schools. His successors have been unable to close more than a handful of schools even though the combined enrollment (and more important, the number of graduates) of the four smallest city high schools is now less than the enrollment at either of the two largest high schools.

Herenton has said several times that more schools should be closed. He has recommended for at least 10 years full or partial city and county consolidation, with or without separate school systems. He proposed rebalancing city and county property taxes 10 years ago. He explored the sale of MLGW, whose pension obligations could one day outweigh the benefits of public ownership. All of these proposals were dropped, maybe because of Herenton and maybe because Memphis wasn’t at a tipping point.

Herenton’s crime proposals were, in part, a response to meetings with Memphis Tomorrow, an elite group of business leaders. Ken Glass, president of Memphis Tomorrow, said crime has taken on “greater urgency” and Herenton and Police Director Larry Godwin must use “known, proven ways” to fight it. The model will be New York City and the “broken windows” approach outlined in Gladwell’s book.

Herenton kept his own counsel and told the businessmen that crime was going to get worse before it gets better. He’ll need all the help he can get to sell his crime plan. By opposing a payroll tax and recommending efficiency studies but ducking consolidation, business groups have left the mayor and City Council no options besides a tax increase to pay for 650 more cops. Citing a big drop in the number of fire calls due to code improvements, some council members think fire stations can be closed to shift more money to police. But that was before last week’s rash of downtown fires.

At his best, Herenton can lead a New York-style turnaround in Memphis. At his worst, he could lose key supporters and his job.