- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, The WKNO Endowment Fund, And by viewers like you, thank you.

- The Memphis Safe Task Force, data center regulations and much more, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

We are joined this week by a roundtable of journalists talking about some of the biggest stories of the week and month and year.

Starting with Toby Sellers, news editor at the Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks for having me.

- Aarron Fleming is a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- Mary Cashiola is editorial director for The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here.

- Happy to be here.

- Absolutely.

And Bill Dries is a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll start, I'll update our ongoing kind of efforts to get candidates for state and federal offices on as we move towards early voting starting October 14th, less than a month away.

And then election day is November 3rd.

And I also note that voter registration ends October 5th.

We have coming up in the next few weeks, Justin Pearson, one of Democratic candidates for one of the House races, Heidi Kuhn.

We're trying to get the Republican opponents for other folks, Charlie Hatcher and David Kustoff, but haven't been successful so far.

We did have Brent Taylor, Republican candidate against, Justin Pearson.

You can get that at wkno.org, YouTube or The Daily Memphian.

Also had Chaz Molder, one of the Democratic candidates, again for the three House districts that cover Memphis now and Shelby County.

We are trying to get Marsha Blackburn on to talk about her race for governor.

We had her Democratic opponent, Jerri Green, on recently and all those again available at wkno.org and so on.

But we are here.

And this past week, the one year anniversary of the Memphis Safe Task Force, came and I guess we'll talk quite a bit about both the task force, specifically crime trends, and so on.

And I'll start with you, Bill.

I mean, a year later, you've covered Memphis for more than a couple decades.

And your thoughts as we hit that mark?

- Much of the discussion is what comes next.

Even among the folks who are saying, well, the task force is just going to stay here as long as necessary.

There are going to be some adjustments I think after a year.

You might not notice that much at first.

Also, I think the midterm elections are going to have a big impact on what happens here and what happens with similar efforts in other cities, because the immigration piece of this in particular is turning into a very big issue in the midterm elections.

- Nationally and here.

- Yes.

- Thoughts from you, Toby.

I think of a couple things before I turn to you.

There have been task force in Memphis, federal, state, local partnershi for as long as I can remember.

They would do a drug task force.

They would do a, you know, violent crime task force, they would kind of come and go.

Is in some ways this one I've kind of said to a lot of politicians, we've talked about a lot on the show, is there's kind of three components.

There's those components at a higher level.

There's the National Guard, which I think a lot of people have always been a little confused about what they're actually doing, you know, when they're just kind of walking around and then there's the ICE part.

- Yeah.

- And so I don't know if you view it in those kind of broadly in those three buckets.

But again, that's how I've kind of seen it.

And politicians have talked about it because a lot of politicians, Democratic included, have supported that first part, coming in, getting violent criminals off the street.

You know, the having US Marshals, having the FBI, having help with that.

They don't like the ICE part, a lot of them, and they're not quite sure what the National Guard is doing, but how have you seen it for the last year?

- The same, and I've heard the same from a lot of different people.

Right, you know.

Memphis is in Tennessee and it's part of the United States.

A lot of folks have said these folks should have been here a long time ago.

We've had out-of-control crime for a long, long time.

We need help.

And finally, we got help, right?

But it came with some pieces that folks just didn't agree with.

Right?

The first one is the National Guard piece.

That looks like occupation, that looks military.

That looks real bad.

Right?

And the third part of this was authorship, right?

This came from President Donald Trump.

And he's a polarizing figure.

Agree with him or not.

And those elements of this thing blew this thing from, you know, what could have been, you know, another drug task force here in town to this big national thing where a lot of Memphians felt embarrassed that, you know, we've got National Guard walking the streets.

Other folks thought it was amazing.

Right?

And, the end result, I think, is that crime has fallen in Memphis over the past year.

Now, that didn't happen in a vacuum.

And it happened under really strange circumstances.

We saw crime fall across the country.

Every city in America.

I shouldn't say, almost every city in America, I can't prove that, saw crime fall.

So we were seeing this national, you know, crime falling all across the country.

And then the task force shows up, right?

So we can't cleanly say the task force lowered crime in Memphis.

It came at a time when it was already falling.

How much would that have been with the task force?

Without the task force?

We don't know.

We'll never know that, you know, the real true impact here.

But the White House loves to take victory laps on on all of it, you know, which is their prerogative and all that.

But, you know, like it or not, crime is down.

- Yeah.

And people will point out that the crime was going down.

I think, as you just said before, the task force got here.

I'll do a couple of quick stats from the Memphis Crime Commission through end of June.

And we'll go to Aaron and Mary.

Major property crime, year over year, is down 40%.

It's down 40.

What, 42, 46% from 2011, which was kind of a high watermark in recent decades for Memphis crime that the Crime Commission has tracked.

Major violent crime is down 30% year over year.

I think the murder rate, you know, number of homicides is down 45% year over year and down also from where it was.

Actually, it's up.

I'm sorry.

The homicide rate is up 30% from 2011.

I'm not laughing that it's up, I'm laughing I that screwed up.

But the trends basically have been down, right?

And, there's other things people will point to.

There are over 2,000 MPD officers, I think, now, Chief Davis talked about that.

That's been a goal for a while.

But let me turn to you, Aaron.

You cover north Mississippi for us now to switch over to that being and doing great stuff there for us in the last, what, nine months or so.

But you covered a lot of crime for us in the COVID, post-COVID era, up to the task force.

And give us some perspective on that, when you look back at that beat you used to have.

- It really does feel like we're in a different era now than when I was covering.

I covered crime and courts and the police for three years, and that was sort of the from '22, '23, up until, you know, back in May when I switched over to north Mississippi.

And so it really felt like then that was really like an era of, I guess, public safety or just crime in Memphis in terms of like, you had these big cases, you had the like the Eliza Fletcher case, the there was the Young Dolph shooting.

You had Ezekial Kelly case.

Like, all of that-- - Tyre Nichols and that.

- Correct, and all of that was going on.

So really that felt like a specific time in Memphis.

And then the task force comes and again, you know, crime is going down now but we have this huge presence in now this thing that was sort of novel at first with these federal agents on the street and the National Guard.

That's almost like that is our new reality and new normal.

And so it's almost surreal that it's been a year because I remember when this started and covering the very beginning of it and seeing it like even get more kind of aggressive with some of the immigration raids.

And then also we've had, you know, some shootings by these officers, where people have died now and so even as the task force has been here for a year, like we've seen it change and get different than it was when it first started.

So.

- Mary, thoughts?

- I think going back to sort of the overall, feel of this, it's really important to note that the federal agents have different roles than MPD.

Right?

There's a different chase rule.

MPD will not chase cars unless there's like a violent crime happening.

There are other things that just make this so much different.

Oh, another one is body cams.

MPD wears body cams.

Federal agents generally don't.

So it really changed the game for Memphis in terms of what, we were covering and what law enforcement looked like.

- And it's interesting to talk about the big spike in crime nationally that Toby and we talked about coming down.

I mean, I can remember during COVID and you got it to me, it's just people saying, "There was an incident in a parking lot last night.

And why didn't you cover that?"

- Right?

- People on the street or in a coffee shop coming up.

"So you guys aren't doing enough to cover.

There was a whole thing, and I knew someone," and it was just this sense of and diminishing the sadness and horrors of those individual acts.

But there were all these acts coming in.

"Why are you Daily Memphian not talking about it?

Why aren't you talking about every incident on the show?

This is out of control."

I don't get that anymore - No, no.

In remotely the same level.

- I think at that point, there was a real feeling of lawlessness and a lot of it was surrounding car break-ins because people feel like very connected to their cars.

It's an extension of like essentially the Castle Doctrine.

It's part of their home.

It's part of who they are.

So when you start breaking into people's cars or worse, carjacking them and their children, it gets really serious really quickly.

And then also we saw like a couple of shootings that came from that in parking lots as well, where people were like, okay, I'm gonna break into this car and someone's like, oh, no, you're not.

And then- - Yeah.

- And I just remembered that, oh, sorry.

Ezekiel Kelly.

That was kind of the big moment, you know.

- I remember, actually to interrupt, I remember calling Mary from a restaurant at Midtown and saying, "Hey, are you online right now?"

And I think I can hear you're doing dishes.

- I was eating dinner.

- Yeah, you're eating dinner.

And yeah.

And it was just like, oh my God.

- I think that, you know, that this guy was number one who was doing it, and I had friends that were at restaurants and they were told to kind of, you know, hunker down a little bit, and then to find out he'd been, you know, blasting this on Facebook and all that.

I mean, he just felt like this kind of peak, wild moment, you know, out of control moment for crime in Memphis.

And I can't remember if Eliza Fletcher was before or after that, but, you know, we'd already kind of seen a lot.

- I think it was right before.

- It was very close together.

- And you know, the Eliza Fletcher moment was kind of the knuckle down moment like, okay, this is you know, I really saw things kind of, you know, firm up after that.

But it was wild.

And you're absolutely right.

That was a whole different ballgame than what we're talking about now.

- Bill.

- And part of the new ballgame is how political crime statistics have gotten.

- Right.

- What you have happening is crime started going down here.

I mean, that's what people care about.

It's here.

It started going down in 2024.

So what you have had with the task force is there's no doubt the federal presence has helped accelerate that drop in crime.

But the Republican federal and state officials who backed this, who made this happen, have absolutely refused to acknowledge that crime was going down here before that.

And on the other side, the city has said, has talked about, yeah, when crime was already going down.

And so you've got this interplay among the two.

And then, you know, it's not like we haven't had these highly visible incidents, particularly on Beale Street, since the task force came here.

- Right.

- And the question becomes, okay, well, the political leaders who were complaining about that and saying, see, this is why we need the task force.

When that happens again during the task force, is it the fault of the task force?

Is the task force not working?

Crickets on that.

- Yeah, right.

- The other thing, and I think this should matter to people, it's certainly matters to us as journalists and news organizations.

And you all have a story at the Flyer coming out this week about the lack of transparency and just it's, it is maddening.

This is my rant.

It's maddening for me.

Not as a judgment of oh they're doing everything right or oh they're doing everything wrong is just like, if it's this important, put the data out there, the body cameras, all of that, so we can talk about it.

I mean, we pay for this.

This is our, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Why is it they, why are they not more transparent about what they're doing?

- And, it's a great question that we get into om our cover story this week, it's called "Stonewalled".

It's got kind of an iconic picture, on the front of George Chidi, from The Guardian, who's covered military for a long, long time.

He got so frustrated by just a complete stonewalling from the task force.

He made a sign that read "the task force won't talk to me, will you", something like that.

And he walked around Beale Street with this thing, and just asking people to find out what's going on.

He said he's never seen anything like this in all of his years of covering military groups.

And our story really gets into his story.

You know, when he asked for information, he says he just gets nothing.

And to Bill's point, when he said crickets, that was, that's the first word of my story, our story this week.

If it did, you know, if it made the edit.

I'm not sure yet, but-- - It did, I saw it.

- Excellent.

[all laughing] That's how closely I'm reading my own copy, but, that's what you get from from anybody in the task force, and our story talks with with Chidi from the Guardian, Mark Perrusquia at the Institute for Public Service Reporting, and with Brittany Brown at MLK50, talking about their frustrations.

But then also how they kind of tried to, get around the blockade, right, and how they did it.

You mentioned, you know, car chases and things like that.

And an impactful thing, Mark Perrusquia and the Institute team, they wanted to know how many car chases are happening.

They ask them, they got absolutely nothing back.

Perrusquia said this is like covering the Kremlin on steroids, you know?

So their workaround was to go to court records, find out how many car chases were involved in these cases going through court, and figured out that a lot of these were happening from the Tennessee Highway Patrol.

He asked the highway patrol for their policy on car chases, and they wouldn't give it to him.

Just out would not give it to him.

And so we still don't have answers there.

Brittany Brown, MLK50 team, they just went to the neighborhoods.

They said, well, if the task force won't talk to us, we're going to go find the neighbors that are impacted by this.

So you've got three different reporters with three kind of different workarounds, you know, you know, one going to the public, one going to the data and the other going to neighbors.

And that just shows you how feisty we all have to be to get information at all about this task force operating here.

- Well, I think we'll move on to some other topics with about ten minutes left here, and I'll remind everyone, the Fyler is coming out, and we continuing to cover the task force and crime, you know, extensively.

But let's switch to some things.

Data centers and, where we are at City Council.

The City Council, Bill, has been talking about a moratorium.

Now, they've kind of slowed down on data centers.

It's obviously been controversial, and, Paul Young had a bit of a, Mayor Paul Young had a bit of an outburst this week around data center things.

But give us, give us the status of where we are in terms of the City Council's effort to have some sort of pause or moratorium or regulation over data centers.

- Okay.

This began with a call by several Council members, led by JB Smiley, to put a one year moratorium on any new data centers in the city.

And during that year, the Division of Planning and Development would come up with some guidelines going forward for areas where those data centers could be, who would have to give approval, what conditions they could set.

In the interim, as that has moved through three readings or three votes.

You had two other proposals, one from Jeff Warren, the other from Philip Spinoza, to just go ahead and write the rules for it now, with no moratorium.

So the Council has now reached that point they inevitably do, where they say, wait, we have to sort this all out.

And that's what they're doing now.

- Thoughts, Mary, on this?

- Yeah.

I think it's super interesting.

And I've said I love to talk about data centers because I do I think they're super fascinating.

And this moratorium to me is super interesting in terms of I think in some cases, people are thinking that every data center is Colossus, every data center is Elon Musk coming to town.

But there are so many in the city.

St.

Jude is doing one right now.

They have one, they're expanding it.

There's the old Fred's headquarters.

That is also a data center project.

And those are not, they obviously still take power.

They still take water.

But there are smaller projects, and I think there is probably some sense out there that we need a more nuanced approach.

- Yeah.

And in North Mississippi, I mean, sometimes people forget there's SpacexAI, as it's now called, has built data centers down there.

It's been met with a mix of, you know, hey, this is great for new economic development and new tax revenue and so on.

But also people saying, hey, these are loud.

What's going on?

I don't want 'em near my house.

Is it Olive Branch?

Check me on this, Aaron.

Olive Branch passed some regulations back in August around data centers, but there's still a lot of fighting going on.

Give us kind of a quick snapshot.

- Yeah.

That's right.

So Olive Branch had similar language to like what Southaven has and what Memphis had in terms of like their city ordinances for them.

You know, basically data centers were covered under, storage warehouses, which allowed a data center to be built by rights if the land that they were wanting to build on was zoned for that kind of project.

And so what they did was they went in and they put specific language on the books to basically like divvy out data centers so that if somebody wanted to come in and build them, they would have to comply with certain regulations and noise caps.

And they also break it into, like you mentioned, data centers being not all being Colossus.

They broke them into different categories.

And so you get tier one, two and three.

And they break them down by size essentially.

And each one has a different, you know, compliance thing for noise and even water usage and electricity usage and things like that.

So.

- Doesn't it feel like, maybe I'll get to you, Toby, on this, putting you on the spot?

Doesn't it feel like all this is Mississippi is different?

But in terms of Memphis and Memphis debating what we can and can't do and what's going on that the legislature is going to be in session.

- Yeah.

- In January.

And they're going to pass whatever laws they want.

And that's what Memphis is going to have to abide by.

I mean, it just seems like one of those situations, for better or worse, where all of this, I mean, I'm not saying that the Council shouldn't do what it's doing.

It's just this seems like it's going to be a state issue.

It'll be super interesting politics because of the incredible negativity that the people have, Republicans and Democrats nationally to AI and data centers.

- Absolutely.

We're going to see some state moves on this in January.

And through the session, because they're passing moratoriums in small towns across Tennessee.

It's not just these great big ones, you know, that you're seeing everywhere.

All these people are hoping that somebody is going to pump the brakes on these, you know, and look at, you know, the, the Memphis episode, right?

I mean, this huge surprise right around Christmas time, I remember, "Hey, xAI's here!"

I'm like, what is this thing?

We didn't know the scale.

We didn't know any of the impacts.

- What's an AI?

- What is AI you know?

honestly, we were asking that question, like, who does this benefit, right?

It came fast.

It came hard.

This thing was up.

They were breaking rules, and nobody would seem to be holding them accountable.

There was no, benefit to the community other than tax revenue, right?

And we're just letting them run these gas turbines.

There's no jobs.

You know, what are we getting out of this?

And then boom, boom, boom, these things started going up so fast, and we're like, you know, it was a shock to the system, and it became this huge political, issue out there, on all the side of that.

And we're still trying to figure this out.

And I remember ages ago, some guy wanted to put up a Bitcoin mining operation somewhere in West Tennessee, and I wrote about that in the electric, you know, all of that.

And you could not have told me at that time that this would be what we're talking about now.

This huge national issue.

And so I think folks are trying to wrap their brains around it.

- Yeah.

Bill.

- And to the point of timing, all things political are about timing.

Jeff Warren on the City Council actually said there has to be some sense of urgency because in January, the legislature goes back to work.

Meanwhile, Doug McGowan with Memphis Light, Gas and Water who's pretty much a first stop for the data centers had told the Council look, there's nothing that's going to happen on this in the next six months, so you can take your time.

- In terms of people coming to MLGW saying we want water or power.

- Yeah.

- But again, it's the same water on the other side of the border.

I mean, you know, we all know that it's kind of it's not different.

And the aquifer goes all over the place.

So much more to come on that with just four minutes left, I want to touch on a story that Sam Hardiman, who's obviously for our staff, has been covering the data centers extensively and SpacexAI.

But also did a story with contributions from Bill and other staff members on Regional One.

And the headline, I don't know if you wrote this headline, Mary, I don't put you on the spot, "Regional One commits to a new $1 billion hospital with no plan to pay for it".

And you know, the plan, It's about there's about $330,000 in monthly consulting fees.

Regional One wants to do this big, renovation It's torn down the old Commercial Appeal building.

But at the same time, the county is in a bit of a financial mess.

Which we'll come to Bill on about that.

But thoughts on the Regional One story and the unanswered questions about how does this get funded?

They've got some commitments, but they don't have $1 billion in commitments.

I will say former Mayor Lee Harris has said, look, we the county committed 300 to 400 and 500,000 and philanthropy is going to fill a bunch.

But the state has never committed to any dollars evenly committed to a lot of other things.

I mean, it's just a little uncertain where this money's going to come from.

- I feel like it's a lot uncertain, right?

Like there are different pots of money where it could come from.

Like you said, the state could come in and say, here's a bunch of money.

The county could certainly say, here's a bunch of money, although there's a big question about whether the county has that money, so or it could come from private donors.

- Who by all accounts have not really come forward with big checks and commitments.

- But no one has said, like, we're ready to champion this.

So we're just at this point where the project seems to be moving forward.

The old Commercial Appeal building on Union is definitely getting demolished.

As you said, there's consulting fees happening on the project, but at the end of the day, how are we going to pay for it?

We just don't know.

- Yeah.

And none of it's a reflection I mean, I haven't talked to anyone say, oh, we don't need a Regional One.

I mean, you know, there's people have their incredible stories.

I've talked my father's experience there like it's an incredible place, but there's also a tremendous capacity at some of the other hospitals.

Healthcare is very uncertain.

There really it seems like there are a lot more questions and we'll keep asking those.

But, Bill, you want to segue into maybe the new mayor, Mickell Lowry, who'll be on the show, county mayor.

He'll be on the show, I believe, next week.

And some of the key appointments that he have kind of reflect some of this fine, if not the Regional One question, some of the financial problems that the county is facing.

- It does, it does.

And this is another example of you get elected on August 6th.

You take office on September 1st.

And this is one of the things, as soon as you even before you move your stuff into the office, this is waiting on you, - Yeah, yeah.

- You know.

So, Mickell Lowry has named his first five appointees to the top positions, what we basically call the inner circle.

And it's a combination.

And there aren't any holdovers in those five.

But there are people who have worked in local government before here and who have worked in other places in other cities in this.

Yeah, it's a very interesting-- - Brian Collins, former CFO for the city, has come back to Memphis.

He'll be the CFO, Moira Black, who has worked for the city for many years then was Chattanooga, Nashville, David Bradford, who was, on the County Commission and worked in construction, will be on public works.

Other folks who've been in there, so it's interesting.

It does seem to be framed around some of the challenges that they're facing.

With just 30 seconds left, I'm goona do one last, little privilege here.

It was a year anniversary of The Daily Memphian this past week, happy birthday to us.

And thank you all for reading and subscribing.

Folks have asked me, we announced around that time, is just coincidental.

We have a new CEO, Pierre Landaiche just joined.

Some people that I might maybe know that name.

He was at the convention center for a long time, University of Memphis, which is very exciting.

I am now editor at large at The Daily Memphian.

I don't know yet what that means, but I'm loving it already.

And the truth is that Mary Cashiola has really run the newsroom, and people give me sometimes way too much credit.

For many years now, day to day, week to week and month to month and so, we're very excited about this new era as we go into our next phase.

But that is all the time we have right now.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you everyone.

If you missed any the show you can get the full episode online at wkno.org, The Daily Memphian or YouTube, and coming up soon, Mickell Lowery, Justin Pearson, Heidi Kuhn and others.

Thanks very much and we'll see you next week.

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