Tag: Mayor Jim Strickland

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Editorial Opinion

Homicide Wave: Memphis is Up Against It

Apropos Memphis’ homicide wave: To put it bluntly, we are indeed up against it — the “we” including Mayor Jim Strickland, his interim Police Director Michael Rallings, the members of the Memphis City Council, and … who

else? Oh, yes, that “we” includes us, all the residents and businesses of Memphis and Shelby County, and all the tourists and other visitors who come here, drawn by the city’s legendary reputation for barbecue, boogie, and whatever else.

Specifically, count two of downtown Memphis’ foremost attractions, Beale Street and the Bass Pro Pyramid, within that group of potential victims of illegal violence — and, hey, summer, whether destined to be the long, hot version or not, hasn’t really even gotten started yet.

When Justin Welch, a distressed and/or mentally unstable 21-year-old, went on a shooting spree Saturday night, wounding innocent people in the Pinch District and Bass Pro and killing Police Officer Verdell Smith with a stolen vehicle, he put an exclamation mark on what was already an untenable situation.

Strickland must have known what he was getting into when he ran for the mayoralty, an office of responsibility that he’d had an opportunity to observe during his eight years as a city councilman. And we can only hope he knows what he’s doing now as he sets forth on what would seem to be a new course of active “partnerships” with other law-enforcement agencies: namely, the Tennessee Highway Patrol and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.

For obvious reasons, there has always been some jurisdictional cooperation between the Memphis Police Department and these and other agencies, including the Tennessee and Federal Bureau of Investigation. But this new arrangement is different; it puts a new spin on the old conundrum of whether the sum of separate parts can be greater than the whole.

We are reminded of another not-so-distant time, the late 1980s, when the “jump and grab” incursions into Memphis of the late activist Sheriff Jack Owens were regarded with a fair amount of jealousy and suspicion by the MPD and city government at large. The new combine of crime-fighting forces has, by the very fact of its being proposed, become a graphic illustration of the emergency we seem to have found ourselves in.

Simultaneous with an upsurge in homicides, surely the most chilling spectre on the public horizon, there are basic matters affecting the MPD that must be resolved. There needs to be a permanent police director, pronto. And, even though we have been assured by the wise lights in our local governments that the reductions in benefits for our police officers and other first responders were absolute fiscal necessities, we cannot regard this matter as closed. Strickland’s proposals for reactivating PST assistants  and for increasing pay and other incentives may, in fact, not be enough to offset what is clearly an understaffed protective infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Strickland is not the only public official who is on the spot; another is former district attorney and state Safety and Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons, who will shortly be assuming his new dual role of president of the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission and director of the new Public Safety Institute at the University of Memphis.  

Let’s hope Strickland is on the right track with his new crime plan, but we need as many new answers as we can come by.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Welcome Home, ServiceMaster!

On May 19th, The Memphis Flyer posted an open letter from me that challenged ServiceMaster to consider moving downtown. In that letter, I asked the company to explore more deliberate engagement in Memphis, to consider contributing to the “winning culture” that they desire instead of waiting for it to emerge or seeking it elsewhere. I suggested that by occupying or building a presence downtown, ServiceMaster could attract other businesses and assets who would be moved by their actions to reconsider downtown. In essence, I argued that the company had the power within themselves to participate in a winning culture, not by asking but by leading by example.

I urged them to think about getting involved. To be bold. To be an example. To invest in Memphis in order to get its full return.

Well, indeed they have. With the announcement last week that ServiceMaster will move approximately 1,200 company employees into the long-dormant Peabody Place, ServiceMaster has aggressively bid to put its name alongside the other great founders of and contributors to our modern downtown. Along with FexExForum, Henry Turley, Raymond James, Bass Pro, St. Jude, and countless others who have started businesses, built culture, and activated downtown, ServiceMaster will now be regarded as a significant momentum booster, a downtown patron and leader.

The decision, I assume, was not an easy one. But I applaud ServiceMaster’s vision to recognize that in order to institute change, one must initiate change. I applaud all who played a role in providing financial incentives, civic incentives, and motivational incentives. It is a testament to the drive, resources, and will of our city leaders; not just government leaders, but city leaders. Memphis is a much greater force when our resources are coalesced toward common goals.

Memphis’ Mayor Jim Strickland is concentrating on being “brilliant at the basics,” a philosophy that is, at this point, indeed right and appropriate for our city’s future. But the city government is not working in a silo; our other civic, business, and social leaders realize that we are better together and have rallied their energies toward major initiatives that require more vision, energy, and risk than any government is able to manufacture on its own. This is the energy that is necessary to fully realize the continued potential of Memphis. We are no longer a city that is satisfied with the status quo, but rather a city that has begun tasting the fruits of our successes. Now we’re hungry for more.

There will be challenges, of course, but I believe that those challenges and ServiceMaster’s response to them will yield a dynamic workforce, an enriched culture, and will provide a great return on its investment. I also believe that ServiceMaster will find its way to join the same group that helped share the Memphis vision with them and they too will communicate that vision to those in their realm of influence. With the announcement of their downtown relocation, they have effectively joined the team.

So, thank you, ServiceMaster. Thank you from all downtown and Memphis enthusiasts. Thank you from merchants and residents. We’re all grateful. And while our thanks is loud and enthusiastic, I believe the biggest thanks you will get will be in the future — from your current employees, future employees, shareholders, and all of those who have a vested interest in your success.

So to ServiceMaster, we thank you and welcome you to downtown as it is today as well as to the downtown of tomorrow.

Doug Carpenter is the founder of DCA, a creative communications consulting firm located in downtown Memphis.

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News News Blog

ServiceMaster Moves Global Headquarters to Peabody Place

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam made things official today when he announced that ServiceMaster is moving its global headquarters from East Memphis to Peabody Place in downtown Memphis. The move means approximately 1,200 employees will occupy the renovated former mall by the end of 2017.

“I’m a former mayor, I believe in cities,” Gov. Haslam said. “Cities are the heartbeat of what happens. [Memphis] is a city that, I think has, not just an incredible past with creativity coming out of its pores. But an incredible future.” 

Haslam then introduced ServiceMaster CEO Rob Gillette who said he was, “Thrilled to be joining the downtown business community,” and excited about plans to create a new technology and innovation center in the new Peabody Place location. 

ServiceMaster moved its headquarters from Downer’s Grove, Ill. to East Memphis in 2007. Earlier this year the residential and commercial service provider relaunched its corporate brand and was named one of the world’s most admired companies by Fortune magazine.

ServiceMaster Moves its Global Headquarters to Peabody Place

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Behind the Bill

CREDIT: JB

NASHVILLE — Maybe it’s because Ron Ramsey, the powerful state Senate Speaker, Lt. Governor, and presumed political careerist, chose Wednesday as his time to announce his decision to exit politics, or maybe it’s just another indication of how Memphis and its perils rate low on the Richter scale of Legislative Plaza these days. Or maybe it’s just a matter of the calendar. JB

Strickland at Shelby delegation lunch

In any case, outside of those folks who, in one sense or another, represent the sphere of Memphis and Shelby County in Nashville, the Great De-Annexation Crisis has generated very little fuss and bother at the General Assembly in Nashville.

This is despite the fact that Memphis is one of only six municipalities in Tennessee that stand to lose from the de-annexation bill that swept through the House of Representatives on Monday night and has convulsed local government — the Memphis part of it anyhow — with its implications.

It was only on behalf of Memphis that several of the Representatives elected by the city — Joe Towns, G.A. Hardaway, Raumesh Akbari and Larry Miller — and two friendly helpers — House Democratic leaders Mike Stewart of Nashville and Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley — rose on Monday night to protest HB0779/SB0749, the bill brought by two Chattanooga-area Republicans that would allow residents of areas annexed by their municipalities since 1998 to de-annex.

Other cities charged by the bill’s sponsors with “egregious” and arbitrary annexations are Chattanooga, Knoxville, Kingsport and Cornersville. Cornersille? Yes, the tiny Marshall County municipality of 1100 souls was faulted on Monday night by bill sponsor Mike Carter (R-Ooltewah) for grabbing up nine local farms in an arbitrary annexation.

The only one of 16 or so amendments introduced by opponents of the bill that was accepted by Carter was one to delete Johnson City as an offender. What that east Tennessee city had done was to voluntarily consent to the de-annexation of a community called Suncrest and thereby earn a pardon.

It would seem that Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, for whom this is about the fourth or fifth crisis to hit him unawares during his short term, is agreeable to ceding two of the most recently annexed Memphis neighborhoods — South Cordova and Southwind. He said so to the press after a Wednesday lunch meeting of the Shelby County legislative delegation at Tennessee Tower that he and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell had signed on to long before the current matter broke.

Those two de-annexations would only cost the city $5 million, Strickland said, as against the $27 million or so he estimates that de-annexations of every community absorbed by Memphis since 1998 would cost.
JB

…and wth the press afterward

The year 1998 is apparently being used as a demarcation point in the de-annexation bill because that is the year of what was supposed to be a settlement of the crisis caused by the fateful Toy Town bill of 1997. That measure, smoothed through the legislature by the late Senate Speaker John Wilder on behalf of a Fayette County client community, would have allowed communities of the most modest size to incorporate and, before it was finally declared unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court (on a caption irregularity, actually), it had already spurred dozens of would-be incorporation efforts on the borders of Memphis.

The resultant 1998 compromise bill assigned municipalities limited areas as expansion reserves and made the process of urban expansion more difficult. But that has clearly failed to appease the adversaries of urbanism, and one wonders if Strickland’s proffered sacrifice will be honored as a stopping point in a revised Senate version or serve merely to whet the appetite of the de-annexationists.

A dialogue Monday between Strickland and Rep. Curry Todd (R-Collierville), one of the more vocal advocates of de-annexation, was not promising in that regard. Todd insisted that the city, in a conference call held at some unidentified earlier point, had agreed to larger concessions, and Strickland (who would later say he had participated in no such conference call) would respond that it wasn’t so.

Beyond the offer to sign off on Southwind and South Cordova, Strickland also floated the idea of somehow  offsetting fire and police expenses and of adding utility and OPEB costs to the general obligation bonds that the bill would obligate the residents of any de-annexing area to pay out on a pro-rata basis.
JB

Germantown Mayor Palazzolo

Granted, the current situation is to the Toy Towns matter as apples are to oranges, but then Mayor Willie Herenton, for better or for worse, was less flexible on concessions by Memphis, and make of that what you will. (One historical analogy that definitely does hold is that County Mayor Luttrell, much in the manner of County Mayor Jim Rout in the Toy Towns era, professes not to be terribly troubled by developments.)

In any case, there may be beaucoup bargaining yet to come before the other legislative foot drops in a Senate vote, probably next week. For what it’s worth, Memphis Democratic Senator Reginald Tate is already showing signs of weakening in his sponsorship of the de-annexation bill under pressure from the media in exposing his legislative history.

Tate, who lost out on a vote to be Senate Democratic leader before the current session by a single vote, has in fact voted so often with Republicans, even on matters arguably counter to Memphis’ interests, that wags in  Legislative Plaza refer to his District 33 as “the Ramsey-Tate district.” JB

Curry Todd on the attack

For what it’s worth, spectators for the Monday night vote on de-annexation included a generous supply of mayors of suburban municipalities. Asked about that on Monday, Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo said his primary interest in being in town was to resist ongoing efforts to repeal the Hall Income Tax, the proceeds of which are significant add-ons to to the coffers of every municipality in Shelby County, including Memphis.

But Palazzolo acknowledged that his landlocked city would be an interested party if adjacent areas like Windyke became de-annexed in the wake of the current bill.

The question of whether and when such areas, if detached from Memphis, would be eligible for absorption by another municipality, is an intriguing one — and, oddly, several leading proponents of the bill, including Todd and Representative Mark White (R-Germantown) professed not to know what the bill provided in that regard, though House sponsor Carter dismissed the prospect of such re-annexations Monday night on the ground that the bill made them prohibitively difficult.

To say the least, there would seem to be much in the measure requiring a re-examination by all sides.

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News News Blog

State Bill Could Affect Forrest Statue Future Here

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Justin Fox Burks

The Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in Health Sciences Park

The Tennessee House of Representatives approved a bill Thursday that would prohibit the removal of markers honoring military conflicts in the state, a move that might affect the future of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in Health Sciences Park.

On a vote of 71 to 23, House members passed the Tennessee Heritage Act of 2016, which completely replaces the Tennessee Heritage Act of 2013.

The bill says “no statue, monument, memorial, nameplate, or plaque which has been erected for, or named or dedicated in honor of a military conflict that is identified in a list of conflicts in which the U.S. has participated and is located on public property, may be relocated, removed, altered, renamed, rededicated, or otherwise disturbed…”

It also says any building, park, school, or street named in honor of a historical military figure, event, organization, or unit may not be changed.

The bill explicitly defines public property to mean any property leased or owned by the state, counties, and cities.

To Nashville lawmakers, the bill would help forecast the future of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Tennessee State Capitol building.

In Memphis, the bill could help direct the next moves on a plan to, perhaps, remove the statue of Forrest from Health Sciences Park. Former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton called for the statue’s removal last year.

New Mayor Jim Strickland’s plans for the statue are not yet known. However, Strickland voted to remove the statue in August as a member of the Memphis City Council. A spokesman in Strickland’s office said the mayor had no comment on the new bill. 

In debate on the bill Tuesday, Nashville Representative Harold Love, an African American AME pastor, urged lawmakers to see some of the state’s markers from another person’s point of view.

Love

“Sometimes in life, we have to do the hard thing that shows we have moved on and we have healed,” Love said. “It’s one thing to look at something on a personal level and then to step back and look at it again from someone else’s point of view.”

The bill’s House sponsor Steve McDaniel (R-Parkers Crossroads) said the bill will help guide the state “so we don’t have knee-jerk reactions to [events] across this country.”

McDaniel

The bill does lay out a process for government agencies to get a waiver for removal from the Tennessee Historical Commission. The new rules update the old rules on the process by mandating public notice of the waiver request and making hearings on requests open.

Those waiver requests would have to get a two-thirds majority by the historical commission for approval.

The Tennessee Senate will review the matter in a meeting Tuesday.  

Categories
Editorial Opinion

A Body-Cam Replay

As we know all too well, it isn’t just in other cities — Baltimore, Ferguson, Milwaukee — or in the scenarios of a proliferating number of TV cop shows, that the issue of police/community relations is on the front burner

(in every sense of that metaphor). Memphis has had the sad experience, within the last year, of prominent cases involving life-threatening and even life-ending violence by citizens against police and the converse, of police against citizens. And it scarcely reduces the anxieties that have been aroused that these instances, as has been the case elsewhere, are not simple cases of black versus white. There has arisen a fundamental distrust between the supposed guardians of civic law and order and the host population which, in theory, is being protected by the police. As it happens, blacks are likely to be on both sides of the dividing line between victims and perps, and so are whites.

Further complicating the issue is the increasing danger of organized terrorist activity, which, by its very nature, can happen anywhere — not just in Paris or San Bernardino. And where it happens, these outbreaks clearly require the existence of police responders — SWAT teams or the equivalent — capable of suppressing them. That need runs directly counter to an argument, equally well-reasoned, that urban police units have in our time become too militarized in equipment and attitude, and need to be reduced to a more human scale, less provocative to the communities they serve.

In short, the problem is complicated.

One of the answers that is increasingly put forward — again, here as elsewhere — is for there to be a systematic use of body cameras for police so as to provide a record of police-citizen interactions for the mutual protection of both. It is no accident that body-cam footage of a street youth’s death in Chicago, once pried loose from attempts at suppression by city authorities, turned out to incriminate the officers on the scene — and to place the mayor of that city, Rahm Emanuel, in direct jeopardy of losing his job.

But, as was reported on the Flyer‘s website Tuesday by reporter Toby Sells, there will be further delays in the city’s employment of the 1,700 or so body cameras it has acquired for the Memphis Police Department’s force of around 2,000 active officers.

Last fall, in the hurly-burly of a city mayoral campaign, the prospect of putting the cameras to immediate practical use was made to seem possible. Now, according to MPD officials, the city will have to appropriate money to hire 10 part-time video analysts to review body-cam footage before it can be made public. 

And there are likely to be even more prohibitive delays and training regimens and costs over the long haul before an effective program will be truly up and running. “We’re not there yet,” MPD interim director Michael Rallings said.

We hear that. But we would advise both the department and the Memphis City Council to act with all deliberate speed. The meter is running.

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News News Blog

Officials: MPD Body Camera Program Needs Time, Money

Rallings, McGowen, Spinosa, Ford

Memphis Police Department officials asked the Memphis City Council on Tuesday for money this fiscal year to hire video analysts they say they need to get the department’s body camera program off the ground. 

MPD told council members Tuesday that they need $109,000 to hire 10 part-time video analysts who will review body camera footage before it can be made available to the public. That figure rises to about $300,000 for the new employees next year as they are paid for a full 12 months.

Asked for a timeline on the full implementation of the body camera program, MPD interim director Michael Rallings said “we’re not there yet.” 

“We need to hire the analysts first, before we put the cart before the horse,” Rallings said.

However, he said he hoped the analysts could all be hired by April.

Doug McGowen, the city’s chief operating officer, compared Memphis to other peer cities rolling out body camera and in-car camera programs. Seattle, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Denver are all “taking a phased-in approach.”

So far, Memphis has 150 in-car cameras deployed. It now has three officers testing body cameras but has a total of about 1,700 body cameras ready to be deployed.

Seattle has deployed 18 of its 500 cameras. L.A. has deployed about 690 of its 1,500 body cameras. Milwaukee has deployed about one-tenth of its total cameras and Denver is one-fifth of the way through a full deployment of its camera program.

McGowen projected that the MPD body cameras will create about 72,000 hours of footage each month. In-car cameras in Seattle now create about 18,000 hours each month. Milwaukee projects it will create about 36,000 hours each month. McGowen said Denver has created about 6,000 hours of footage in the last 28 days.

McGowen projected it will take three hours here to fully review and redact one hour of footage from police cameras. In Seattle, where they have more stringent public records rules, the process will take 10 hours for every one hour of footage. L.A. Has not yet released any police videos. Milwaukee and Denver have not yet had any requests for videos, McGowen said.

Cost projections to store the Memphis videos will be about $4.5 million in the next five years, McGowen said. That price shoots up to $10 million with the full deployment of all cameras. The figure in L.A. Is about $50 million and no cost projections were yet available form the other cities surveyed.

Council member Edmund Ford Jr. asked Rallings how Memphis stacked up against Albuquerque and New Orleans, cities that have already fully deployed car and body camera programs.

Rallings said camera policies in those cities are likely very different than what they’ll be in Memphis. Officers there can turn the cameras on and off “at will,” he said, and open records laws are also different in both cities. In total, he said the comparison to Memphis would not be “apples to apples.”

MPD bought its body cameras from Taser International last year. A lawsuit filed earlier this month from Taser rival Digital Ally claims Taser bribed officials to get contracts in six cities, including Memphis. Council member Phillip Spinosa asked Rallings if the suit would affect the city’s camera program.

“It has nothing to do with us,” Rallings said. “It’s between Taser and the other company.”

Sexual Assault Kit Update

The Memphis Police Department (MPD) has whittled its backlog of about 13,000 untested sexual assault kits down to about 3,000 untested kits.

That was the latest from MPD officials who told Memphis City Council members Tuesday that more than 5,500 kits have completed analysis and more than 5,000 are now at labs for testing.

Officials said they can send about 30 kits a month for testing.

Also, MPD’s rape kit testing project got a nearly $2 million infusion of cash Tuesday. In September, the New York County District Attorney’s Office announced it would award nearly $38 million in grant to 32 jurisdictions in 20 states to test backlogs of rape kits. Memphis won one of the biggest grants which ranged in size from $97,000 to $2 million.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Changing the Guard at MPD

CREDIT: Memphis Police Department

It was recently announced that Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong and nearly half of his command staff are leaving the department. While there’s no question the departure of so many seasoned officers will be a huge loss, it also gives newly inaugurated Mayor Jim Strickland an opportunity to remake the department to better serve the community.

Memphis Police Department

Departing MPD Director Toney Armstrong

The department faces many external challenges and suffers from internal problems that have been long ignored. These challenges are unlikely to be adequately addressed by an insider.

One of the flaws that was exposed in the investigation into the officer involved in the shooting death of Darrius Stewart is the lack of consistent policy positions for officers in what would often be standard situations. 

Currently, rules are written vaguely, giving officers the latitude to make judgment calls. Unfortunately, that latitude can also be used to treat different people in similar situations very differently. This ultimately undermines the relationship between law enforcement and populations that have been wrongly targeted due to circumstances that are beyond their control (race, the condition of their vehicles/residences, and the areas in which they live).

Rules that detail when passengers involved in traffic stops are to identify themselves need to be put in writing. This will ensure people’s privacy rights are respected, and officers don’t accidentally create a situation where an arrest is thrown out due to mishandling.

Clear rules about when to call for backup need to be in place.

Finally, rules about when force, either restraining force or deadly force, is to be used need to be in line with a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which involved an unarmed, fleeing suspect and the Memphis Police Department. 

That ruling states deadly force cannot be used unless the officer has “probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

The new police administration should actively engage the Citizen Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) on any new policy adopted and treat their relationship as a partnership to both inform the public of new policy and provide oversight when policy violations are reported.

For too long, relations between law enforcement and the public have been strained due to real and/or perceived wrongs committed by officers. Partnering with the CLERB will give the public the assurance that conduct issues will be dealt with in a timely manner.

Changing the way the department polices the city is another issue to address.  Instituting a community policing program would help heal fractures and most likely lead to a real decrease in crime.

Officers in Memphis have little direct contact with the populations they’re serving unless they’re on a call. That means officers only see the people they’re serving when they’re at their worst or in a bad situation. This negatively impacts their outlook on the community and leads to more alienation.

While walking patrols may not be feasible in every neighborhood, focusing on developing relationships in the community will minimize the alienation that is common in traditional patrols. It also builds relationships between the public and police that are durable, even when things go wrong.

Those relationships also provide a “boots on the ground” intelligence to identify other societal ills that may be occurring in communities (domestic violence, child abuse or neglect, unfit housing, wage theft, and other problems people who feel forgotten may not report, because they don’t believe anything will be done about it).

These things are important for a city like Memphis that has a high rate of working poor. While the loss of decades of institutional memory may seem like a severe problem for the city, problems are really just opportunities ripe for the taking.

Positive changes are unlikely to come from within. Institutions have their own inertia and generally follow Newtonian laws of motion, meaning they will most certainly maintain their current velocity and direction unless acted upon by an external force, and even then, they’ll still resist any push to change.

The opportunity for Memphis and law enforcement in the new administration is to identify the right kind of “external force” that will move the department in the right direction and make Memphis not only safer for its citizens but also a city that places a high degree of value in a cooperative relationship between the police and the community.