How much of the current sense that Memphis and Shelby County are threatened by a crime tsunami is a matter of perception, and how much is based on fact? That was one of the issues focused on during a summit in Bartlett last week in which DA Steve Mulroy and officials and other representatives of the outer county confronted both each other and the fear that things are getting out of control.
The roundtable meeting, hosted by Bank of Bartlett president Harold Byrd, was held last Thursday at the Bartlett campus of the College of Applied Technology (TCAT). There was a palpable sense of urgency to the event, conducted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting death of MPD Officer Joseph McKinney and a lethal fire-fight at an Orange Mound block party.
Mulroy took the opportunity to outline to the group various emergency crime-control procedures that his office was undertaking, and he cited a new report from the Shelby County Crime Commission showing that crime statistics had actually receded during the last quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.
Among others, Mayor Mike Wissman of Arlington was skeptical. “What you give us sounds good on paper. … But we’re not seeing that. I mean, every time we turn on the TV, the first five stories are all crime. And most of them [involve] repeat offenders. … It all sounds great. But we’re not seeing results. It’s very frustrating.”
Mayor Stan Joyner of Collierville also disputed “all the talk that crime is down,” suggesting that newly released repeat offenders were beating arresting officers back home from court to renew their illegal activities.
“I share your frustration,” Mulroy said, noting that violent crime had been building steadily for a decade in Shelby County before he took office. “I will tell you this, it’s absolutely the case that I find what’s going on right now unacceptable. And I’m trying to do everything that I can to bend that curve.”
As for the apparently reassuring crime statistics, Mulroy said, “They may be true, but they’ve gone down from an unacceptably high level. And so the trend may be a positive one, and we all pray that the trend goes down, but the absolute level of crime is still unacceptable, right?”
There was general agreement on the point and on other aspects of the moment, including the effect of rising crime concerns on retarding economic progress and the contention of Millington Chamber of Commerce official Terry Roland that Memphis was the only Tennessee city to lose population last year. “We’re the stopping point,” Roland said, suggesting that Shelby County’s outer communities were a major factor in restraining even more dramatic population loss.
Said Mulroy: “I get it that we want to avoid the vicious cycle of, you know, crime perception leading to less investment leading to less prosperity, leading to more poverty into more crime. We definitely do not want to get in that vicious cycle, which is why we need an all hands on deck approach. … I totally agree that we need to stop pointing fingers, and we need to start joining hands. And we need to show a unified front to the state. You know, let’s figure out what it is we want from the state on a consensus basis and then try to go get it.”
Bartlett Chamber of Commerce president John Threadgill made an effort to put the crime problem in a more general context: “We’re in fairly good company, y’all. We’re ranked in the top 10 as far as violent crime, but we’re in there with St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Baltimore. There’s a lot of cities out there that have the same issues we have. We’re not the only ones. I’m a native of Nashville. And I can guarantee you folks in Nashville think they have too much crime.”
All in all, that was the import of last week’s meeting, that crime was everybody’s problem and, locally and even statewide, communities were in this together.