- (male announcer) He 's been a leader in the fight against crime in Memphis for nearly 50 years.

E. Winslow "Buddy" Chapman reflects on his career, his city, and his retirement.

Otis Sanford hosts A Conversation with Buddy Chapman.

[light breezy music] - Hello, and welcome to A Conversation with Buddy Chapman here on WKNO.

I'm your host, Otis Sanford, and today I am honored and thrilled to have a conversation with E. Winslow "Buddy" Chapman.

Everyone in Memphis knows him simply as Buddy.

Chapman is retiring as executive director of CrimeStoppers of Memphis and Shelby County, where he has served in that role since 2006.

Previously, Chapman served as director of the Memphis Police Department, from 1976 until early 1983.

So he knows the ins and outs of policing and public safety in greater Memphis, and we are pleased to have him with us today.

Buddy, welcome.

- Thank you, Otis.

Pleased to be here.

- Glad to have you.

- An honor to be here.

- The honor is all mine, and I wanna have a wide-ranging conversation with you today.

- Otis, all of our conversations are wide ranging.

They have been since you would visit me at police headquarters.

- Exactly, exactly.

So let's jump right on in and let's begin with the here and now.

You are retiring as head of CrimeStoppers after 17 years in that role.

In fact, you started CrimeStoppers.

- 1981.

- 1981.

That's right.

Why are you leaving now?

- Otis, I just think it's time to step off the stage.

I've been around.

I will be the first to admit some of the things that have recently happened have discouraged me, depressed me, and it's just someone else's game to run now, I think.

- You ran for sheriff in Shelby County.

I think it was either '76 or '78.

Somewhere in there.

Did not win.

But as far as I know, that's the only time you have run for public office.

Why haven't you sought public office more than just that one time?

- Well, immediately after that one time.

Because of the problems in the Memphis Police Department, I set my sights on the Memphis Police Department, and it was a very singular sight and a very driven sight.

As you already know, I tried, I worked towards getting Wyeth Chandler elected.

Once he was elected, I stayed on his case about being the police director because I saw what needed to be done.

And quite frankly, if you wanna take the...

I ran for sheriff, but I then subsequently wanted to be police director.

I saw a whole lot more problems in the Memphis Police Department than I did in the Sheriff's Department.

But I never had the opportunity because I went almost immediately into city government as Chandler's top assistant.

Finally, after General Hubbard exited the scene- - That's Jay Hubbard.

- Jay Hubbard.

I became police director, and then I spun off from police director, not immediately, but pretty closely into CrimeStoppers.

- Okay.

- I actually applied to be the director of Crime Stoppers before I got it, but they chose Walter Cruz, and then it didn't work out for him, and so then they came back to me and asked me if I would apply again.

- I may get back to Crime Stoppers in a few minutes, but since you brought up wanting to be police director, you came from the outside, even though you were born and raised around here.

I think we were talking off air that you grew up on a farm in Raleigh.

- I did.

- And did everything that a farm boy would do, right?

- Plowed a team of mules, walked behind a walking cultivator and milked a cow.

That pretty much covers the waterfront.

- It does, doesn't it?

I'm very familiar with that as well.

So you knew the city and you knew the county, but you were an outsider where the police department was concerned.

And that to me, in my research, has always been the friction here, at least back then, that the ingrained people, you mentioned Jay Hubbard, but he had problems with Bill Crombie, he had problems with Bill Price, who were the police chief and deputy chief.

You almost had some of those same problems.

Why was that such a tension and a problem with somebody coming from the outside and somebody already there?

- Well, let me jump back to one point that you may or may not know.

I helped Bill Morris form the Sheriff's Reserve, and I served for quite a while in the Sheriff's Reserve.

Actually, almost until I went in as police director.

I did not serve in the Sheriff's Reserve once I became the mayor's assistant.

But in that capacity, I was able to look close hand at the problems in the Memphis Police Department.

The reason there was such friction is that the police department had closed ranks, and they had closed off the outside and they didn't want anyone, quite frankly.

Yes, Jay Hubbard was a Marine General, so he wasn't that.

And then certainly I was considered an outsider, even though I had been involved in local law enforcement.

But they just plain didn't want anybody having to do with what was going on in the Memphis Police Department.

And we see a little bit of that right now.

"This is police business.

You can't possibly understand this."

And what I've always said, and you've heard me say, is nothing is the public's business more than police business.

Secondly, we talk about staffing a police department.

You can put as many police officers on the street as you want to, and unless you're aiming towards martial law, unless you have the community supporting that effort, it is going to be ineffective.

And what had happened was, is that the African-American community had been marginalized and mistreated and disregarded.

So therefore they didn't trust the police.

And the white community, "We want you, you go get those criminals.

You do whatever you have to do."

You can't do it that way.

And the real truth of the matter is, is that crime is not a police problem, crime is a community problem, and you will have as much crime as the community countenances, and they've got to be a part of the solution.

And that's what's so devastating about the latest incident that we had is that that just wipes clean all the trust that had been built up, that the police are gonna do the right thing.

You'll always have bad actors.

There's no question about that.

But to have, to have situations where it becomes the norm rather than the exception, that's where you run into problems.

- Okay.

Before I...

This might be my last question related to CrimeStoppers.

[Otis laughs] Now that you're retiring, you'll be succeeded by David Wayne Brown, who I know from my days as a reporter at "The Commercial Appeal".

He was the executive editor.

Tell us a little bit about David and how you think he'll do in that role.

- Oh, he should do superbly because David has served as my strong right arm for many years now.

He was involved going back to his involvement with the firm of Conaway Brown.

And they were the first firm that took over the promotion, public promotion, whatever you want to call it, dissemination of information for CrimeStoppers.

Of course, he went over to form his own company, but I employed him.

So they helped us with all of our news information, dissemination of information, promotion of things.

And so he is very...

He's a much calmer person than I am, so maybe he'll be a better director.

He won't be quite as inflammatory as I tend to be sometimes, but I think he's gonna do a great job.

- So let's get back to you as police director.

You got the job in 1976.

You had lobbied, as you said, you had lobbied then Mayor Chandler for the job because I think you felt that the department and the city needed what you had to offer.

You had been a graduate of the Naval Academy and you understood the chain of command too, and how important that was.

I think that gets a little bit to the, to the control or the supervisory nature of the job.

- I told you leadership 101, that's what's drilled into you is what is involved in leadership.

And leadership is not yelling at people what they're gonna do or what they're not gonna do.

Leadership is guiding, leadership is directing, leadership is promoting the right things and showing the people that doing the right thing, and the same thing could apply to the schools and to the trust pays, is promoting the right way rather than making excuses for the wrong way.

- And after you took over, you said earlier that relationships between, especially the African-American community and the police, were pretty bad at that time, but you went about to fix that or to mend some fences with African-American leadership in this town.

Tell me why you thought that was important and why you feel that you might have been successful in doing that.

- Well, it was important because it was the right thing to do.

And the way I was successful is...

I should, I shouldn't probably say this, but I'm a very fair person or I try to be, and it just plain wasn't fair and it wasn't right, and we needed to do something about it, and I set about to do that.

Now, I was sort of edged in that direction in part because we had three different police consent decrees from the Department of Justice.

They were just very close to taking over.

They had two cities they were gonna take over, Philadelphia and Memphis.

They took over law enforcement in Philadelphia.

We dodged a bullet because I made them, I say I made them, I got them to believe that I was not only talking the right things to do, but I was taking steps to do them.

There was the one incident where we had a meeting.

I think it was Reverend Kyles, I don't remember.

But at any rate, the justice had the subgroup here in Memphis for the civil rights.

And I remember Mayor Chandler, who was never lost for words, he said he wasn't meeting with that bunch of kooks.

- Right.

- And so I did go meet with them and I took a little bit of a hot seat in my meeting with the Black leadership in Memphis.

But evidently, for whatever reason, they discerned that I was sincere when I said, "No, we're now gonna do the right thing."

You and I have discussed the John Gaston Turben.

And I think that was the type of reaction and the type of action that caught people's eyes and said, "Well, maybe the guy does really mean "what he's saying.

Maybe he is gonna do it."

And then my... You and I, I don't know if we've talked about my advisory commission.

I formed that advisory commission, which it was across the board.

And I told you this story about somebody saying, "You're the only person in the Mid-South "that could get the Ajanaku family and the White Citizens' Council talking to each other."

And I did.

I had a wide diversity of people, and they had that openness.

That's another thing.

You cannot close, bring up the drawbridge and put down the portcullis and close off the police department.

You've gotta open it up.

And they had absolute access to any case, anything, any, to know exactly what happened.

That openness is what really, I think set it in the right direction.

People realized I wasn't hiding anything.

- You mentioned John Gaston Turban.

Let me just for the clarity of our audience here.

That was a situation where a lot of police officers was joking among themselves that they would apply a beating to the head of a suspect, usually African-American, to the point where they would need to go to the old John Gaston Hospital.

That's what that John Gaston Turban was.

- And get a head bandage.

- And get a head bandage.

And I think you said after you became director, you said, "I never wanted to hear that term again."

- Called the staff in and said, "I don't wanna hear that again."

And what I said at the same time is, as the way I did things, I said, "There may be occasion "that you have to hit somebody in the head with an nightstick.

"If you have to, you have to.

"Just be prepared to explain it to me, "and not in the fact "that you had a fight with your wife that morning, "or you were feeling "just ticked off at everybody or whatever.

"No, I was in a struggle and I had to use my nightstick in order to resolve that."

- Okay.

So in 1979, which was Chandler's last mayoral campaign, a group of Black ministers actually wrote a letter to the mayor, urging him to reappoint you as police director.

And this is what they wrote.

They said that "You had done much to improve the department, "as well as bring credibility and respect to the department in the community of Memphis."

That was pretty high praise for African-American ministerial leadership at a time when, as you say, the relationship between police and community was not all that good.

How do you feel about that kind of high praise?

- I'm very proud of it, and it goes to the point of what my singular focus was, to prove that A: my thoughts, my directions, my actions were going in the right direction, and B: that I was gonna be successful in implementing that.

And yes, matter of fact, Church of God in Christ, Bishop Patterson invited me down to one of the, their big things at the old Ellis Auditorium and gave me a big award.

I've still got it at home.

So I think it's credibility, and I'll go back to the openness and honesty.

I think it's a terrible mistake for a police agency to ever just simply stop with no comment 'cause no comment means you're avoiding.

- You're hiding something.

You know how I feel about that.

- Well, you and I went down that path because what I would tell you was never no comment.

I would say, "Otis, I can't talk to you about that right now, but when I can, I will."

And did I?

Yes, I did.

- You did.

Yes, you did.

- I always came through.

- You did, you did.

- I also told you a lot of times you were looking in the wrong direction.

- And I appreciate that.

[laughs] Can you talk very specifically about your relationship with Maxine Smith, who was head of the local NAACP?

She was skeptical of you at first.

- Well, now Maxine, I was a great admirer of Maxine and Vasco both.

And I'll tell you about Maxine.

One-on-one, she and I were fine.

But she had a position she had to take, and I understood that.

And so therefore, you probably noted that I let a lot of that adverse rhetoric just kind of go off.

'Cause I would think, well, that's... And she was an advocate at a time when there were things that needed advocation.

There's no doubt about that.

I mean, there were...

It wasn't simply the police department, it was the community.

You know, Memphis, if Memphis had a reason that we're maybe not nearly as large than Atlanta, it's that when the whole Black/white issue came up, Atlanta embraced what had to be done.

Memphis fought it, fought it, fought it, fought it, and then finally it washed over us like a wave.

- That's exactly right.

Let's talk about 1978 and the police strike of '78, which actually was a police and fire strike later on.

Was that one of your most difficult moments as police director?

Or how did you navigate that?

- Well, it directly contributed to the fact that Chandler almost got rid of me as police director and why the ministers had to write that letter.

Because I was very vocal that police officers who had violated the law should be punished.

- I gotcha.

- And I did punish them.

And the mayor felt, on the other hand, he was very close to David Baker, the president of the union, and he wanted to forget, to just, bygones be bygones type thing.

I felt like some things had been done that just couldn't be forgotten.

For instance, we had members of the gang squad, if you wanna call them that, that would go around and threaten and maybe even knock around police officers' wives who were working.

A lot of people don't know that.

We had damage to police cars, serious damage.

We had damage to policemen who were working, to their private cars.

We had some violations of the law and more important things that just plain shouldn't happen, and they should have been punished.

Maybe I was a little bit too strong in the way I expressed that.

And with Chandler, you didn't cross him that strongly.

It came within a...

If it hadn't been for Henry Evans, I would not have been reappointed.

- Is that right?

- Henry said his famous quote after I did get reappointed.

He says, "And then there's Buddy Chapman, first in our hearts, but last to be reappointed."

[both laughing] - Oh, that sounds like Henry Evans.

What a guy he is.

Then comes 1982, Chandler is tired of being mayor.

He wants to go be a judge.

So he gets an appointment, I think from Lamar Alexander, who is the governor.

- He did.

- Appoints him to the circuit court bench.

That was pretty much it for you as police director.

Because you, in that special election, did you support Mike Cody?

- No.

No, I didn't take a position.

- You didn't take a position.

People thought that you supported Mike Cody.

- Well, maybe I did, and maybe I did some things that would make people think that, because I'm a great admirer of Mike Cody.

- But anyway, the fact that you, whether you did or not, Dick Hackett won the election.

- But I don't think it was... Dick Hackett won the election.

But I think, if you want my opinion, why Dick Hackett won the election is Chandler had two police officers who were his bodyguards, confidants, whatever you wanna say.

And Hackett, of course, had taken over my previous position as the mayor's top assistant.

I think that it was a whisper campaign.

I think it was also the police department saw an opportunity, the upper level of the police department, that they had an opportunity to get rid of me.

And so I think it was, quite frankly, a thing where through those two individuals, and then also directly, they worked that, Mr. Hackett at that point, if you get rid of Chapman, you'll have the full support of the police department.

He's too hard on us, and he's this and he's that.

And then what we had immediately on that is we had Shannon Street.

- That was gonna lead into my next question.

Right after you leave, and John Holt is named director almost immediately.

- Almost immediately.

- 'Cause it was in January.

- It was.

- Shannon Street happens.

And for people watching who don't, wasn't around or don't know about Shannon Street, that is when a group of people led by a guy named Lindberg Sanders, they abduct a police officer.

- Very small group.

- Very small, most of them were young guys.

- Well, it was like five people, I think.

- Exactly, and Lindberg.

And they abduct this police officer and beat him.

- Beat him to death.

- Beat him to death.

And of course, later on, police stormed the place, kill everybody in the house.

But I think you had told me earlier that you sort of acted as sort of an unofficial advisor to John Holt in that case.

What did you tell him?

And did he abide by what you told him?

- He tried.

I had had two very successful, I don't know, I don't know how your people may take this, but in both cases, the person who had taken the hostages was killed, but only the person who had taken the hostages.

And it was the Clark Tower thing.

- The Clark Tower, yes.

- And St. Jude.

And they were both resolved very, very successfully.

But the way they were resolved was by very quick resolution, not hanging on.

And what happened in Shannon Street was that it went on forever, and they listened to him being beaten to death.

And so the policemen were just like ready-- - They were on edge.

- On edge.

No, Holt called me three times, and I gave him the same answer three times.

And he said that the mayor wouldn't let him do it.

And so it was terrible.

But I'll tell you the most terrible thing, and a lot of people don't know this, and I don't even know if I've ever told you this, was the effect that it had on, I shouldn't say all, but certainly some of the tactical unit officers who were involved in that.

I have one that calls me to this day to thank me 'cause he came to me and he said, "I can't stand what we did."

He said, "I can't live with it."

And I said, "Your only answer is to get away from the police department."

And he still calls me to this day, thanking me for that advice.

- So he did get away from the police department.

- He left the police department.

- Because what happened there, they went in eventually and just killed everybody, right?

That's what happened.

- Exactly.

That's exactly what they did.

The people in the house only had one gun, and that was the police officer's.

- And that was the police officer's gun, right.

Wow.

- So at any rate... that's...yeah, that's, that's where we were on that.

- Yeah, it was a tough one.

- It was terrible.

- It was terrible.

- But Holt...

I'll tell you about Jack Holt.

Jack Holt was absolutely the best I've ever encountered in the military or anywhere else, that if you gave him a concept, putting it together, so it would be a plan that worked.

- Okay.

- But he was not real good at envisioning the what ifs or might be's.

- I gotcha.

Let me do this very quickly 'cause we're almost running out of time.

I told you I was going to give you names and you give me me one or two- - Oh my gosh.

- Words to describe them.

Let's do this in a lightning round fashion.

- All right.

- Henry Loeb.

- Very overbearing.

- Wyeth Chandler.

- Good mayor, better judge than he was a mayor.

- Dick Hackett.

- Dick Hackett, I'd rather even not get on that.

- Maxine Smith.

- Maxine Smith, very, very bright, but somewhat difficult.

Prickly personality.

- Prickly.

Willie Herenton.

- Willie Herenton, interesting guy.

We worked together on a lot of things.

- AC Wharton.

- AC Wharton, really great guy.

- Jim Strickland.

- Empty suit.

- Really?

Cerelyn "CJ" Davis.

- Ineffective.

- And finally, Otis Sanford.

- Otis Sanford, now boy, you better hope we're out of time.

- Yeah, right, we out of time for that.

- No, I tell you, Otis, and I said this to you, that working with the media was just really great.

But it was great because I felt like the more the public knew about what we were doing, what I was doing and what I was thinking, the better it was.

And if there is one thing that contributed to my success, it was that.

And you were a part of it.

Thank you.

- Buddy, I wanna thank you for joining me today for this conversation.

We're gonna miss you here in Memphis.

'Cause I understand that you're going to relocate at some point to Florida to be closer to family.

But we wish you all the best, and you have been a good friend of mine.

So thank you so much.

- Well, and you've been a good friend, and I do truly love Memphis.

And I want it to, to flourish.

But we're gonna have to overcome our, our problems in order to flourish.

- And I wanna thank you all for joining us this evening for WKNO's A Conversation with Buddy Chapman.

Thank you, and we'll see you the next time.

[light breezy music] [acoustic guitar chords]