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Police Continue Search for Suspect in Bradford Shooting

Memphis Police officials have developed two possible suspects, both believed to be male, in the Sunday night shooting of 21-year-old University of Memphis football player Taylor Bradford.

At a press conference Monday afternoon, police director Larry Godwin wouldn’t discuss any possible motives, but only that the investigation in ongoing.

U of M police director Bruce Harber said the shooting may have occurred inside the Carpenter Complex, a gated apartment complex for students. Gates are programmed to only allow residents’ cars, but Harber says it’s possible that the assailants came in on foot or they may have followed Bradford’s car inside the gates.

Bradford was discovered when U of M police responded to a car wreck on Zach Curlin near Central at 9:47 p.m. Sunday night. Bradford had apparently attempted to leave the scene of the shooting in a two-door Lincoln Town Coupe but struck a tree.

Campus officials didn’t know the football player had been shot until paramedics arrived on the scene. Bradford was taken to the Med, where he later died. There were no reports of gunshots called into campus police last night, but Harber says several witnesses later said “they’d heard something.”

Ironically, police say Bradford had attended a campus safety meeting earlier in the evening.

Godwin and Harber are asking anyone with information to call the MPD homicide department at 545-5300. Godwin is also asking the Memphis City Council to add this crime to their reward program, in which witnesses who provide information that leads to solving this crime will receive $500,000.

— Bianca Phillips

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A Dramatic Solution

Outside the Nappi by Nature salon on May 30th, poet J’malo Torriel, the salon’s owner Sefu Uhuru, and three others say they were brutally attacked by Memphis police officers for no apparent reason. Following the attack, three officers were relieved of duty pending an internal investigation.

Ironically, the group was there to begin rehearsal for their play Why We Die, a serious look at why so many young African-American men face untimely deaths in Memphis.

Torriel (pictured at right with Jasira Montsho) is a member of the spoken-word group Brotha’s Keepa. He began writing the play three years ago in response to the homicide rate for that demographic.

“It’s a play about four young men who are childhood friends. They all end up putting themselves in harm’s way because of social engineering,” says Torriel, who also directs and acts in the play.

“It tackles parents being careful of what they do in front of their children and being economically independent, so kids don’t grow up thinking they have to make money off of crime,” Torriel adds.

Proceeds from the play will benefit Brotha’s Keepa’s Youth Prison Prevention program, their Summer Youth Theatre Camp, and their efforts to feed homeless people downtown.

“Why We Die,” Friday-Saturday, September 28th-29th, 8 p.m. and Sunday, September 30th, 3 and 7:30 p.m., Southwest Tennessee Community College Theatre, 737 Union (409-2655 or 859-4051). $15 advance/$20 door.

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The Cheat Sheet

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

The University of Memphis Tigers, still smarting from a two-point loss to rivals Ole Miss, hit the road to seek redemption by putting a whuppin’ — they hoped — on Arkansas State. Unfortunately, the gods of football have other ideas, because thunderstorms cancel the game. The game is rescheduled for later in September, which means the U of M will have to play three games in 11 days. We just can’t catch a break here.

Greg Cravens

Operators of the Ducks, those amphibious vehicles that have been transporting tourists around town and even into the Mississippi River for years, announce they are ending their stay in Memphis. We never liked getting stuck behind one of these slow-moving things in traffic, but we came to enjoy the weirdness of the whole quacky experience.

Three employees of the Germantown Performing Arts Centre are sacked after they tie rope into loops that resemble a hangman’s noose, which is interpreted as a racist threat by one of GPAC’s board members. A Ku Klux Klan hood left in a board member’s office, yes — definitely a racist symbol. A burning cross on GPAC’s front lawn, yes. But a hangman’s noose left dangling behind the stage?

Memphis police reach new heights in their battle to solve crime. And we mean that literally. Officers will now climb into a 25-foot-high basket at Beale and Third, which will give them an unobstructed view of pretty much the entire entertainment district. We guess that will give everyone on Beale a nice, safe feeling — until the cops have to take a bathroom break.

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Lads on the Loose

British filmmaking duo Edgar Wright (writer/director) and Simon Pegg (writer/actor) don’t make spoofs in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (Airplane!) sense. They make genre-targeting comic homages. Their surprise breakthrough hit, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, was their take on the zombie flick, in which a couple of louts (Pegg and Nick Frost) find their low-key existence complicated by the arrival of the undead.

The follow-up, Hot Fuzz, ostensibly does the same thing for the buddy-cop genre. This time Pegg is Nicholas Angel, a workaholic London cop who is transferred to the sleepy village of Sandford because his superiors think he’s showing up the rest of the force. In Sandford, Angel is reduced to searching for a loose goose and rousting underage drinkers and suffers the indignity of being partnered with Danny Butterman (Frost), the cheerfully incompetent son of the town police chief, who peppers his big-city counterpart with questions about policework gleaned from nights on the couch watching Hollywood blockbusters (particularly Point Break and Bad Boys II) on video.

In Sandford, Angel begins to suspect that an unusually high accident rate might be the result of more than mere accident and sets about attempting to uncover a criminal conspiracy that eventually demands the use of heavy ammo.

Shaun of the Dead was a lovable lark, getting its biggest laughs from having Pegg’s ale-soaked sod so hung over he couldn’t differentiate between the living dead and the everyday worker bees in his neighborhood. If Hot Fuzz is less successful, if there’s less to love beyond the movie’s genial gags, it’s because Hot Fuzz doesn’t seem to be about much other than movies and movie fandom. This can certainly be a topic for a great movie, but Wright and Pegg don’t seem to be up to making it.

Shaun of the Dead, by contrast, didn’t poke fun at zombie movies as much as the lived-in pub-lad lifestyle that the undead invade. In Shaun of the Dead, Pegg and Frost played characters that felt real — recognizable, funny, and frustrating even before their lives are impinged upon by the stuff of movies. In Hot Fuzz, the characters that are supposed to morph into movie creations are movie creations to begin with.

Which doesn’t mean Hot Fuzz isn’t enjoyable. Pegg and Frost maintain a palpable chemistry, and Frost, with his bedhead jocularity, may be one of the most instantly likable sidekicks in memory. And though Hot Fuzz worships at the altar of modern American shoot-’em-ups rather than British thrillers of the James Bond or Get Carter variety, Wright and Pegg stay proudly British, which is one of their central charms.

Parodying blockbusters is increasingly becoming old hat. In this regard, Hot Fuzz rises above the attention-deficit-disorder style of the Scary Movie series but lacks the confrontational appeal of something like Team America World Police. It evokes its sources formally as well as conceptually but in a way that’s more appreciative than mocking. It’s a movie that, like Butterman, seems to side with couch-potato passivity. At the end, I wasn’t sure if the lack of differentiation between the sublime Point Break and the merely noisy Bad Boys II was a comment on the filmmakers or just their characters.

Hot Fuzz

Opens Friday, April 20th

Studio on the Square

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What To Watch

Earlier this month, while walking to her car, a University of Memphis graduate student was stabbed in the thigh and robbed. Campus security cameras caught the attack on tape, and a few days later, Zachariah Judge and his girlfriend/accomplice Valerie Jones were arrested.

Though the camera was installed by the U of M, that crime-fighting tactic may soon spread across the city. Last week, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton requested the City Council earmark $700,000 in next year’s budget for a Memphis Police Department (MPD) Real Time Crime Center. The center would combine video surveillance with sophisticated data systems and software.

“We’ll have Sky Cop cameras, which have the capability of triangulating gunshots,” says MPD spokesperson Vince Higgins. “Say there’s a camera posted on Tennessee Street and a shooting occurs within a block of the Flyer office. A Sky Cop camera would sense where that shot came from. It would then turn to that area and that video would feed into the Real Time Crime Center.”

Officers stationed in the crime center headquarters, to be located at the Urban Child Institute at 600 Jefferson, will be able to watch the footage on a large video wall. Officers could even be dispatched to the location before anyone calls to report the shooting.

“The cameras are totally mobile. They’ll be posted throughout the city where the need is greatest,” says Higgins. “That will be determined at our weekly Blue Crush meetings when we’re pinning down crime hotspots.”

Other cameras designed to spot stolen car tags will be placed on patrol cars.

“The camera will read tags as it passes cars, so even if the officer is preoccupied, the cameras will notify the officer that the car or tag is stolen,” says Higgins.

But the Real Time Crime Center encompasses more than video surveillance. Using special software, police will receive instant information on recent criminal activity in a radius around a crime, existing crime patterns in the neighborhood, and a history of people with arrest records who may frequent the area.

“Investigators headed to the scene will have the ability to take that real-time information gathered from all those sources,” says Higgins.

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has been operating its $11 million Real Time Crime Center since 2005. The center draws information from New York state criminal records, parole and probation files, as well as city criminal complaints, arrest records, and 911 calls. MPD director Larry Godwin toured the NYPD facility last December.

With Blue Crush databases already in place, Higgins says much of the work for the local Real Time Crime Center is complete.

“Instead of buying someone’s software to get this started, we have people on our staff who are able to write the software specific to Memphis,” says Higgins. “We’re not buying a system that was used in New York and then trying to make it work in Memphis.”

Though Herenton requested $700,000 from the city, additional funding for the center is expected to come from grants.

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Identity Theft

It sounds like a scene from a mafia film: In a covert meeting, a drug-dealing, crooked cop agrees to sell information about a confidential informant to another drug dealer. But unbeknownst to the cop, the other dealer is secretly taping the conversation for the FBI.

Last week, the FBI arrested Thomas Braswell, an officer with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO), and charged him with bribery for allegedly selling confidential information. Pending an investigation, he was relieved of duty with pay.

According to the complaint filed with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Braswell received $500 late last month from an undercover informant posing as a coke and steroids dealer in exchange for the address, Social Security number, driver’s license history, and date of birth of another informant used in the SCSO investigations.

Braswell obtained the information through SCSO computers and read it out over the phone. All the while, the informant was taping the conversation. Several other conversations were also taped via telephone and during face-to-face meetings.

During one conversation, Braswell discussed his efforts to obtain steroids. Sheriff Mark Luttrell says it was Braswell’s drug involvement that prompted the FBI investigation.

“In this case, officers were working on some drug crimes. In the course of that routine investigation, this case came up involving [Braswell],” says Luttrell. “They just started following the leads. It wasn’t a situation where we started out targeting a particular officer.”

Though Braswell’s primary duties were those of a patrolman, he had access to the same informant database that drug and gang units have.

“There’s certain information that all of our law enforcement officers have access to,” says Luttrell. “It’s considered for official use only. That doesn’t mean it’s top-secret or highly classified. But there is an understanding that it’s considered to be sensitive information not to be released to the public.”

Luttrell acknowledges that Braswell could have put an informant in danger had he given that information to a real drug dealer. He says that informants range from “John Q. Citizen to someone with a criminal background.”

“Fortunately, we became aware of this in time. We were able to control it,” says Luttrell. “We just have to be very aggressive in responding to it.”

As a result, Luttrell says the SCSO will be beefing up lessons about handling sensitive information in their in-service training, the 40 hours of classes every officer takes annually.

They’ll also be looking at their system of storing confidential information.

“Anytime you have an event like this, you certainly look at your internal procedures to see if your restrictions are tight enough,” says Luttrell. “We’ll go through that routine process of accessing our security.”

Braswell is the third SCSO officer charged in a federal investigation since 2005. According to personnel records obtained by the Flyer, Braswell was cited for attempting to start a fight with another officer in 2004. He’s also been cited for improper handling of a traffic ticket, accidentally discharging his weapon in the prison ward, and crashing his police vehicle.

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Police Posers

When the Memphis Police Department (MPD) announced they were looking for more officers a few months ago, they hoped people would fill out an application.

But a couple of would-be officers have taken matters — and uniforms — into their own hands, posing as police and committing crimes. Early this month, two police impersonators were arrested in Memphis, while two others went free. MPD officials do not believe there’s any connection between the cases.

Rene Montgomery, 44, was arrested in Midtown on February 3rd after MPD officers spotted an unmarked Crown Victoria with Tennessee government tags entering the IHOP parking lot on Union.

As he stepped out of the car, the officers noticed Montgomery was wearing a blue police-style uniform. He wore a pistol and a badge, but his uniform lacked an MPD-logo patch.

“We had a couple of incidents reported late last year and early this year in regards to individuals posing as police and attempting to stop females,” said MPD spokesperson Vince Higgins. “We had one incident where a person was reportedly raped.”

The officers ran the car’s tags and determined the plate was stolen from a St. Jude vehicle. When they approached Montgomery, he flashed an ID from the Jericho, Arkansas, police department.

“We were able to debunk that,” said Higgins. “We even had Jericho officials come to the scene.”

Montgomery was arrested and charged with impersonation and driving with a suspended license, but Higgins said he’s under investigation for rape.

Less than a week later, MPD officers arrested 23-year-old Bartlett resident Ronnell Lawson in connection with a robbery in which he posed as a cop.

Lawson handcuffed a Latino victim, demanded his cash and car title, and threatened to have him deported.

“The victim was suspicious. We’ve been trying to educate the Latino community to report these incidents,” said Higgins. “Our police officers are not going to shake you down for money, and they’re not going to threaten to send you back to Mexico.”

Lawson is under investigation for involvement in similar robberies.

On February 15th, two men in plain clothes knocked on the door of a Whitehaven home and claimed to be officers sent there to search the house for drugs.

By the time the homeowner had been summoned, the men were in a 2000 Chevy Impala. The homeowner then noticed that the car did not have any police radios or equipment and called the police. The suspects drove off and were not apprehended. In all, nine police-impersonation cases have been reported in the past three months.

“We’ve had people use this M.O. in rape cases. We’ve had it used in robbery cases,” said Higgins. “Some people even use it to get free food.”

According to Higgins, police uniforms can be purchased at some local shops without proper police identification. Badges and equipment purchases, he said, usually require an ID.

“If you’re being pulled over and you don’t believe the car that’s pulling you over is being driven by a police officer, drive to the nearest precinct,” said Higgins. “Or utilize your cell phone and contact the police. Then, we’ll send real police.”

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No Vacancy?

Petty criminals — shoplifters, vandals, the drunk or disorderly — are getting a slap on the wrist as the county jail nears capacity.

Last week Shelby County sheriff Mark Luttrell asked the County Commission to build a new jail with 3,500 to 4,000 beds. Luttrell indicated that the jail at 201 Poplar is almost full, and to prevent overcrowding, the county is only holding people for serious crimes.

“There’s more scrutiny to determine whether or not a crime can be dealt with as a misdemeanor as opposed to a felony charge,” said Luttrell. “If you didn’t have the pressures of a crowded situation, you might easily write people up for some felony offense and put them in jail. But these are people who don’t really need to be in jail.”

As of last Wednesday, the county jail population was 2,360 inmates, and the facility can only house 2,500. If the population rose above 2,500 inmates, Luttrell would have to mix dangerous criminals with minimum-security inmates.

“When you start mixing minimum-security with maximum-security, you’re talking about a higher-level, more predatory inmate dealing with a lower-level, less predatory inmate. You’ll run into some real risky behavior,” said Luttrell.

The sheriff’s office is using other tactics to keep jail space available for dangerous criminals. About 200 inmates are being held at a satellite facility at the County Corrections Center at Shelby Farms, but that building has nearly reached capacity as well. About 37 juveniles have been diverted to the women’s facility near Shelby Farms. The District Attorney’s Office has been weeding out arrest warrants that involve crimes that may not stand the test of prosecution.

“We’ve got to have some relief,” said Luttrell. “At the Operation Safe Community summit in November, we laid out 15 initiatives to aggressively fight crime. That means we’re going to be locking more people up, which means we’re going to need a new facility.”

Not all county commissioners backed Luttrell’s plan, however. Commissioner Mike Carpenter suggested Luttrell look into having the Corrections Corporation of America build a satellite facility to hold extra inmates. Luttrell expressed his opposition to privatization but said he’ll “discuss it as long as anyone wants to.

“I’m not convinced that privatization will save us that much money without impacting operational efficiency,” said Luttrell.

Commissioner Mike Ritz suggested housing more inmates at the Penal Farm.

“The County Correctional Center can’t hold too many more,” said Luttrell. “They’ve told us they can’t afford to give us any more buildings.”

Luttrell said he’ll begin requesting proposals from architectural firms in the next couple weeks. He expects to present a final proposal to the County Commission by July or August.

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Hitting Home

A flashy car and a cool badge apparently aren’t enough to attract a sufficient number of applicants to the Memphis Police Department (MPD), currently understaffed by about 100 officers.

But police officials hope the Memphis City Council’s recent decision to allow officers to live outside the city limits will help find applicants for vacant positions.

“For the past three to five years, we’ve just barely been keeping up with attrition, and if you add in the fact that we’ve been annexing and we just opened up a new precinct, we’re somewhere on the order of 90 to 125 officers short,” said Vince Higgins, public affairs officer for MPD.

The City Council voted last week to temporarily exempt police officers and paramedics from a 2004 referendum requiring all city employees to live within the city of Memphis. Officers and paramedics hired in the next two years can live anywhere in Shelby County.

Higgins says the problem isn’t finding applicants but rather finding qualified applicants who can pass the academic requirements, physical demands, and firearms tests required by police training. By expanding residential boundaries for new officers, MPD hopes to avoid lower training standards.

“In the past, [the department] has lowered the standards by giving waivers to felons, but we’ve found that to be counterproductive,” said Higgins. “I don’t think the citizens of Memphis want the standards lowered.”

Currently, the department doesn’t hire anyone with a felony background or anyone who has a DUI conviction on their record. Applicants must have completed two years of college or active military duty, pass a psychological exam, and be at least 21 years old.

Because the department is understaffed, some officers due for a promotion haven’t received it yet.

“We can’t promote sergeants because we’d be depleting uniform patrol,” said Higgins. “It’s a domino effect. Once we get more officers, we’ll have more latitude with the promotional process.”

But not everyone’s pleased with the change. City Council member Joe Brown voted against the measure because he didn’t feel comfortable changing something the citizens enacted by referendum.

He also worries that hiring outside the city limits will affect the applicant pool for positions at the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.

Before the 2004 referendum, Memphis police officers could live anywhere inside the county line. Officers hired before 1980 can live anywhere within a two-hour drive.

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Price Check

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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