Tag: Poplar Plaza Kroger

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News News Blog

New Poplar Plaza Security Measures Revealed During Community Meeting

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A couple of weeks after teenagers involved in a flash mob beat three people in the Poplar Plaza Kroger parking lot, residents of the High Point Terrace neighborhood are still worried about being victimized when they travel to the grocery store.

Many of those concerned residents gathered in the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church’s Fellowship Hall during the High Point Terrace Neighborhood Watch and Association’s meeting Wednesday night.

The event brought together more than 150 people: area residents, elected officials, Memphis city councilmen, Shelby County commissioners, employees from both the Poplar Plaza Kroger and CiCi’s Pizza (where the teens met up before the Kroger parking lot situation), and representatives from Shelby County Juvenile Court, law enforcement, and civic organizations.

Locals submitted questions about crime in the area — primarily the Kroger incident and what’s being done to make sure a similar occurrence doesn’t take place in the future.

“I want to know what protection they’re going to have in the parking lot to control this,” said one long-time High Point resident. “My way of thinking is, the kids should not be there in a group anymore. They should be monitored. I just want to see that it doesn’t happen again. There needs to be more parental control. And there has to be some justification for your actions.”

Various members of law enforcement commented on the Kroger issue and disclosed how they’re working to better assure the safety of all community residents.

Tillman Precinct Commander Colonel Terry Landrum informed the crowd that a new surveillance camera had been installed at the Poplar Plaza Kroger. Landrum said that he’s diverted some of Tillman Precinct’s bike patrol to the Poplar area and has also increased the number of police cruisers patrolling the area.

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Landrum also revealed that Finard Properties, the company that owns the Poplar Plaza property, had increased security there, and Kroger is considering hiring uniformed patrol officers.

“Poplar Plaza was a terrible incident to occur. There was no real warning that it was going to happen,” Landrum said. “It’s regrettable. It’s something that we don’t expect to happen again. I cannot promise you that it won’t happen again. It can happen anywhere. Since this incident, we’ve taken every step that we should’ve taken to make sure this does not happen again.”

Other people who spoke during the meeting included Memphis Police Department Deputy Chief Clete Knight, Deputy District Attorney General Jennifer Nichols, Shelby County Juvenile Court Detention Center Administrator Gary Cummings, Rick Smith of Finard Properties, Memphis City Councilwoman Wanda Halbert, and Shelby County Commission Chairman Justin Ford.

Each person shared ideas on what can be done to make sure no one else is victimized in Poplar Plaza and throughout the community. Many of the ideas involved mentoring to at-risk youth and having more churches and schools open up their gyms for teens to utilize outside of school hours.

“Have you seen a great spike of churches opening up at night to offer their gyms? Have you seen Shelby County Schools open up their gyms to offer the kids something to do?” inquired Shelby County Commissioner Mark Billingsley. “Unfortunately, the answer is no. Instead of waiting another year for us to do nothing, you’ve got to hold people like me, and the city council, accountable. Six months from now, you need to hold another one of these [meetings] to say, ‘What schools do we have open at night? What churches are open at night? And how many people in this room are mentoring a child?’ I would just encourage you, if anything, [to do that], or [crime] will be a bullet away from your family.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Let’s Go Krogering: A Rorschach Test

When a mob of black teens rampaged through a Kroger parking lot one night last week and attacked three people, it started a storm of controversy, mainly because a store employee caught much of it on video. As is inevitable these days, the video was put on every media site in town and shared countless times on Facebook and Twitter. Some national websites then picked it up.

The Flyer‘s Louis Goggans posted a report and a link to the video on our website. The incident — or better said, the video of the incident — served as a sort of social Rorschach test. Viewers mostly used it to enhance and support their own narratives in the comments section.

Racists found it the perfect excuse to use the “n word” and/or to disparage all black teens as “thugs” or “animals.” For Memphis haters, it offered a wonderful opportunity to bash the city and brag about how they “got out in time.” Gun lovers pointed out how much better the situation would have been if someone had just shot some of the teens. Liberals saw the incident as the inevitable result of income inequality.

Also getting some play were: “Where are the parents?” “The school system sucks!” “This was a hate crime!” And “Where’s Al Sharpton?” (Which is apparently comedy gold for a lot of angry white people.)

Then a few facts emerged: The teens left a nearby pizza joint en masse and came after a guy getting out of his car; probably the first person they saw. The police called him “non-African American,” which could mean he was Hispanic or Asian or white. Two Kroger employees — one black, one white — came to his assistance and were attacked and knocked unconscious.

Within a couple days, the MPD had rounded up 11 of the teens; some of whom had been turned in by their parents. The mayor and the police chief, both African Americans, held a press conference, denounced the incident, and pledged to arrest all involved. This calm and professional handling of the incident disappointed a lot of commenters, mainly, because the teens were not charged with a hate crime, which is difficult to prove and likely not applicable in this case. But apparently, for some folks, if someone you hate commits a crime, it’s a hate crime. Case closed.

And I learned something interesting about those “discussing” the incident on the Flyer website. After deleting more than 20 racist and/or vile Memphis-hating comments one evening, I decided to use our site technology to see where they came from. Seventeen of those comments came from out of town, and I don’t mean Bartlett. People from Michigan, South Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and elsewhere were flooding the Flyer site with ignorant racist remarks and Memphis-bashing.

It’s a good example of how a discussion about how to deal with a local problem can be distorted by those with no real knowledge of the situation and no skin in the game — except a desperate need to promote their own sad hatred.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Poplar and Highland

Perhaps the most celebrated and important thoroughfare in Shelby County is Poplar Avenue. It begins on Memphis’ western rim, on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River, among the sturdy buildings of our governmental

complex, and continues eastward through some of the city’s oldest and most scenic areas, along the long edge of Overton Park and continuing past the Parkway, bisecting thereafter, mile upon mile of choice commercial and residential territory. Eventually it escapes Memphis proper and cuts a swath through the vital centers of Memphis’ two most upscale suburbs, Germantown and Collierville, before finally crossing into Mississippi in the far southeast corner of the county.

Poplar can truly be called the Main Street of Shelby County, and a key point of it, a connecting link of sorts, about midway on its path through the county, is the intersection of Poplar and Highland, just past the monumental Benjamin Hooks Public Library on the north and the now-secluded stretch that shelters Chickasaw Gardens to the immediate south. The corner serves as an entrance into the University of Memphis area and to the nearby expanse of the Links of Galloway golf course. It is surrounded with prime shopping and residential areas.

On the northwest corner of the intersection is the busy Poplar Plaza shopping area, home to numerous popular restaurants and stores, and most notably the enormous (and enormously popular) new state-of-the-art Kroger Supermarket.

On each of the past two weekends, the vast parking area of Poplar Plaza has been the scene of mob violence. As surely as everybody reading this knows, the second of these outbreaks, during which a would-be Kroger shopper barely managed a gauntlet run from where he’d parked his car to the relative safety of the big store’s interior, was captured on video via an employee’s cellphone camera. As the video also makes clear, two other Kroger employees, both young teens, were beaten unconscious by the marauders, who may or may not have been playing the thuggish “game” called Point ‘Em Out, Knock ‘Em Out, which targets people at random who have the misfortune to be in the mob’s path.

Mayor A C Wharton and Police Director Toney Armstrong have responded promptly to the latest incident with strong words and promises of strong action. Several arrests have already been made. In their own way, though, they have been a bit like President Obama, who has so far struggled to counter the horrific surge of the ISIS caliphate with impressive rhetoric but with uncertain action.

This latest urban crisis similarly confronts Memphis. Occurring at a time of reduced benefits and troubled prospects for the city’s first responders, it would be difficult to deal with even by a fully staffed law enforcement corps with high morale.

But we know what we’re up against — a virulent strain of youth violence that, if left unchecked, could beget more such incidents, generate vigilante responses, and sunder permanently the links that still hold Shelby County together — literally and figuratively, physically and spiritually.

The way to confront the problem must be found, and it will need the full support of all of us. If one of the pillars of Memphis commerce is allowed to fall prey to this sort of lawless behavior, everyone loses, regardless of race, class, or place of residence.