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Floyd Bonner: ‘We’ve got to hold people accountable’

August 21, 2023: Memphis, TN - Floyd Bonner portrait at his campaign headquarters. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Floyd Bonner, 64, believes in accountability. While discussing public safety with the Memphis Flyer and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, the two-term sheriff spoke often of the importance of people being held accountable — parents, youth, gun toters. Yet the Orange Mound native seemed to resist the idea that he or his department’s policies might have some responsibility for the 44 inmate deaths that have occurred since he took office in 2018, calling any attribution “a very unfair portrayal of the hard-working men of the sheriff’s office and our jailers.” 

That comment and Bonner’s campaign reflect his deep commitment to law enforcement workers and policing ideals. He didn’t criticize Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis; his most specific answers were about increasing the number of police officers (he’d like a larger sheriff’s force, too); he’d like to see longer sentences and tougher laws; he embraces the idea of curfews for youth. Still, the married father of two sons also believes the personal touch can be a route to crime prevention and intervention. If elected, he says, he’ll be out in the streets, talking to youth. “We can’t sit in the office and let parents or kids come to us,” he says. “We’ve got to get out in the neighborhoods to find out what we can do to help these kids be successful.”

The following Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. This interview was conducted on Aug. 21, 2023.

The killing of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police officers obviously damaged the community’s trust in the police. What steps would you take to rebuild that trust?

Well, I think I agree with you — it damaged the trust with the community. I do not support a bad police officer, would not support a bad police officer. But it’s about being out in the community, talking with the public, getting them to understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can work collectively to keep it from happening again. And so I think being accessible to the public, where they can actually ask one-on-one questions, and not always hashing it out through the media, but just being out there. So as sheriff, I’ve done that, and we’ll continue to do it.

How would you describe Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis’ performance as police chief? 

Well, I think Chief Davis has had to learn the community and had to learn her agency. You know, I’ve been asked many times would I let her go if I was elected. I don’t think that’s fair. I think all city directors will be evaluated in my administration, and decisions will be made accordingly.

Was [her performance] worth an extra $50,000? (Davis received a sizable raise when a blanket pay increase for all MPD employees went into effect earlier this year.)

Well, that didn’t fall on my purview. I don’t know what the intention was to give her the extra $50,000. It was a 15 percent raise, so that’s what it equated to. So, I think that someone probably should have looked at the command staff, and I think it [the raise] was more for recruiting and frontline officers. 

MPD has about 1,900 officers but says it needs 2,500. Do you agree 2,500 is the right number? If not, why not? And if so, how would you help add MPD officers? 

I have 42 years experience. How would I go about doing our desk-to-duty plan? It’s taking some officers out of precincts, [taking] officers out of the public information office, and getting those officers back out on the streets. We have officers doing tasks that civilians could be doing — for instance, like fixing the SkyCop cameras.

In lieu of those officers out on patrol, it’s going to take two to three years to get to where the staffing levels need to be right now. We can’t wait that long. We don’t need the next mayor to need to have two to three years’ on-the-job training, trying to figure that out. So when you start talking about increasing the staffing levels, yes, desk to duty. But we can also do a better job in recruiting; you know, we need to look at states that have state income taxes or a high cost of living and entice those officers to move here to Memphis. We’ve got to do a better job of selling our city; we’ve got to work harder. Even when you start talking about our ad campaign, you know, the Best in Blue campaign has been around now for five or six years. It needs to be freshened up. We need to take a different approach, getting a professional management company to do those types of things for us. Let the professionals do what the professionals do. 

Your proposed desk-to-duty transfer: How many people would that be?

We just have to take an overall look at the department, but we think it could be anywhere between 50  to 75 officers that we could actually put back out on the streets.

What would you say is the ideal number for the police force?

About 2,500 or 2,600.

August 21, 2023: Memphis, TN – Floyd Bonner sits for an interview at his campaign headquarters. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Currently, nearly 40 percent of the city of Memphis’ budget goes to police. Should residents expect that, under your administration, that share would go up, down, or stay the same?  

We know that here in a couple of years, there’ll be a $50 million debt cliff* that will be re-occurring. So you know, there is money that will be coming to the city coffers to do different programs. Right now, even with the budget the way it is, you know, our police need more cars. We’re having officers that are having to wait for cars to come in so they can go out. So it’s some things in the police department that we need to fix. And right now, I can’t say that the budget would increase, but it’s certainly nice to stay where it’s at.

(*Editor’s note: The City of Memphis’ debt payments will fall by around $50 million in 2026.) 

MPD is currently under a civil rights investigation by the Department of Justice, as you know. How do you plan to ensure that the Memphis Police Department treats all citizens fairly, which is what they’re going to be looking at? 

This starts with the leadership. It starts at the top. But I welcome the DOJ investigation or anything where you have an outside second set of eyes to take a look at an organization to see if we are doing things the right way, or the systemic type of actions that need to be taken. So, we welcome the investigation. Now, the public needs to keep in mind also that it could take two to three years for them to come up with findings. And so, again, the next mayor needs to understand those findings and know how to make the proper adjustments in the police department. 

Other than policing, per se, can you name three measures you would take to increase public safety?   

We can always talk about intervention, first of all, to curb crime, to keep it from happening in the first place. But also with prevention. We need to provide jobs for our people, for young people, especially meaningful jobs. We talk about opportunity to youth, including the programs that are already in existence with the city. But we’ve got to ramp up these chances to get our young people involved, and we’ve got to hold parents accountable. And for the 20 percent, the ones that are committing the crime, we’ve got to have tougher rules. When you talk about the average time that a person convicted of aggravated assault is only five to seven years, we’ve got a close-up on loopholes in truth in sentencing. An aggravated assault is just a murder that didn’t get to happen.

What public safety solutions have you seen work in other cities that you might seek to implement here?

Well, I just read an article just the other day about curfews, juvenile curfews in D.C., as well as in Baltimore. They’re implementing curfews. And I think we’re missing an opportunity as well to enforce the curfew laws. I think it’s something that we really need to revisit. Again, it’s about holding parents accountable for their kids.

Some cities have tried to respond to mental health crises with first responders who aren’t police officers. Is that a solution you’re interested in exploring for Memphis? And if so, how would you fund it?

Mental health is a big concern for our public; we just received $2.7 million for our private pilot program to work with a hospital to take detainees that are already in the jail to get them the mental health evaluations they need, not only to get through the court system, but to get mental health evaluations and, hopefully, on the right track with medication that doctors deem necessary.

How do you plan to engage young people to help them avoid gangs and criminal activity?

Well, it’s all about intervention and prevention. At the sheriff’s office, we have a Crime Prevention Unit that offers over 40 different programs for our youth, but as the mayor, the mayor has to be accessible to juveniles. I grew up in Orange Mound and Westwood; a lot of the kids that are getting in trouble look like me. I can relate to those kids. And I think it would help just being a visible mayor being out and about and trying to talk to these kids. We have the conversations with the kids that are excelling, but I mean, we got to have conversations with kids in the neighborhood.

Any particular plans for doing that on a regular basis?

We can’t sit in the office and let parents or kids come to us. We’ve got to get out in the neighborhoods to find out what we can do to help these kids be successful. 

Memphis always ranks poorly in its number of roadway deaths. Is there a way to make our streets safer without relying solely on increased enforcement by police?

I think you look at what some cities are doing with their traffic plans or roundabouts that you’re starting to see just a little bit in Memphis. I have relatives that live in the suburbs in Annapolis, where they have that, for example. But you’ve seen a lot of roundabouts, now, traffic patterns, changing, you know, you increase traffic enforcement, attention to red lights and things like that. We’re gonna have to take a long hard look at traffic patterns. 

August 21, 2023: Memphis, TN – Floyd Bonner at his campaign headquarters. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Give me a realistic change you can facilitate to help reduce car theft and property theft.

My wife and I’ve raised two sons in this community. We were responsible for their actions and where they were, but these young people that are out there that are breaking in cars, we’ve got to get down to the root problem of that. That could be a food issue, it could be a homeless issue. We’ve got to find out what those issues are, and then change the trajectory of those kids.

Are you one of those who blames the state legislature for worsening gun problems with legislation that’s passed up there?

I think it did. I mean, I’d sit at a table with Gov. [Bill] Lee and talk to him about constitutional carry and what it means to this community. Urban areas are different from rural areas. And I don’t think an urban area in the state of Tennessee was happy with the change in the law. We had a permit system that was working; I even suggested to the governor to give it to the citizens for free. What we were trying to get done is a mixture of background checks, going to classes, learning how to operate a handgun. And I keep reading reports where citizens are shooting themselves, saying that they were cleaning their weapon and, you know, the gun went off. When you look at the kind of things that have happened since they did away with the permit, I mean, we all can say gun violence is really going up here and in the state of Tennessee. 

Now, that also happens because people are carrying guns in their cars, and they’re leaving guns in their car. So when we start talking about deaths from motor vehicles, most of the time it’s not the change that you might leave in your ashtray these kids and young people are looking for, it’s weapons, even though they can buy a weapon now because the state law has changed, to where an 18-year-old can buy a gun. But many of these guns are illegal weapons.

Well, the guns are here, they’re on the street. What’s your best idea for getting them off the street?

Aggressive policing first of all. We’ve got to hold people accountable. But also we’ve got to change the mindset whereby we don’t have conflict resolution anymore in schools or anywhere. I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen with the churches and pastors, community organizations that are willing to step up now and really get the message out as to how serious this is in our city. Because a lot of time our youth don’t understand the consequences of pulling the trigger on a weapon. So when you talk about trying to get them to get those guns out of their hands, then we’ve got to find a way to talk to them and get them to understand that violence is never the answer to anything, but also holding them, again, responsible and accountable for their actions.

You’ve mentioned your interest in a curfew. As specifically as possible, what kind of curfew would you imagine would work? 

Well, the curfew that’s already on the books. But we gotta find those social services, agencies that would be willing to partner with us to handle juveniles. What you’re asking is for a parent or responsible person or guardian to come pick that child up. So many times I hear parents say, ‘Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t know where my child was. My child told me that they were at this place, and they actually wound up at this other place.’ So again, you know, it’s about holding parents accountable, holding juveniles accountable. I think getting young people off the streets late at night, especially in the Beale Street area, which as we all know, is an adult entertainment center. A 15-year-old don’t need to be down on Beale Street after midnight.

At the opening of your campaign headquarters, you said we’ve got to unhandcuff the police officers and let the police do what the police need to do. What does that mean?

Well, that means we’ve got to show support to the police. I think some of the ordinances that were passed in talking with MPD officers, they feel demoralized. They feel like they can’t police. They feel like they’re being restricted … 

(Editor’s note: Among other things, the city council ordinance directs police not to stop cars for low-level offenses, bans the use of unmarked cars and plainclothes officers from routine traffic stops, and mandates regularly reported data on traffic stops, arrests, and complaints.)

By the restrictions on pre-emptive steps taken by the city council? Which are now being considered by the county, you know …

Yes, yes, I do know. But if you read the orders, the county is only requesting, they’re not telling me that I have to do that. But we need things in place that when those kinds of things [police-involved killings such as Tyre Nichols’] happen, and they should never happen, but you have policy and procedure as well as the law, and what we saw with the five officers that were involved with that Tyre Nichols thing.  I was in a forum just last week with the Chamber; their description was ‘five rogue officers.’ So if you’re saying five rogue officers, you’re not saying the entire police department, but you must have policy and procedures. And we saw it work effectively, those officers were immediately fired. And now they’re going through the justice system.

The assistant U.S. attorney says that it has received information indicating that the MPD may be using an approach to street enforcement that can result in violations of federal law, including racially discriminatory stops of Black people for minor violations? I think a lot of people are curious about racial profiling, as well. Is that a real problem?

I don’t know if there’s a real problem. But when you talk about a city that’s 65 percent or 60 percent African-American, policing is about data, where the crime is occurring, when it’s occurring and not necessarily who’s committing it. But you try to put yourself in those places where crime is occurring. So I don’t necessarily think it’s racial profiling. But with that higher percentage of African Americans, there is the possibility that more African Americans are going to be arrested … People in South Memphis want to feel safe, just like people in East Memphis and Germantown want to feel safe. So you let the data lead you to where the crime has occurred.

There’s been a lot of concern about the number of jail deaths that have occurred during your tenure. Is it fair to attribute the rise in such deaths to policies in the sheriff’s department? And can the number be reduced?

Now, when you start talking about jail deaths, there are people who were charged with DUI, were involved in an accident, but never came to jail. They died in the hospital. People come to jail with heart conditions. A lot of times, the people that come to jail, they’re not in the healthiest condition in the first place. These people, maybe, have never seen a doctor before. We’ve had kidney issues, people dying in the hospital under medical supervision. But it triggers on our account because they were an inmate at the jail, and they did not make bond. I had a case where one person was dying of cancer. He was in the last stages of cancer. We all knew that he was going down, and we talked to the jury about releasing him. But he died of cancer at Methodist University. And so we get tagged again. I think it is unfair what other candidates are saying, what other media outlets are saying, because no one ever asked us to go into detail about what’s actually going on in the jail.

There are 244 jails in the state of Tennessee, and only 41 or 42 report jail deaths. We self report; we’re [in] a small percentage that do [report jail deaths]. I think even Congress said that the DOJ needed to do a better job with getting jail death reports from all around the country. We don’t try to hide anything.

(Editor’s note: The Commercial Appeal reported that it began asking the sheriff’s office to release details of deaths in custody in 2020, but that it was only after a change in state law in 2022 requiring records to be kept and available for the public that the office provided a list.)

A recently announced plan to control crime Downtown envisions the sheriff’s department joining MPD and maintaining a blockade of sorts on vehicular traffic on weekend nights. Did you personally sign off on that plan?

I talked with Chief Davis last week several times about it but no, I did not sign off on it. There’s some other things that need to be done because when you push the traffic out and you keep it away from Downtown, you see what happens. Last weekend, kids went to Union and Pauline and shut down two businesses, the Burger King as well as the Exxon right there, because it was a gathering spot. So we’ve got to do more than just protect Downtown. Downtown is the front door to our city. But there are other areas in town that we cannot forget about.  

If you are elected mayor, to what extent would you welcome direct participation by the sheriff’s department in the activities of the MPD?

That’s another misconception by the public, that the sheriff’s office doesn’t work inside the city limits. I still have a narcotics unit that does probably 95 percent of their work inside the city limits. Our gang unit does probably 95 percent of their work inside the city limits. Every day, our Fugitive Apprehension team, they’re working inside the city limits of Memphis. 

When you start talking about us doing more, we are doing a lot. We are a full-service law enforcement office; we have to respond to calls in unincorporated Shelby County, as well as serve in 54 courtrooms. 

I wish I had a force of 1,500. I think if I’m elected as mayor, we need the highway patrol down here on a permanent basis. We need them to come down here and be a constant presence on all of our state routes as well as the interstates. We need constant partnering with everyone that’s available.

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Van Turner: ‘I can bring credibility to the mayor’s office’

August 30, 2023: Memphis, TN - Van Turner, 52, stands for a portrait in a conference room at the law office where he practices, Turner Feild Law. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Much of Van Turner’s past work and position have led to him being critical of policing in Memphis. The 48-year-old lawyer, Memphis NAACP chapter president, and former county commissioner has marched in support of unarmed Black people killed by police, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tyre Nichols. 

So it’s not surprising that as he runs to be mayor, he says he’s been asked several times how he can now lead a police force.

During an interview about public safety with the Memphis Flyer and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, Turner says those experiences are exactly why he should be mayor.

“As I’ve said, I’ve gone against bad policing, but I’ve always supported good policing in the community. And there’s a difference,” he said. “And so I think I can bring credibility to the mayor’s office.

“I’ve been the one who’s been out there in the trenches with the community. When I go and I enact the plan for reform and the comprehensive strategy for better public safety in the community, I think the community will trust what I have to say better than anyone else, because I’ve been there with them in those trenches fighting.”

The following Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. This interview was conducted on Aug. 30, 2023.

The killing of Tyre Nichols at the hands of the Memphis Police Department has very obviously damaged the community’s trust in the police. What steps would you take to rebuild trust in the police?

I think we first have to have a top-down reform of the Memphis Police Department. We have to look at what the Department of Justice says. Not only will they review the case of Tyre Nichols, they’ll look five years back to see if there was a pattern in practice of these sorts of cases occurring and they were not addressed. Then, I think, we will have to make sure that the training and the leadership is appropriately in place to ensure this does not occur again. And then, finally, I think we need to get back to some of the community policing that we used to have when I was growing up in Whitehaven.

We knew our officers. They were at our schools. They were at the community centers. They were at the football games and track meets. We saw them in church. You had a relationship where if we saw something, we said something, and we were not afraid to contact the authorities or law enforcement in order to address issues. Now that you see this rift between the community and law enforcement, that doesn’t occur like it occurred when I was younger. And so, in order to truly look at resolving public safety of this community, the relationship between the community and law enforcement has to be healed.

How would you describe Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis’ performance as police chief? 

I thought she was good as far as being transparent on the release of the Tyre Nichols tape and the reprimand and termination of those five officers. I think perhaps there’s some room for growth and accountability as it relates to the use of this tactical squad being used for just a mere traffic stop and not for something that it was probably organized to do: to take down maybe a drug operation, to go after the heavily armed bad guys that were going to have AR-15 rifles and shoot back. Tyre Nichols was innocent. He had no weapons. He was not speeding. His tags cleared — and he was beat to death. And this tactical unit was responsible for his death. To deploy a team like the team that was deployed in the death of Tyre Nichols was a failure of leadership.

She should be held accountable for this even occurring, pre-beating death of Tyre Nichols. Everything that she’s done post that death, I think, was good. But were there better steps that should have been taken prior to the murder of Nichols? That’s what we still have to analyze.

Do you think you would’ve hired her?

I respect the fact that she’s the first woman and the first Black woman to be in that role. But as I sit here today, I probably would’ve preferred someone local, someone that was homegrown, someone that came through the ranks and perhaps knew the Memphis community a little better, starting out day one.

August 30, 2023: Memphis, TN – Van Turner, 52, sits for an interview in a conference room at the law office where he practices, Turner Feild Law. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

MPD currently has about 1,900 officers and says it needs 2,500 officers. Do you agree that 2,500 is the right number? If not, why not?

I think 2,500 first responders is the right answer. I don’t know if they necessarily all have to be rank-and-file police officers. What we’re learning is that for traffic stops, for mental health cases, for medical emergencies, for unruly students, perhaps first responders who are not rank-and-file officers could be deployed. I think we do the community and ourselves a disservice when you send in an armed rank-and-file officer to handle some of these situations and perhaps exacerbate the situation.

I do think we need a full complement of first responders, but I would suggest that perhaps 200 to 250 of those first responders should be comprised of specialty units and of specialty officers who can emphasize de-escalation, address mental health issues, address nonviolent, non-threatening traffic stops, and address some of the domestic [violence] issues that we see. We really have to look at a comprehensive strategy to resolve crime more effectively in the community. 

Where would you look for additional officers?

We should have a hybrid approach. The council voted to not hire outside of the city limits. The state overturned the council’s prerogative and said we could hire outside of city, county, and state. We have to navigate the law as it’s written. If we are hiring from outside, we are competing with everyone else. We just increased our pay for officers in the $800 million budget to incentivize officers to come. So did some of the surrounding suburbs. So you can make equal or almost the same in Germantown, but have half the headache. And so you’re competing against those kinds of challenges. And those challenges are gonna remain. 

Maybe we should look at diversifying what we consider a first responder in law enforcement. And perhaps they could yield better success in retention and hiring those individuals. But I just think we keep doing what we’re doing, keep recruiting, keep going into our high schools and junior colleges and saying, ‘Hey, you can make a career out of this.’ I think we just have to keep working at it.

Currently, nearly 40 percent of Memphis’ total budget goes to policing. Should residents expect that, under your administration, that share would go up or go down? Or would it stay the same?

My budget would likely be the same if you look at the whole spectrum of public safety. But I would like to increase the budget as it relates to prevention and investments in disinvested communities, disinvested youth, disinvested community centers. I think that’s where we really have to pour a robust allocation of our investments into, because what we’re doing now is not working. 

My plan would not be to lock more people up and to keep locking them up month after month after month, and that’s the solution. We are going to get the bad guys off the streets. We are going to make sure that the most hardened criminals are locked away and hopefully rehabilitated. I’ll be tough on those who we need to be tough on. But then I will be equally as balanced as it relates to trying to prevent this pipeline from school to prisons, from Black and brown communities to prison. We have to address that. 

I think the community spoke loudly in the election of DA [Steve] Mulroy, as opposed to [former DA Amy] Weirich. They want a comprehensive strategy. They want to focus on intervention and prevention. And I’ll continue that as mayor, I’ll work with DA Mulroy, I’ll work with Juvenile Court Judge (Tarik) Sugarmon to make sure that we have a comprehensive approach to tackling this main issue. So, I will likely increase the funding as it relates to prevention and intervention.

The MPD is currently under a civil rights investigation by the Department of Justice. How do you plan to ensure that the MPD treats all of Memphis’ citizens fairly?

As leadership, top down, we have to make sure that we have a strong transition team. We hear from the community, we go to each community — and I mean each and every community — and we listen. The transition team takes that in, we report out, and then we see if it is the correct way forward to keep the leadership there, or to move away and get new leadership. We focus on training, and we make sure that our most senior officers are being utilized more than perhaps what they’re being utilized now. There were no senior officers [there] the night of the murder of Tyre Nichols. That was a misstep and a problem.

What do you mean? There was nobody on duty or …

All those officers were young on the force, five to seven years. Had there been a 10-year, 12-year, 15-year veteran out there, I’m hopeful that we would’ve had a different result. The senior leadership would’ve kicked in and calmed those young guys down. There were just several issues which we saw that perhaps could have been addressed or remediated with more leadership on the ground. And so that is the second point. And third, we have to focus on recruitment and recruiting the right individuals with the correct temperament, the right mind to serve and protect. 

Other than police, name three measures you would take to increase public safety.

I would attempt to hire and retain other first responders besides rank-and-file police officers to address emergency situations. I will focus on intervention. If you look at Craigmont High School, there’s a Boys and Girls Club in the high school, which has a 100 percent graduation rate, as opposed to [the school’s] 70 percent graduation rate. We need to put that type of program in all of our challenged high schools and middle schools. I was just in a meeting with First Eight this morning. They work with pre-K literacy, and they work with actually making sure that there’s affordable childcare. I think that’s the other factor. Intervention is what the Boys and Girls Club is doing. And then prevention is focusing in on affordable childcare, focusing in on making sure the literacy rates are where they need to be. And that’s the city’s issue. It is a school board issue, but it becomes a city issue as well because when these young people drop out of school, they become the issue of the city to handle.

July 22, 2023: Memphis, TN – Van Turner during the mayoral forum hosted at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church. The event was organized by the Black Clergy Collaborative of Memphis, 100 Black Men of Memphis, and the National Bar Association. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

What public safety solutions have you seen work in other cities that you would seek to implement here?

The crisis unit, as far as going in and addressing mental health issues without a rank-and-file officer with a gun. That’s something that I’ve seen that’s better. Utilizing technology is something that I’ve seen in other cities, which can be used and deployed. Returning back to, again, community policing — making sure that the officers are in the community as much as possible, building relationships with the young people and with the community.

Some cities have tried to respond to mental health crises with first responders who aren’t police officers. You’ve already said that this is something that you would like to explore. Can you talk about that a little further?

I think that there’s a role for individuals who have that type of expertise to be used by law enforcement and by fire. Oftentimes, EMTs are first on the scene, and there are issues that they have to address which concern mental illness. And they’re not equipped to do so. If it’s a heart attack or a stroke, obviously they’re an emergency medical technician, that’s what they do. But if it’s a mental illness breakdown or something along those lines, neither police nor fire are equipped to do it. And so we need a unit that will do it, that will travel with fire and police and make sure that mental health issues don’t result in death.

We should have someone down at Division 14 of General Sessions [Court]. That’s where one would typically go, or at least on that same floor to get an order of protection because of domestic violence. And we need a follow-up. We need that to be given to a caseworker, a first responder for mental illness issues and domestic violence issues. They need to follow up, monitor that situation, make sure that it doesn’t turn into something that’s more violent. And I think that would be something that could be used here like we’ve seen in other cities.

Would you be willing to redirect any funds from policing to address mental health?

I think we have to. Mental health, addiction to drugs, those are not crimes. Those are individuals who need assistance. They don’t need to be killed, and some of them don’t need to be incarcerated. But they do need treatment. If you know anything about our courts, you know that we have all kinds of specialty courts in General Sessions Criminal. We have an environmental court, we have a veterans court, we have a drug court, and we have a domestic violence court. Really bringing together those individuals within those courts and, you know, within the juvenile court system coming together, the school system coming together to try to have a comprehensive strategy, is something that’s missing. I’ve oftentimes said we need to triage and treat this issue of violence in our community like we did the pandemic. We got a report every morning. Everybody was meeting on the subject. We were transparent. We have to take that same comprehensive approach — not point fingers, but work together and be transparent. Give the community a plan to fix it. Lay out the metrics, and then you hold us accountable, and we improve. We do this as partners with the community and all these other organizations. 

How do you plan to engage young people and help them avoid gangs and criminal activity? 

A kid that joins a gang is looking for love, looking for acceptance, looking for protection, looking for a community. And they find that in the gang because it’s not at home, it’s not at church, it’s not on the football team. You really have to disrupt that pattern of the gangs preying on these vulnerable youth because once they get ahold of them, it’s hard for them to let go, and it’s hard for that young person to get out of it. So we have to step in before the gangs get to them and provide that positive community for them. That’s why [I like] the Boys and Girls Club. It’s a positive community. There’s true advocacy for that young man or woman. That’s why the Boys and Girls Club is effective. And that’s why we need to really scale and expand those kinds of operations within our schools. As a county commissioner, I funded Heal the Hood every year with my grant funding. Heal the Hood is run by Dale Beaver, and he has a gang intervention program and he’s doing great work. We need that in all the communities, and it works. 

Memphis always ranks poorly in its number of roadway deaths every year. How would you help make our streets safer without relying solely on increased MPD enforcement?

Perhaps the answer is figuring out some way to say if there are too many infractions, there are too many red lights that have been run through the accidents, that you have a mandatory check-in to reinforce your driving skills. And should you fail again, then you perhaps don’t need your license for an amount of time. I think we’re going to have to get tough on these kinds of issues because you should not be in fear of just going to get groceries, and someone just runs you over and t-bones you.

I do think we have to enact smarter and better measures outside of law enforcement to get a handle on the reckless driving. Driving is a privilege. You don’t have the right to act a fool and kill people because you want to have a little fun.

MEMPHIS, TN – August 12, 2023: Memphis mayoral candidates Van Turner, right, and Paul Young look on during the 2023 Memphis People’s Convention at the Memphis Sports and Events Center. Photo by Brandon Dill for MLK50

As mayor, what measures would you take to help get guns off the street?

Obviously, talking to the Tennessee General Assembly won’t work. When the states have failed us in the past, we’ve turned to the federal government. As a civil rights attorney, that’s what I’ll do. I will support litigation to make sure that we at least put all the issues on the table. 

I will seek an injunction in federal court, and I know what would likely happen. But the important thing is that we will create a record. We will have experts who will have testimony. We’ll get all those folks on the stand who’ve been ill-affected by gun violence. And then we’ll take that record to the U.S. Congress, and we’ll ask for the United States Congress and for the president to give us relief. We’ve had a ban on assault weapons before. It can happen again. We should not give up on this issue. 

Let me drill down on this just a little bit, please, because you are an attorney. I’m going to state my understanding of what you just said. You tell me how I’m wrong. So the city council or the county commission could pass an ordinance that says you have to have a permit to carry a handgun, you can’t have assault rifles in Shelby County, or in the city limits, or whatever. Let’s say we were able to do that, which is not outside of the realm of possibility, right? 

Right. 

But then the state, the general assembly is going to void those laws. So that’s what you believe would happen in that case.

Right. Then we’d end up in state court, or we could remove it to federal court, depending on what type of litigation, especially if the firearms cross state lines. Then you can use the law, which says if it involves two or more states, you can go to federal court.

As mayor, what is a measure that you, or measures that you could take to reduce car break-ins and theft? 

Part of addressing the issues is to not only require a permit to have the gun on your person, but require permits to have guns in your cars. Many times, they’re looking for guns and other valuables. And so if we enact the law to do what we are saying, that will hopefully reduce some of the break-ins. The uptick occurred when we allowed guns in cars without a permit, and every law enforcement person in the state was against what the assembly was doing.

I think, too, you disrupt how they make money off of what they’re doing. You really tackle, and you use good detective work, good policing to break up the chop shops, to break up the shops where they can get the drive-out tags and not have licenses which can be traced. And then I think you, you lean into, ‘Hey, young man or woman, once we catch you, we just can’t let you back out without any parameters or any way of correcting your behavior.’ That’s something that I think the city mayor and Judge Tara Sugarman should get together on and check how we are following through and see what improvements can be made there. Because a lot of these young people are repeat offenders, and they’re young. I think those are measures that can be utilized and things that can be done in order to make sure we are addressing the root cause of the problem.

You want to change the incentives.

Yeah. We want to make it more difficult to make money off the crime. It’s an economic crime. They make money from the chop shop. They make money from what they can find in your car. So, we have to address economics. People who can earn income and provide for themselves and have affordable housing don’t break in cars. 

The disinvestment in these communities is also an issue. Poverty that we’ve allowed to fester and grow and be unaddressed. And now we see the result of it. My plan is to make robust investments back into the community, to bring hope, to bring light, to bring investment back into these disinvested communities. We’ll see the change. And that’s what the city hasn’t done.

What are your thoughts about maintaining a curfew on young Memphians?

Yeah, I think that’s, again, an outgrowth of there are not enough activities for young people to engage in which are positive and which can keep them away from the negative behavior. We need 24-hour community centers. We used to have something called Run and Shoot Midnight Basketball. There were other things that just worked. And for the life of me, I don’t know why we stopped doing things that worked. Extended community center hours, which would provide wraparound services, a safe haven, warm meals, the whole community of family and structure that they need. I think those are things that can be done. Obviously, we may have to start out addressing the issue head-on.

You have to meet the emergency need where it is. It’s a crime wave. You have to meet that wave at its height, but then a wave normally drops, and we have to make it drop by bringing down the root causes of why we’re seeing what we’re seeing. And I think once we lean into these extended community center hours, more programming, you know, addressing more activities for our young people, especially over the summer months, we’ll start seeing a change.

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Paul Young: ‘We have to build up this additional support for public safety’

September 7, 2023: Memphis, TN - Paul Young portrait at his campaign headquarters. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

While Paul Young, 43, has never held elected office, he’s been one of the most influential men in Memphis for a while.

As president of the Downtown Memphis Commission for the last two and a half years, he’s led the quasi-governmental commission’s efforts to restart Downtown’s growth after the pandemic hit the neighborhood hard. Before then, he led the City of Memphis’ Division of Housing and Community Development, which was responsible for developing the new Memphis Sports and Events Center and the still-on-hold dining, hospitality, and entertainment project next door. He’s also been a lobbyist for Shelby County and an administrator for the Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning & Development.

But when discussing public safety with the Memphis Flyer and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, the lifelong Memphian spoke far more about his personal experience than lessons from his time in public service.

By the time he was 21, he had lost “four or five” friends to gun violence, he said. And as the son of two pastors, he witnessed his parents constantly dealing with the grief violent crime brings.

“I know people that have been killed and have been the killers,” he said. “I’ve had friends that have been murdered by other friends — high school classmates and kids I grew up playing basketball with in the neighborhood.”

The following Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. This interview was conducted Sept. 8, 2023.

Let’s start with policing. The killing of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police officers obviously damaged the community’s trust in the police. What steps would you take to rebuild that trust?

Rebuilding trust is the number one goal for the Memphis Police Department over the next couple of years. I think that the ordinances that were passed at City Council were a step in the right direction. But I believe that it’s important that we do everything we can to restore that faith.

I think that having a presence in the communities, not just when it’s time to enforce the law — walking through neighborhoods and communities and showing up to community meetings as a sign of support — those are things that I think can be done at little cost. It’s hard to hate people that you know. It’s hard to hate somebody that you look in the eyes on a regular basis. Having individuals on the police force that understand these communities and building those relationships is the way that we change the tenor. If I make that a priority, the Memphis Police Department will follow the model that I set forth.

How would you describe Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis’ performance as police chief?

I think she’s done a good job. Obviously, the incident with Tyre Nichols and the SCORPION unit and what appears to be a lack of oversight is something that she has to own. And I think she has owned the mistakes and tried to do the things necessary to right the course, and that’s what leadership is about.

The challenge before C.J. now is making sure that she can maintain trust and respect with the officers that work under her leadership and also show transparency and openness to engage with the public in what can be sometimes hostile environments. The visceral hate that we’re seeing in our community between residents and officers is something that only goes away when you build relationships, and the chief has to be the tip of the spear when it comes to making that happen.

The MPD currently has about 1,900 officers but says it needs 2,500. Do you agree 2,500 is the right number? 

I agree. I don’t know that many people would disagree. As president of Downtown Memphis Commission, when I work with MPD on staffing issues for Downtown, I know there are tremendous staffing pressures that they’re under, particularly with overnight shifts. 

How would you look to help MPD add officers? 

We have to start introducing people to law enforcement younger. Just like we have training programs in high schools for the trades, we could introduce them to public safety careers. I think we obviously should continue to recruit from other cities. And I want our officers to be the highest paid officers in the region. I want them to feel like the big dog: When you work from Memphis, you’re on the premier force. You’re going to have the most resources, you’re going to have the best equipment, and you’re going to have all the support that you need. There was a time that that was the case; when you worked for MPD, you were the big dog in the law enforcement community. 

We also have to find the efficiencies that are going to make sure that we are being most efficient with the ones that we already have. When someone is arrested, it takes them three hours to process the arrest. This is just paperwork. This is just process improvement. These are things that we can be working on to get that officer back on the street. Those are the types of things that I want to analyze, so they can put more time into being present on the streets. Having a physical presence brings calm to our community.

Currently, nearly 40 percent of the city of Memphis’ budget goes to police. Should residents expect that, under your administration, that share would go up, down, or stay the same?  

It will probably be about the same. You would see incremental increases as a result of increasing the number of staff, but I don’t see it going up significantly or going down significantly. 

In order to truly make our community safe, we have to find ways to make additional investments in public safety that’s not necessarily MPD — investments in our parks and our community centers and mental health programs, things that will actually prevent the crime in the first place. We have to build up this additional support for public safety. At the same time we support this police system that we’ve been using for years. 

October 6, 2022: Memphis, TN – Paul Young, President/CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission, during the mayoral forum hosted at The Pocket in Downtown Memphis, alongside fellow candidates Judge Joe Brown and Van Turner. Photo by Ariel Cobbert for MLK50

MPD is currently under a civil rights investigation by the Department of Justice. How do you plan to ensure MPD treats all of Memphis’ citizens fairly? 

I welcome the investigation that’s underway. It will help us identify national best practices for ensuring that everyone is being treated with dignity and respect. Leadership is making sure that I set the tone as mayor with my willingness to comply and willingness to engage. We want that to resonate with the chief of MPD and everyone that falls under her purview. 

The investigation will also give us declarative actions that we can take to ensure that we’re doing exactly what we want.

Other than police, name three measures you would take to increase public safety.

First and foremost is data sharing. We need data sharing among MPD, juvenile court, truancy court, and the school system. We should study the trajectory of criminals — of people that have gone down the wrong path — and what were some of the early indicators. My guess — I haven’t done the research — is you’re going to see suspensions from school and truancy. We should take that data, identify who’s headed down the wrong path, and deeply engage them in programs that can change their lives like My Brother’s Keeper.

Second is activating our community centers. When we look at young people, many are surprised that they’re running around busting windows. I’m not surprised because they want to have fun. There’s a thrill to busting windows. We have to have an alternative to it. We should engage our youth from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., when they’re the most mischievous.

And then investments in mental health programs. We have traumatized people that are out here traumatizing others. Our young people are experiencing trauma that is unnatural. Some people are losing uncles, brothers, and cousins; they’re going to come back and retaliate unless someone works with them to change their outlook on the world. My mom started the Emotional Fitness Centers of Tennessee; I could see investing in programs like that.

What public safety solutions have you seen work in other cities that you would seek to implement here?

Pittsburgh re-trained their officers on how to engage on police stops. They talk about the weather and make small talk to disarm. They do that to reduce the likelihood of a negative encounter.

In Omaha, they put together a coalition of people from different agencies focused on holistic public safety. They’re using data to identify the young people that need other interventions. And they have a host of programs that are able to engage those young people when they’ve been identified.

Some cities have tried to respond to mental health crises with first responders who aren’t police officers. Is that a solution you’re interested in exploring for Memphis? 

I’ve talked to people that have done it. The challenge you find is that when you have individuals responding to an intense scene or somebody’s having a mental health episode, with the proliferation of guns in our community, you still need a trained officer. Can we send mental health workers out with officers? Yes. Sending them out alone? No, I don’t think that’s wise.

Would you be willing to redirect any funds from policing to address mental health?

No, I’d find more money.

How do you plan to engage young people, to help them avoid gangs and criminal activity?

They have midnight basketball in St. Louis, and they’re working to activate their community centers for more hours. I want to invest in programs that are going to bring stronger children to the classroom — wearing them out playing basketball and other sports. I think that it’s really important that we invest in our community centers, our parks, and our churches.

Memphis always ranks poorly in its number of roadway deaths. How would you help make our streets safer without relying solely on increased MPD enforcement? 

We need drivers to be informed that the public right of way isn’t just for cars. It’s for people. People walk, they bike, and they drive cars. We need public service announcements that remind people that they have to share the roads. We also should be exploring design solutions. There are ways that you can design intersections and roads such that they tighten at certain points that get people to slow down.

MEMPHIS, TN – August 12, 2023: Memphis mayoral candidate Paul Young poses for a portrait during the 2023 Memphis People’s Convention at the Memphis Sports and Events Center. Photo by Brandon Dill for MLK50

As mayor, what is a measure you would take to help get guns off the street?

Gun buyback programs — making sure people are turning those things in. And making sure we address illegal guns. When people commit crimes with those types of weapons, we should make sure there’s a higher penalty.

Do harsher penalties — for guns and in general — work to reduce crime?

I don’t know if they’re a strong deterrent, but I think they’re just. If you are committing certain crimes in our community, then the penalty has to match the level of the brutality that you’re unleashing. Whether criminals are deterred or not, harsher penalties are the right thing to do. I don’t think that there will be like an overwhelming amount of people that will be deterred, but the question is what is the right amount of time for the chaos being wreaked.

As mayor, what is a measure you would take to reduce car break-ins and theft? 

Those are young people. I had an opportunity to sit on a town hall panel with NLE Choppa a few months ago, and there was a young person who said he liked stealing cars. I asked why. He said, ‘I’m bored and I need some money.’ Those are things we should be solving for! We have to find ways to engage youth, have them earn money and have fun.

As specifically as possible, what are your thoughts about maintaining a curfew on young Memphians?

I support the curfew. I think the challenge comes with implementation. I don’t agree with profiling; I don’t think you identify youth by what clothes they’re wearing. But if they’re obviously 10 or an adolescent, I think we should take them into custody where their parents can come and pick them up.

Floyd Bonner is obviously the sheriff. And Willie Herenton has done this before. What experience do you have to help you make this community safer?

As president of Downtown Memphis Commission, we lead the Blue Suede Brigade, which is not a police force but they serve a security function and work with MPD. As incidents have taken place in Downtown Memphis, I’m in the War Room with the Memphis Police Department. We’re working and strategizing every day on how we can keep Downtown safer.

The issues we’re dealing with around public safety are not strictly about law enforcement. It’s about all the things. It’s about the environment that young people grow up in — the fact that everything around them looks hopeless and you have houses that are crumbling. They don’t have options; this is something I deeply know and appreciate because of the work that I’ve done in communities and neighborhoods throughout the city. That’s experience the other candidates don’t have.

What personal experiences do you have with crime?

I’ve been robbed by people I know and have had guns pulled on me in my car. I’ve had, obviously, car break-ins and busted windows but that’s frivolous. 

By the time I was 21, I had about four or five friends that had been shot and killed. 

You become numb to it. My boy Ced got killed by another one of my friends when we were 20. One of my real close friends got shot and killed by a dude in an apartment with all my friends in the room — the dude just stood up and shot him because he took some liquor from him or something. One of my buddies just got killed last summer. It doesn’t stop.

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Willie Herenton: At 83, ‘sharper than a lot of 30- and 40-year olds’

August 29, 2023: Memphis, TN - Willie Herenton, 83, former Memphis city mayor who served for 17 years and current candidate in the 2023 mayoral race. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Yes, Willie Herenton is 83. And he’s fit. 

If you ask, the former mayor will tell you that he takes two-mile walks by the Mississippi during the hottest part of the day just to challenge himself. (He brings water.) He mostly eats fish and vegetables and has at least one glass of good red wine a day. Sometimes two. 

So, he’s ready and able to serve Memphis again. 

Yes, he left his fifth term early. In an interview about public safety with the Memphis Flyer and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, Herenton explained why: One part was his success. 

“I knew I was mayor for life. Nobody was gonna beat me. I knew that,” he said. “I’d achieved all my major goals. I couldn’t just sit around and draw a paycheck. I was bored.” 

(Editor’s note: In 2019, Herenton ran for mayor and was defeated by Mayor Jim Strickland.) 

Another reason, he says, was because two years of scrutiny from a federal investigation was wearing on his mama. 

“Basically, my trials became her trials. … She might have been watching TV, and I might have had a bad media day. And I said mom, ‘I got this. You don’t understand what’s going on.’ She wasn’t sophisticated. All she knew was her son was under pressure.” 

Herenton, who was mayor from 1992 to 2009, was also candid about what he could and could not do. He doubted he’d be able to hire enough police officers to reach 2,500, the number of officers Mayor Jim Strickland has said the city needs, but he says he knows what to do to fix MPD culture. He noted that only the state legislature has the ability to take on gun control, and he thinks the highway patrol is best to tackle dangerous roadways. 

He spoke more of his experience than his age as an asset, noting a couple of things he’d seen work and would like to revive: In the shadow of the killing of Tyre Nichols, he spoke of the respectable police force he led, one, he says, that embraced the Constitution. 

He believes, too, in specialized units, noting that his Cobra unit, unlike the now-dismantled SCORPION unit responsible for the January beating death of Tyre Nichols, was well-trained and well-supervised. 

The following Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. This interview was conducted on Aug. 29, 2023.

The killing of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police officers obviously damaged the community’s trust in the police. What steps would you take to rebuild that trust?

Let me give you a kind of a preface … I served as mayor for almost 18 years. So, obviously, I have experience working with directors of police. I know a lot about police operations and all this training stuff. I’m prepared to bring respectability and constitutional policing back to MPD. Now everybody knows I am pro-law enforcement. For anyone to entertain defunding the police department is utterly ridiculous to me. So I’m going to bring back Blue CRUSH (Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History). Blue CRUSH was a strategy with well-trained officers. You’ve got to have specialized police units, but they’ve got to be well-trained. They’ve got to be appropriately selected. And you gotta have accountability. 

We had a unit we called Cobra. Those officers were handpicked. And those units had sergeants, lieutenants, and majors, ensuring accountability. What happened in the Tyre Nichols situation? They had a group of officers that didn’t have extensive tenure as police officers. And they lacked supervision … I would have an organizational structure with a chain of command providing appropriate oversight.  

How would you describe Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis’ performance as police chief? 

Had I been the mayor, would I have made that choice? In all probability, she would not have been my choice. Why not? Well, from what I’ve read in the press and from what I’ve heard, there were some troubling issues in her past that I probably would have had to carefully weigh. The other reason is that if I could have identified an individual that had the competency level that I could trust with that leadership role, I would have selected from within.   

You said you want to increase the number of MPD officers. How would you go about doing that?

I’m gonna be very candid with you. It’s going to be very difficult reaching that 2,500 goal because I will implement the highest standards. I think they’ve lowered the standards, which is troubling to me. The academic standards, for example: I don’t think training is vigorous and as rigorous as it was. I remember, in my first term, I would go out to the training academy and watch how to train officers. I even went out on the shooting range and all that. We had well-trained officers.

MPD is currently under a civil rights investigation by the Department of Justice. How do you plan to ensure the MPD treats all Memphis citizens fairly?

Well, first of all, when I said to you it is clear to me that we need to fix the culture of MPD, I’m committed to doing that. I know exactly how to get the culture straightened out and to make sure that we have transparency. We’ll have accountability, and we’ll have constitutional policing. And it starts with my leadership. It may also have something to do with my choice of a director.

Other than policing, per se, can you name three measures you could take to increase public safety?

You mean, outside of the police? That opens up a whole gamut of issues that takes you into the philosophical. As a majority Black city, we are number one*. Now, how do people interpret this? Probably that such a city is plagued with poverty, crime, declining education, and quality of life because it’s Black. 

(Editor’s note: USA Today reported in June 2023 that 2022 population estimates show Memphis may have overtaken Detroit as the nation’s largest predominately Black city.)

In Newark or in Detroit, they expect government to be inefficient and corrupt because it’s majority Black. That’s why you’ve always seen me strive for excellence. I’ve always wanted to be an exception to that prevailing thought that because it’s Black it can’t be excellent and competent. 

What we’ve got to do is deal with the inequalities of life that exist in many urban cities that disproportionately affect people of color. And that’s a long haul, like I said. Generational poverty is an albatross around the neck of Memphis. And it’s going to take economic growth and development and include a diverse population, improved education.

August 29, 2023: Memphis, TN – Dr. Willie Herenton, 83, former Memphis city mayor (for five consecutive terms 1992-2006) and current candidate in the 2023 mayoral race. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

At the age of 83, do you feel fit for another term as mayor?

If I didn’t feel that my cognitive and physical abilities are not appropriate to go back, I wouldn’t do this. Thus far, God has blessed me to maintain a reasonably good cognitive ability and physical abilities. With age, everything declines. But for whatever reason, I still feel sharper than a lot of 30- and 40-year-olds.  

You were concerned about your mother’s reactions to the tribulations?

Yeah, because so much was rolling off my back, and she worried about my having to handle it.

Okay. So we started best practices. So to answer your question, I would obviously stay abreast of best practices. I was studying cities and police departments getting good results. I’ve always done that.

Some cities have tried to respond to mental health crises with first responders who aren’t police officers. Is that a solution you’re interested in?

Just about a month ago, we looked at the organizational chart. I want to make sure that I understand the present organization and charter of the police department. In our society today, there’s suffering from mental health, and a lot of police officers are not educated. The other thing people don’t understand, too, is that a lot of individuals out here have all kinds of mental disabilities that the policemen, if they’re not well-trained, they don’t know how to recognize. You have to broaden the training because they are running into some mental health issues that need to be addressed. 

We’re gonna have a partnership with Memphis City Schools. We will have partnerships with nonprofits and with the Methodist health system in dealing with a variety of mental health issues. I want to have a partnership with the public school to increase the number of guidance counselors in schools.

How do you plan to engage young people to help them avoid gangs and criminal activity?

There’s a myriad of complex social, psychological factors involving youth and adults that society has to deal with. This is gonna require educated people, law enforcement people, the whole gamut of professionals to deal with the myriad of problems we have in this society.

Memphis always ranks poorly in its number of roadway deaths. Is there a way to make our streets safer without relying solely on increased enforcement?

The reckless driving in Memphis has reached epidemic proportions. I’ve never seen the level of reckless driving, inappropriate driving behavior, as I’m seeing on the expressway and streets. I’m so happy to see the increased level of highway patrol in our city. I will support that 100 percent — to increase the presence of highway patrolmen. They do it right.  

August 29, 2023: Memphis, TN – Dr. Willie Herenton, 83, former Memphis city mayor (for five consecutive terms 1992-2006) and current candidate in the 2023 mayoral race. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

What degree of collaboration should exist between the MPD and the sheriff’s department?

The operations of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department are dramatically different from MPD. The Memphis Police Department is a multifaceted, highly complex law enforcement unit, much broader than the sheriff’s department. Now they should have a partnership. I think they ought to work hand in hand. The sheriff is the highest law enforcement official in the county. I think they ought to use resources when they are available to patrol in the city limits as well. 

Can you give me a realistic change you can facilitate to help reduce car theft and property theft?

There’s some brands of cars that are [more] susceptible to car thieves than others. In fact, I think I read that our current mayor was joining with some other mayors who’re talking about suing automakers who make cars so easy to be stolen.  

Would you be interested in joining? 

Yes.

Can you give me an idea for getting guns off Memphis streets?

I think that the legislative body in Tennessee is going to have to exercise more accountability and responsibility as we look at gun violence and gun control. So I’m for a lot of the reform measures. But within the powers of the executive branch, which the mayor is in, we just have to operate within the confines of the Constitution and state legislature.

Do you favor the referendum on gun-control measures put forth by the city council?

Oh, yeah, I support it, but it’s probably unrealistic. Say the referendum passes. State law has more authority than local law. And given the culture, it’s not going to pass the Tennessee legislature. I’m just simply saying that getting some reform past our Tennessee legislature looks bleak. Of course, I would be just as vigilant and confrontational as this group that went up there before the special session.

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Politics Politics Feature

In the Picture

Michelle McKissack (Photo: Michelle McKissack | Facebook)

As was teased in this space last week, second-quarter financial disclosures of the Memphis mayoral candidates were expected to come due. And they did, roughly a day after last week’s issue went to print.

The contents of the disclosures have since been bruited about here and there and have been subjected to analysis. In many — perhaps most — ways, the numbers conform to advance expectations. The leaders now, in the vital metric of cash on hand, are the same two who led the field in first-quarter disclosures in January: Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Paul Young, with $432,434.97 cash on hand, and Sheriff Floyd Bonner, with $404,139.12.

Local NAACP president Van Turner was still very much in the game, with $154,633.46, as was the largely self-funding developer J.W. Gibson, with $254,015.55.

The real surprise was former Memphis-Shelby County Schools board chair Michelle McKissack, who raised $101,712.95 — in less than two months of a declared candidacy, she notes — and has $79,164.95 on hand.

Clearly, McKissack has some catching up to do but justly takes pride in her results, given her relatively late start. She and the other candidates have some time, given that candidate petitions cannot even be drawn until May 22nd. Election day is October 5th, some five months away.

In a video tweet last week, McKissack alleged about some of the media coverage that “there are those in the city who don’t want to acknowledge that it’s actually possible for a woman to be mayor of Memphis.” She focused on an unnamed article “that really touted, just, you know, highlighting the men in this race.”

Both the point of view and even some of the language in McKissack’s tweet were reminiscent of attitudes expressed by former female candidates for mayor — notably Carol Chumney, now a Circuit Court Judge, who ran for Memphis mayor twice, finishing a competitive second place to incumbent Willie Herenton in a three-way race in 2007.

Herenton, out of office now for 14 years, is a candidate again for his former office, where he served for 17 years. He and others — including City Councilman Frank Colvett, state House minority leader Karen Camper, former County Commissioner James Harvey, and former TV judge Joe Brown — will doubtless make some waves, one way or another.

Tami Sawyer (Photo: Tami Sawyer | Facebook)

• Another former mayoral candidate, Tami Sawyer, who had a singularly devoted following for her reform platform in 2019, is back on the scene after a work sojourn for Amazon in both D.C. and California. She tweeted, “Yes, I’m back in Memphis for good … I am not running for office in 2023. But y’all gonna still see me deep in this work.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Mayor Floyd Bonner?

Floyd Bonner electioneering this year (Photo: Jackson Baker)

There is, it would seem, a different Name of the Week in generalized speculation about the 2023 Memphis mayor’s race. Confessedly, there have certainly been different figures to talk about in successive weeks of this column.

Previously mentioned as likely mayoral candidates next year have been: NAACP head Van Turner, who is finishing up his second and final term of the County Commission this week; Paul Young, the president/CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission; Karen Camper, caucus leader of the state House of Representatives Democrats; and Joe Brown, the onetime Criminal Court judge and former TV celebrity judge.

Brown’s intentions, though he has certainly promoted a possible race, may be more fanciful than real. The others are, one way or another, making tangible plans to run. Turner has basically already announced, Young is reportedly lining up some serious financing for a campaign, and Camper is expected to make an announcement any week now.

Other names that are getting some mention are those of the Rev. Keith Norman of First Baptist Church-Broad, a chief lobbyist for Baptist Memorial Hospital and a former Democratic Party chair; Beverly Robertson, president/CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber; Patrice Robinson, City Council member and former Council chair; and Worth Morgan, City Council member and defeated Republican candidate for county mayor this year.

This week’s most mentioned mayoral prospect? Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who in two successive county elections has led all other candidates for office and has a decent-sized campaign account left over to start a mayoral campaign with.

Bonner’s popularity with the voters as a Democratic candidate has been such that Shelby County Republicans did not even bother to nominate an opponent for him this year and themselves endorsed him.

His interest in running for the nonpartisan office of mayor is a very real thing, and he has definitely had preliminary discussions about mounting a campaign next year. Bonner’s status on the eve of the Memphis city election has been likened by more than one observer to that of AC Wharton in the first decade of this century, when Wharton was considered an inevitable candidate for, successively, Shelby County mayor and Memphis mayor, both of which offices he would win.

Jason Martin (Photo: Jackson Baker)

• Jason Martin, the Nashville critical-care physician who emerged as the winner of the Democrats’ three-way gubernatorial primary, was the speaker at last week’s Germantown Democratic Club meeting.

Addressing an audience of 70-odd attendees at the Coletta’s restaurant in East Shelby County, Martin deplored GOP Governor Bill Lee’s policies on several counts, including Lee’s restrictive posture toward abortion rights, his refusal to countenance Medicaid expansion and the annual federal outlays of $1 billion that would come with it, his striking away of gun regulations, and his moves toward privatizing public education.

Said Martin: “The other side is so radical on these issues that most people are like, ‘That’s not me.’ And that’s why we’re getting traction.”

• As first reported last week on memphisflyer.com, outgoing District Attorney General Amy Weirich will be taking a position as assistant DA with the office of Mark Davidson, district attorney for the adjoining 25th Judicial District, which serves the counties of Tipton, Fayette, Lauderdale, McNairy, and Hardeman.

A press release from Davidson’s office on Monday confirmed that Weirich will be sworn in as special counsel to his office on September 1st, a day after the swearing-in of Steve Mulroy, who defeated Weirich in the August 4th county election, to replace her as Shelby DA.

• The ever-worsening situation of Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert, under fire for mishandling license-plate distribution and her office affairs in general, almost got even bleaker Monday when the Shelby County Commission, in its final meeting as currently composed, failed by one vote to appoint a special counsel to begin ouster proceedings.

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Politics Politics Feature

More to Come

Back in 2009, Joe Brown (right), then the star of a syndicated TV show and now a self-declared mayoral candidate, hobnobbed on a visit home with newly installed Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, state Representative G.A. Hardaway, and the late state Senator Reginald Tate. (Photo: Jackson Baker)

With outgoing County Commissioner Van Turner’s announcement last week of a pending run for Memphis mayor in 2023, another political season is on its way.

Actually, Turner did not announce as such; he told the Flyer, and subsequently the world, that he would be making his formal announcement at month’s end, about the time he leaves his present office.

If advance gossip can be trusted, Turner, whom many observers reckon as the favorite, can expect to be joined in the contest by Downtown Memphis Commission President Paul Young, who has a key speech to the Kiwanis Club scheduled this week, and Karen Camper, minority leader in the state House of Representatives.

Meanwhile, local NAACP head Turner is actually the second declared candidate for the office, which is likely to be the object of spirited competition now that the voters have taken incumbent Mayor Jim Strickland out of the running by voting in the August 4th election not to allow a third term for mayor and council members.

The first declared candidate? None other than Joe Brown — not the General Sessions Court clerk and former councilman but the other Joe Brown, who played a judge on TV for some years after being one for real in Shelby County back in the ’90s. You might have missed it, but Brown’s announcement was made via YouTube last fall, and if he follows through, it will be his second major non-judicial run for office in these parts.

Brown’s last electoral effort, a race for district attorney in 2014, began with abundant ballyhoo and a sense among some local Democrats that his celebrity and presumed healthy bank account would allow the party to achieve a generalized success at the polls. Instead he belly-flopped, badly. Coincidentally or not, so did the party.

Among other things, the bankroll — for whatever reason — didn’t exist, nor did Brown’s actions and public positions during the campaign exactly square with many people’s ideas of political leadership.

As part of his rollout, Brown had been the keynote speaker at an official Democratic Party tribute to former Mayor Willie Herenton. He used the occasion to denounce “promiscuous” women and make homophobic remarks.

One of his next acts was to get himself arrested on a contempt of court charge for insulting a Juvenile Court magistrate in the process of a pro bono child support case Brown was handling. (Brown thereupon posted a Facebook entry in which he likened his ordeal to that of Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic confinement in the Birmingham jail.)

All this was just a lead-in to Brown’s culminating campaign act, a speech in which — sans any evidence or pretense of same, or any relevance to anything, for that matter — he accused his opponent, incumbent DA Amy Weirich, of having a lesbian affair with her next-door neighbor. Weirich won with 65 percent of the vote.

• Weirich’s luck ran out this year in another reelection campaign, this time against an opponent, Steve Mulroy, not pre-ordained to fantasize or self-destruct.

The two of them took turns last week in the well of the Shelby County auditorium, arguing this time for the same goal — the creation of a new bail hearing courtroom. A resolution to that end, requiring that bail issues for new county prisoners be hashed out in a hearing before a judge and with representation from both arrestee and victim of an alleged crime, was passed unanimously by the 13 members of the commission. As Mulroy noted, this was the one thing the two erstwhile adversaries had been able to agree on during this campaign year.

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Cover Feature News

Memphis Election Guide: Mayor and City Council Races Dominate the Ballot

There are 11 names on the October 3rd ballot for Memphis mayor, but that well-watched race is generally thought of as coming down to only three of those names — incumbent Mayor Jim Strickland, former Mayor Willie Herenton, and current County Commissioner Tami Sawyer. A fourth candidate, Lemichael Wilson, maintains that he has enough support to be considered viable, as well.

Of the presumed top three, one, Herenton, has a past record to be judged by; another, Strickland, has a current record subject to voter reckoning; and the third, Sawyer, offers a platform strongly animated by promises of progressive reform. Beyond that, there has been little opportunity to make comparative judgments about the three, inasmuch as there has been no public debate or candidate forum featuring all three.

Brandon Dill

Incumbent Mayor Jim Strickland

There have been all kinds of claims and reasons put forth to account for that circumstance, but the root facts are these: Herenton has opposed all efforts to include him in such a mutual confrontation, and Strickland has declined any joint endeavor that excludes the former mayor. For her part, Sawyer has accepted a series of open invitations that both Strickland and Herenton have eschewed.

Justin Fox Burks

Former Mayor Willie Herenton

One of the more recent of these was last Sunday’s conclave of MICAH (Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope) at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church Westwood — an event featuring thousands of attendees from numerous civic-minded organizations, all energized and in not much need of extra stoking. Of the mayoral hopefuls, only four were in attendance — Sawyer, Terrence T.B. Boyce, Lemichael Wilson, and Pamela Moses. Moses, whose candidacy has been disallowed by the Election Commission but who has filed suit against her exclusion, got to speak; Wilson was not invited to speak, since he had not completed a written pre-registration form for the event.

Current County Commissioner Tami Sawyer

That left only Boyce and Sawyer with a chance to make an impact. For an unknown, Boyce didn’t do badly in celebrating the event and its participants and in associating himself with it all. Sawyer did not exaggerate when she suggested that her own stated objectives and “every one” of MICAH’s bullet points were one and the same: “from transportation equity and economic equity to support for human rights, so on and so forth, and, most importantly, education and opportunity for our youth.”

For his part, Strickland was at a meet-and-greet at a supporter’s house elsewhere in town, one of a series of such events he has come to employ. And Herenton had, since the beginning of early voting on Friday, been busy organizing the bus “caravans” to the polls that would win the election for him — or so he had promised at a rally last month. So involved had he become in the planning that he was a no-show at an event of his own on Friday evening — a “sunset with Doc on the river” occasion, now postponed until later, that was to have been held on Mud Island.  

Early voting is indeed underway and will continue through Saturday, September 28th. Voting will conclude on Election Day, Thursday, October 3rd. Between the mayoral contest and other races, there will be 63 candidates for Memphians to choose from. Besides the aforementioned 11 mayoral candidates, there are 52 candidates on the ballot for 13 Memphis City Council seats, nine for the City Court Clerk position, and five for judgeships in City Court.

There is also a referendum for a half-cent increase in the sales tax, the initial proceeds of which are meant to restore health care and pension benefits lost to first-responder public employees in recent years, with any remaining proceeds to be applied to street maintenance and/or pre-K education.

The election is being held in the year of the city’s own bicentennial; Memphis having been founded in 1819. Our 58th mayor since then, Jim Strickland, took office in 2015, having defeated then-incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, whose comeuppance was due in part to the trimming of benefits mentioned above.

One basic problem for challengers Herenton and Sawyer is that, financially, they lack the means to contend on even terms with Strickland, who brought a campaign kitty of $1 million into the campaign. And prime media of the free kind — especially, as indicated, in the form of organized debates between the contenders — has been hard to come by.

While both of Strickland’s opponents have appealed to what they hoped were legions of dissatisfied citizens, Herenton’s base is obviously African American as such, while Sawyer’s is, in a paradoxical sense, both broader and narrower. 

Herenton’s pitch is basically to the long-depressed citywide population that he had empowered with his precedent-setting victory of 1991, as well as to the residual auld lang syne of his governmental experience and years in power. Important supporters of Herenton are public-employee unions, including the Memphis Police Association.

During his 18 years at the helm of city government, Herenton, who was actually the candidate of the Memphis establishment in 1995 and 1999, had enjoyed moments of genuine across-the-board support, though most of this has dissipated with time.

Sawyer, with her slogan of “We Can’t Wait,” has appealed primarily to younger voters, white and black. The county commissioner represents the eternal appeal of idealism per se, and through her determined activism over recent years, Sawyer has already achieved quite a lot — notably in her successful marshaling of opinion against the retention of statues and markers glorifying both the Confederacy and, implicitly, the creed of slavery.

Strickland, assisted by strategist Steven Reid, worked an effective simplification and synthesis of political issues in his campaign of 2015, and it gained him a victory over incumbent A C Wharton, who had once appeared unbeatable. As a councilman for two four-year terms, Strickland had been primarily a budget hawk and anti-taxer and had thereby solidified his hold on many Memphis homeowners.

Leaving that rhetoric of austerity aside (even if still coasting on its dividends), candidate Strickland in the 2015 campaign harped on three issues and three alone — public safety, blight, and accountability — all wrapped in the catch-all slogan of “Brilliant At the Basics.” Strickland defended this triad of talking points as a “vision” in 2015, and it has been transformed over the three and a half years of his tenure so far into the basis, more or less, of the self-administered report card of his reelection platform in 2019.

Launching his official “kick-off” in early August at his campaign headquarters, the old Spin Street store at Poplar and Highland, Strickland, whose usual practice is to cite pothole repairs as a major achievement,  boasted of an accelerated hiring of police officers, a doubling of the city’s paving budget, and the use of “data” to “drive government decisions.” He would quickly amend that formulation to “data and good people,” working in a brag on city employees.

Strickland served up some stats, claiming a quickening of the city’s 911 response to an average of seven seconds per call; an enhanced survival rate at the city’s animal shelter; an increased MWBE percentage (rate of contracting with firms owned by women and minorities); a 90-percent increase of summer jobs for youth; and 22,000 new jobs in three and a half years. “All of that without a tax increase,” Strickland proclaimed, promising more via his administration’s Memphis 3.0 growth plan. “Memphis does have momentum,” he assured attendees.

The Memphis 3.0 initiative, the city’s first comprehensive growth plan since 1981, is an ambitious prognosis of what should be done in the coming years. And in a sense, it involves a reversal of Memphis’ growth patterns since that former prospectus. In the previous 40 years, the city has sprawled eastward in a helter-skelter response to the various social upheavals of the late 20th century. The process was nonstop, and city government, merely to maintain a tax base and to stay within a country mile of solvency, annexed new developments — Parkway Village, Fox Meadows, Hickory Hill, and a whole array of new Potemkin villages in the vast eastern expanse of Cordova  — virtually as fast as developers could create them, incurring thereby an obligation to provide essential services.

Over the decades, there were calls from good-government types for city-county consolidation, but the developing geographic/demographic schism had occurred for a reason. The occasional referendums on the consolidation issue required “yes” votes in both city and county, and were inevitably defeated.

The last such test occurred in 2010, when the voters inside the city’s boundaries gave a consolidation proposal a bare okay, but voters of the outer county overwhelmingly said no. The next few years would see a reprise of sorts when the Memphis City Schools Board abandoned its charter, a majority of its members fearing that a new Republican legislative majority in Nashville would diminish state monies for city schools to fund a new special suburban district.

The outcome? An attempt at city-county school consolidation, which Shelby County’s six incorporated suburbs managed ultimately to fend off with friendly state legislation allowing for new municipal school systems.

These newly hardened buffer provinces magnified the problems of the city of Memphis, geographically spread thin and now effectively landlocked by other new state laws restricting its annexation rights. Hence, Strickland’s Memphis 3.0 plan, one central thrust of which was to emphasize, not outward-bound growth, but the in-filling of available or vacated urban areas. As Strickland and his surrogates now put it, “Build up, not out.”

While, implicitly, the mayor’s two major opponents accept Strickland’s concept that Memphis’ future is inward-looking, they differ as to what that concept exactly means, and they take issue with the mayor’s basic assumptions.

In appearances before union groups and other, largely African-American audiences, Herenton has scoffed at “this so-called momentum,” which he says exists so far mainly for developers.

Herenton disputes Strickland’s claims of being “brilliant with the basics,” saying, “I’ve never seen so many iron plates and potholes on the streets of Memphis in my lifetime.” And he calls attention to a recent rise in the city’s murder rate. In a radio interview with Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams, who himself ran for mayor in 2015 but is supporting Herenton this time around, the former mayor said, “Mike, if we don’t get at the root causes of family deterioration, of children being neglected, we’re not going to solve this crime problem.” 

While naming economic development one of his own highest priorities, Herenton expressed concern that the current city establishment “gives away the store” by extending excessive tax breaks and incentives while overlooking the needs of ordinary citizens. Mocking the old saw that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” Herenton proclaimed, “If you don’t have a boat, you’re not going to rise.”

The former chief executive sees himself involved in a “one-on-one” contest with Strickland, minimizing candidate Sawyer as a “distraction” and implicitly rebuking her role as a civic gadfly. “I don’t think leadership can tolerate civil disobedience,” Herenton has said.

There’s no question that Sawyer is willing to confront established practices that, as she sees it, militate against less fortunate members of the Memphis population. She began her rise to prominence — and a national reputation —  in 2014 as one of the leaders of the local Black Lives Matter movement, highlighting the too-often-deadly encounters between Memphis police officers and African-American youth. It was as the founder and principal strategist of “Take ‘Em Down 901” — an organization determined to rid Memphis of its Confederate statues — that Sawyer earned her stripes and enhanced public awareness. 

While Strickland, himself long committed to statue removal, tried to work within the confines of state law and to coax permission from the Tennessee Historical Commission to remove the Confederate monuments from their pedestals in the parks, Sawyer led other activists in around-the-clock vigils around the statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in what had been renamed Health Sciences Park. 

Said Sawyer at the time: “The people are saying that this is what they want. The people that they have asked to represent them have the power and the right to be radical in making this change.”

After finding himself blocked by the guardians of tradition in Nashville and goaded by the reformers at home, Strickland, working with legal adviser Bruce McMullen, devised a way of accomplishing the statue removal: The mayor used a loophole in the law that allowed him to deed over possession of the parks to an ad hoc nonprofit organization, which quickly removed the statues, legally, under cover of darkness.

Sawyer was anything but congratulatory. “You cannot give credit to the mayor and his administration for the removal of the statues and erase the fact that they participated in the arrest, detainment, surveillance, and silencing of the activists and protesters who brought the issue back to the public eye,” she said.

In 2018, Sawyer was elected to the Shelby County Commission, from which vantage point she continues to speak out for what she sees as long-overdue change, highlighting such issues as outmoded public transportation, the need for criminal justice reform, and implementation of a local $15-an-hour minimum wage. In every sense, her slogan, “We Can’t Wait,” is a clear rendition of her worldview.

With only a fortnight left in the race, Strickland remains the clear favorite, with support from a wide demographic range, as would be indicated by a recent prayer breakfast where he was warmly endorsed by a  gathering of prominent black pastors.

Herenton has meanwhile been able to hold mass gatherings of mostly African-American supporters. And Sawyer’s enthusiastic reception at last Sunday’s MICAH conclave suggests something about the breadth and energy of her base. The mayor’s private polls show him with a comfortable lead. But both Herenton and Sawyer are determined to take the fight to the incumbent, and anything can happen in the campaign’s final two weeks. Stay tuned.

City Council Races

The Memphis City Council has two decidedly different kinds of seats; the six “Super District” seats — three of which are in predominantly black Super District 8, and three of which are in white-inflected Super District 9. All six contests are, as is the case with the mayor’s race, winner-take-all affairs. The other seven seats are more traditional, representing the seven individual geographic districts that comprise the city. In the “District” seats, runoff elections are held if no one candidate gets a majority on October 3rd. Which raises another point of contention.

Shelby County Election Administrator Linda Phillips had arranged for the 2019 election to be conducted via the process of Ranked Choice Voting, which obviated runoffs by allowing successive re-samplings of votes cast by out-of-the-running finishers to determine a winner. But a de facto collaboration of incumbent council members and opponents of RCV in the state election coordinator’s office managed to suppress the instituting of that reform, which had twice been approved in referendum votes by Memphis voters. Adherents of RCV, also called Instant Runoff Voting, intend to keep pressing for its use in future elections.

The 13 city council races break down this way:

District One (Raleigh, Northeast Memphis): This race is essentially a rematch between incumbent Sherman Greer, a former aide to two 9th District Congressmen, Harold Ford Jr. and Steve Cohen, and Rhonda Logan, president of the Raleigh Community Development Corporation and the protégé of several north Memphis politicians, notably State Rep. Antonio Parkinson. After a prolonged stalemate to fill a council vacancy, Greer got the interim nod from a council vote over Logan last year. Dawn Bonner is a third hopeful.

District Two (Outlying East Memphis, Cordova): Incumbent Frank Colvett, sales director at Greenscape, Inc., is expected to have little trouble with token opposition from novice candidates John Emery and Marvin White.

District Three (Southeast Memphis, Hickory Hill, Whitehaven): Incumbent Patrice Robinson is strongly favored over challenger Tanya Cooper.

District Four (Central City Area): Though she remains favored, incumbent Jamita Swearengen may have a fight on her hands with challenger Britney Thornton, the Ivy League-educated founder of JUICE Orange Mound, a community development organization.

District Five (Midtown, East Memphis): Sales executive Worth Morgan, the incumbent, is what his name sounds like: He’s the son of investment-guru Allan Morgan of Morgan-Keegan fame. Well-funded and well-spoken, he won easily in 2015 and has become a council fixture, though one demonstrably capable of independent actions. In 2019, he is up against John Marek, a stylish maverick, cannabis pioneer, and founder of the Dignity PAC, dedicated to criminal justice reform. This race could catch fire, given the district’s eclectic demographics.

District Six (South Memphis, Downtown, Riverfront): This race has a lot of sideshow activity, with a father-daughter contest (Perry Bond vs. Theryn Bond) and a gay policeman/minister Davin Clemons bearing the endorsement of County Mayor Lee Harris. But former seat-holder Edmund Ford Sr. is favored in a bid to reclaim his old seat. Other candidates are Paul S. Brown and J. Jacques Hamilton.

District Seven (North Memphis, Frayser): The trick here is to see who can make it into a runoff with incumbent Berlin Boyd, who has constantly been under fire for his imperious attitude and penchant for wheeling, dealing, and flirting with potential conflicts of interest. Among the eight challengers looking for that ultimate one-on-one are Michalyn C.S. Easter-Thomas, who has the endorsement of this year’s People’s Convention, community activist Thurston Smith, and political newcomer Jerred Price. Others are Toni Green-Cole, Jimmy Hassann, Will “the Underdog” Richardson, Catrina L. Smith, and Larry Springfield.

Super District Eight, Position One: Gerre Currie, the current District 6 incumbent, eschewed that race in deference to Edmund Ford Sr. and is running in this tight field instead. Her major opponent is probably lawyer J.B. Smiley, who is running hard. Reformer Pearl “Eva” Walker has a passel of endorsements and a nod from the People’s Convention, and Darrick Dee Harris is a familiar Democratic Party activist. Nicole Cleaborn rounds out a crowded field.

Super District Eight, Position Two: Incumbent Cheyenne Johnson, running as a Democrat, went undefeated for several terms as county assessor, even in Republican-dominated eras. So she has to be favored here against Marinda Alexandria-William, entertainer Frank Johnson, Craig Littles, and Brian L. Saulsberry.

Super District Eight, Position Three: Incumbent Martavius Jones, a stockbroker and former Memphis School Board member, is often a swing vote on the council, and should prevail over newcomer Cat Allen, R.S. Ford Sr., Gerald Kiner, Pam Lee, and Lynette P. Williams.

Super District Nine, Position One: This is a classic one-on-one contest between developer Chase Carlisle, who is an entry from the big-bucks Caissa Public Strategies stable, and grassroots candidate Erika Sugarmon, the socially conscious daughter of the late civil rights eminence Russell Sugarmon.

Super District Nine, Position Two: Incumbent Ford Canale has important establishment support, but he has challenges from Deanielle Jones and Mauricio Calvo. Calvo, the longtime executive director of Latino Memphis, is a newly naturalized citizen making his first political run and, upon entering the race, made a point of coming out as bisexual.

Super District Nine, Position Three: University of Memphis Development specialist Cody Fletcher would appear to offer the only real challenge to Jeff Warren, a former school board member who has impressively diversified support from numerous sources and has been the leading fund-raiser among council candidates. Charley Burch raised a policy issue or two before endorsing Warren, and Tyrone Romeo Franklin rounds out that field.

At issue overall is the question of whether grassroots city council candidates any longer have a serious chance against those favored by the city’s business elite, a group which has in recent years used its financial resources, in effect, to bypass the dialogues and forums of pure democracy.

Buttressed by high-dose advertising and veritable forests of yard signs, the favored candidates can — and sometimes do — conduct entire campaigns while remaining remote enigmas to the voting population. For better or worse, the last several councils might as well have been hand-picked by the development community, which seems determined to prevail in its choices once again.

See “Politics,” for information on judicial races and the race for City Court Clerk.

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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
Opinion The Last Word

My Choice for Memphis Mayor

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Larry Kuzniewski

Justin Fuente

Early voting has begun, and I’ve made my choice for the next mayor of Memphis.

My pick for mayor is an up-and-comer who loves a challenge. What some might call “the worst job in the country,” he calls an opportunity.
He balances a lot of responsibilities at his current high-pressure job. But he manages and delegates effectively. He and a few assistants oversee a team of about 90 people, most of whom are only high school-educated.

He hasn’t been in Memphis long, but his outsider perspective means he’s not cynical and defeatist.

He’s not above working on weekends – in fact, he lives for a Saturday at the office.

Sorry A C, Jim, Mike, and Harold. Maybe next time, Mongo. There’s one man who has shown he has the guts, vision, and leadership to tackle seemingly insurmountable odds and effect real, positive change.

His name is Justin Fuente. He coaches the University of Memphis football team.

I know what you’re probably thinking, and, at first, I didn’t believe in him either. I even called him “another ‘who’ hire instead of a ‘wow'” the day it was announced he’d been selected to coach my alma mater’s embarrassment of a football team. I don’t remember whom I preferred at the time, or why I even thought anyone else would be crazy enough to take the job, but I will happily admit I was wrong. With the success Fuente has had here, I’m more inclined to call him a genius or a wizard than a coach. If he can fix Memphis football, let’s see what else he can do.

If Coach Fuente can transform the Memphis football program from trolley fire to conference champion in just three seasons, I’d like to see what he can do for Memphis Animal Services. Did you see that reverse flea-flicker Paxton Lynch threw Saturday at Bowling Green? That demonstrates that Fuente’s not scared to get creative and make bold decisions, a strength I would like to see him apply in addressing the city’s issues with blight.

We talk about attracting and retaining talent to the city, and so far he seems to have done a pretty good job with that. Just imagine the positive attention the city will get if Memphis beats Ole Miss this season. If that happens, we should bypass the mayor thing and crown him King of Memphis for life eternal so he never moves on to a “bigger” job. What better gig is there than king?

I’m sure he’d decline, deflecting the praise onto his players and assistant coaches. But it would backfire, because that kind of humility is another leadership quality that would make him a perfect mayor and/or king of the city. Shoot, bring the staff along too. City Council, start packing your things. I’d offer the players something too, but I’d hate for some NCAA violations to interfere with these good-time feelings in Tiger Nation.  

Former U of M athletic director R.C. Johnson used to say “It’s a great day to be a Tiger,” and it made me cringe every time. But we can finally say without irony that these are halcyon days indeed for Your Memphis Tigers, who have started the season 3-0 for the first time since 2004. That means they’re already halfway to bowl eligibility for the second year in a row, with a  fairly friendly schedule ahead. They’ve won 10 straight games for the first time since Kennedy was president. That’s good for one of the longest winning streaks in the country. In football! Can you believe it? It still feels a little like Bizarro World to me.

For others, it feels too good to be true. Every postgame show, at least one caller asks: “How long before somebody snatches him up?” “What happens when he’s gone?” “What do we have to do to keep him here?” How typically and hilariously Memphis is that? “Things are going great, so we should probably start preparing ourselves for when it all inevitably goes to hell.”

I understand. Sports fans in this town have been burned before. But I promise it’s OK. If I had a dollar for every time a fellow alum told me “I love Tiger basketball, but I root for (insert SEC school here) in football ’cause … you know …” I could upgrade my season tickets. Now? They’re complaining about having to work in the morning after attending Thursday night’s Cincinnati game. The train’s on the tracks (literally, it’s on Southern just south of the stadium), and it’s moving in the right direction. Enjoy it.

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian and a digital marketing strategist.