Officer Joseph McKinney – Memphis Flyer

How much of the current sense that Memphis and Shelby County are threatened by a crime tsunami is a matter of perception, and how much is based on fact? That was one of the issues focused on during a summit in Bartlett last week in which DA Steve Mulroy and officials and other representatives of the outer county confronted both each other and the fear that things are getting out of control.

The roundtable meeting, hosted by Bank of Bartlett president Harold Byrd, was held last Thursday at the Bartlett campus of the College of Applied Technology (TCAT). There was a palpable sense of urgency to the event, conducted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting death of MPD Officer Joseph McKinney and a lethal fire-fight at an Orange Mound block party.

Mulroy took the opportunity to outline to the group various emergency crime-control procedures that his office was undertaking, and he cited a new report from the Shelby County Crime Commission showing that crime statistics had actually receded during the last quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.

Among others, Mayor Mike Wissman of Arlington was skeptical. “What you give us sounds good on paper. … But we’re not seeing that. I mean, every time we turn on the TV, the first five stories are all crime. And most of them [involve] repeat offenders. … It all sounds great. But we’re not seeing results. It’s very frustrating.”

Mayor Stan Joyner of Collierville also disputed “all the talk that crime is down,” suggesting that newly released repeat offenders were beating arresting officers back home from court to renew their illegal activities.

“I share your frustration,” Mulroy said, noting that violent crime had been building steadily for a decade in Shelby County before he took office. “I will tell you this, it’s absolutely the case that I find what’s going on right now unacceptable. And I’m trying to do everything that I can to bend that curve.”

As for the apparently reassuring crime statistics, Mulroy said, “They may be true, but they’ve gone down from an unacceptably high level. And so the trend may be a positive one, and we all pray that the trend goes down, but the absolute level of crime is still unacceptable, right?”

There was general agreement on the point and on other aspects of the moment, including the effect of rising crime concerns on retarding economic progress and the contention of Millington Chamber of Commerce official Terry Roland that Memphis was the only Tennessee city to lose population last year. “We’re the stopping point,” Roland said, suggesting that Shelby County’s outer communities were a major factor in restraining even more dramatic population loss.

Said Mulroy: “I get it that we want to avoid the vicious cycle of, you know, crime perception leading to less investment leading to less prosperity, leading to more poverty into more crime. We definitely do not want to get in that vicious cycle, which is why we need an all hands on deck approach. … I totally agree that we need to stop pointing fingers, and we need to start joining hands. And we need to show a unified front to the state. You know, let’s figure out what it is we want from the state on a consensus basis and then try to go get it.”

Bartlett Chamber of Commerce president John Threadgill made an effort to put the crime problem in a more general context: “We’re in fairly good company, y’all. We’re ranked in the top 10 as far as violent crime, but we’re in there with St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Baltimore. There’s a lot of cities out there that have the same issues we have. We’re not the only ones. I’m a native of Nashville. And I can guarantee you folks in Nashville think they have too much crime.”

All in all, that was the import of last week’s meeting, that crime was everybody’s problem and, locally and even statewide, communities were in this together.

The Shelby County Commission — and county government in general — normally gets less public and media attention than do Memphis city government and the city council. This is largely due to long-held tradition held over from the numerous decades of the preceding century when the bulk of the county’s total population resided in the traditional urban core.

White flight, sprawl, and suburban growth have altered the demographic proportions and residential patterns significantly, of course, but even before the balance of population began to shift so radically eastward and outward, the fact was that, in Shelby as in the state’s other 95 counties, county government has been the chief instrument of self-government — not least because Shelby County is the Venn diagram; it contains not only Memphis but six other incorporated municipalities and much unincorporated turf as well.

The county’s budget is larger than any city’s, and it has primary constitutional charge of health and education matters, as well as significant and growing responsibility over law enforcement.

Monday’s meeting of the county commission reflected the unique aspect of our binary system, actually one of multiplicities.

One significant debate concerned the expanses into which solar energy enterprises — those harbingers of our greener future — can be allowed to spread. Mindful of the outer county’s increasing residential mass, the boundaries for such installations were significantly circumscribed: Going forward, they must be distant from each other by at least a mile and no closer than 600 feet at any point to residential areas. And they must be limited in size to a square mile.

Another prolonged discussion concerned the question of whether a portion of a long-dormant planned commercial development in the Eads area should be allowed to proceed with the development of septic tanks pending an opportunity to connect with the Memphis sewer system. (It will be remembered that such new tie-ins with new developments outside the city were discontinued as of 2017.)

The developers of the area under consideration Monday — one that was de-annexed in 2020 — hope eventually to manage such a connection. But expressed concerns on Monday from Eads residents and defenders of the Memphis sand aquifer about potential pollution resulted in a unanimous turn-down of the septic tank proposal by the commissioners.

After these and various other agenda items were dealt with, several of the commissioners turned their solemn attention to a matter that increasingly roils citizens everywhere in Shelby County — shoot-outs like the one that in the last few days resulted in the deaths of MPD Officer Joseph McKinney and attendees at an Orange Mound block party.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Commission chair Miska Clay Bibbs. Indeed so. The bell tolls for city and county alike.

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David Pryor (right) with the author in 2016

In Memoriam

He was not a Memphian nor even a Tennessean, but Arkansan David Pryor, a near neighbor who died Saturday after a lingering illness, deserves our sympathy and remembrance as well.

Pryor, who represented Arkansas as a congressman, as governor, and as senator, was the genuine article, a selfless public servant. He may turn out to have been the last major Democrat in his state’s history, but as my friend and former Arkansas Gazette colleague Ernie Dumas observes in an almost book-length obituary in the Arkansas Times this week, Pryor was much more — “the most beloved member of the U.S. Senate” in his time, across all partisan lines. That was something that I learned myself when he took me in tow on my first visit to Washington as a cub reporter back in the ’60s. R.I.P.