- (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.

- Digging into the homicide numbers, and expansion of school vouchers, and much more tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by a roundtable of journalists.

Toby Sells, news editor with The Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks for having me.

- Abigail Warren, a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Thank you for being here.

- Thanks for having me back.

- And Ben Wheeler, also a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll talk about a lot of the homicide numbers, which were, we'll start a series that, that Ben, with help from others, but that Ben led with us this past week, or started the week before, I think.

And we'll talk about school vouchers, we'll talk about trains, we'll talk about Cameron Sexton was in town.

But I do wanna start with the homicide numbers, Ben, and just the overall scale of what you found, both in the numbers and in the people who are either family members of victims, or just all of it.

So walk through what you, what you found.

- Yeah, sure.

You know, our series kind of focused on 2016 to 2021 numbers, as that was the data set that we received through an open records requests.

We expanded that a little bit through, you know, media reports that we had done, others have done, et cetera.

And, you know, we, during that period of 2016 to 2021, we saw 1,550 people had lost their lives due to homicides.

Now, I wanna say off the top of my head, you know, the number of unsolved, it's somewhere around 586, without having it in front of me, it might be 589.

And we, you know, we created this data set, we mapped it out, we looked at, you know, where are these cases not being solved, where are they occurring?

You know, who are these people who aren't having their cases solved?

And so we were able to do kind of an, I would like to call it an initial series on this data, because I'd like to continue reporting on it.

'Cause there's plenty of stories in it.

And, you know, we focused on what these numbers say.

You know, with the help of reporter Ian Round, you know, we looked at relaxed gun laws, we looked at the unsolved homicides that have occurred in the city.

- Well, let's stay there for a second on unsolved.

Unsolved means it, no one has been convicted, no one has gone to trial?

What, let's dig into what that term means.

- So there's an issue with that.

So unsolved, we don't necessarily know.

This data comes from MPD.

I reached out to MPD- - Memphis Police Department.

- Memphis Police Department, excuse me.

You know, reached out to MPD, and spoke, you know, sent in interview requests.

Never really received any, you know, answer back.

But to the best of my knowledge, I believe it is by arrest.

Because when look, and it's mentioned in the series, when looking at these cases, there was a case that was listed as solved.

I was actually at a press conference with DA Mulroy, who talked about the closure of a cold case.

But when looking at the data, it had already been listed as solved, because- - An arrest had been made.

- An arrest had been made.

- We're gonna talk in a minute about the data.

And I'm sure some people are listening saying, "Well, why is that not clear?

"And why is that data not clear?

And why do we only have the data through 2021?"

But let me, let me skip over that for just one second, and point out, you know, we've set a record for homicides this year.

We were at 362 as of December 1st.

- Yes.

- And we're on, it's gonna be a record number.

Let's talk a bit about the solutions part.

'Cause you did go into some of the, and talk to some of the people who are trying to prevent these murders from happening, excuse me, the homicides, which is the technical term, before they happen.

Talk about some of what you found on that side of things.

- Yeah, you know, there's a lot of great groups here in Memphis that are working at, you know, group violence intervention, trying to determine who are these at risk individuals who are either becoming victims, who might then become a suspect, or, you know, are headed down the wrong path.

You know, I spoke with Delvin Lane of 901 BLOC Squad, and you know, he spoke about the work that they are doing, and going into these places, and speaking with kids, and trying to get them to realize, you know, "Hey, you might be heading down the wrong path."

I spoke with Aquila Cheryls, who has created kind of a blueprint of how to do this work.

And, you know, Cheryls works a lot with 901 BLOC Squad as well.

And I also spoke with City Councilmember Jeff Warren, who spoke about how, you know, Memphis is on the right path, and they are, they're looking at implementing this kind of, kind of... - These interventions.

- Yes.

- Crime and violence interventions programs.

- And how they are, you know, getting there.

It's just not all the way there yet.

- Let me, we're gonna come back to some parts of the series.

And again, the series is on dailymemphian.com.

But Toby, one of the things about the data, and you and I have talked about this before.

You've gone through this in enterprise investigative pieces you've done, it is not just MPD, it is across, really, it's across local government and state government.

But if we just, just focusing on the public safety, criminal justice kind of realm, the data is so hard to get.

It costs, we spent hundreds of dollars maybe, I don't know if we spent a thousand dollars, just with, okay, so hundreds of dollars.

But we've had, we've had people come back with requests for pretty straightforward data, where it was gonna be a thousand dollars for a digital file.

Why in the world is it so hard to get this?

'Cause it's, it's not just media, it's the citizens, it's the voters, it's, this stuff, we're not looking for people's social security numbers, we're just looking for some pretty straightforward numbers about cases, trials, arrests, solve rates, unsolved rate, and so on.

- I wish I knew why this was so hard to get this data, and why it doesn't match up, why it's not easier to read.

This has been a problem specifically with Memphis Police Department for a very long time.

And then when you have a simple question about, you know, the definition of this or that, you don't hear anything back.

You say, "Hey, I have a question here."

It's not pointed.

It's a pretty straightforward question.

"What the heck is this?"

And nothing, you know.

I say it all the time, maybe this is pollyanna, but this is our information, this is our data.

This, this is for the tax paying citizens of Memphis to help us make better decisions about what we do out there.

And it's like pulling teeth to get this information.

And it's terribly frustrating.

And then when you get the data, it doesn't match up to what other people are doing.

That's the reason that the crime rates are so different between this municipality and this one.

Why it's so hard to get something for Tennessee?

Why, you know, we might report a crime this way to the FBI, and Nashville reports it a different way.

So our crime rate looks bigger than other places, and makes Memphis look, look bad.

Is that about right, Ben?

I mean, it's different, right?

- Yeah.

So I mean, crime data is kind of flawed, depending on where you get it.

It is, you know, certain criteria for X locale, certain criteria for, you know, Y,.

And that's why, you know, you see discrepancies.

And even in the data that we received, you know, for 2021, it was widely reported that we had three hundred and forty-six homicides at the end of the year.

And the data that I received from MPD, it was 345.

Now, you know, again, I don't know why that there was a victim missing in this data, but, you know, it's surely there.

- We've had lots of people on the show.

We've written about it at The Daily Memphian, and y'all have the Flyer.

I mean, about this whole data problem.

The district, it's, you know, the District Artorney's Office, District Attorney Mulroy is announced, I think this week, or maybe even today or yesterday, a plan for a public facing data dashboard.

It'll go through some of these questions of recidivism rates, of who's going through the criminal justice system.

It's trying to tie together data.

They ideally would tie together data from MPD, from TBI, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, County Court Clerks, Shelby County government, all of that.

But it's, there's a lot of pressure on the local government, and to some degree on the state, and coming from lots of different directions to sort of tell people what is going on.

Whether that's people who want the criminal justice system to be harder on the accused, or divert the accused, or somewhere in between.

The date is just not clear.

Let me bring you in Abigail, and we'll stay with criminal justice, public safety.

And Cameron Sexton, the speaker of the Tennessee State House was in town this week talking about a lot of things.

We'll get to school vouchers in a bit, but talk about his, some of the things he talked about with crime, and some of the things they did in the last session.

And I don't know if he got into plans for this upcoming session.

- He talked a little bit about both, you know, he talked about truth in sentencing, and how proud the Republicans were of that effort.

And so, but he said, "You know, crime is still on the rise in Memphis, not only by adults, but also by juveniles."

And so he talked a lot about blended sentencing, which, you know, he gave the example, if there's a 17-year-old that's convicted of murder and found guilty, that they can walk free at age 19.

And so trying to find ways to rehabilitate, set them on a new path.

He said that was a effort that Senator Taylor from Eads, Memphis, Shelby County, is pushing.

And so it's a bill that I think was kind of talked about last year, but he's hoping it comes back.

You know, I think in the rehabilitation bill, there are three things.

It's like you have to get a high school diploma or a GED, you have to have a job, and you can't commit another crime.

And if you do that then, and they're gonna raise the age, I think, to 24, to kind of help people turn their life around.

And so rehabilitation, you know, when Governor Lee ran for election, he talked about criminal justice reform.

I think maybe the legislators have a little bit different idea of what that looks like.

But they are talking about rehabilitation efforts in this session and what that looks like.

- The blended sentence we've talked about on the show.

We had Bill Gibbons on the show.

And I think, I believe Senator Taylor, when he was on the show, was talking about blended sentencing.

And even some criminal justice reform folks have been in favor of some kind of change because it is right now a situation where they don't have, you either transfer them to adult court, or you try them as a juvenile, and then everything gets wiped away at 19.

And there ought to be this kind of middle ground for some people, where it's not that they go to the jail for the rest of their lives at 17, but they, they don't have those tools.

And I think that that is one that was a high priority for a whole lot of folks in the last session, probably for this upcoming session.

- Right.

He said it's trying to find the mechanism, it's what it is.

He gave the example that as a parent, the most effective punishment was not taking his child's phone away, but taking the door off the hinges, so that they lost that sense of privacy and peace.

And so he said, he gave it as an analogy, and he said, you know, like, "We've gotta find a mechanism that helps people transform their lives."

- Let me stay with you for a second.

A big issue, we talked about, school vouchers.

The governor has put forward a proposal to expand school vouchers in 20 what, '24, '25, and to what, ten thousand vouchers next year for students with disabilities, students who meet eligibility requirements for the existing voucher program, and students with family income below 300% of the federal poverty, another poverty level, another 10,000 vouchers would be available to any student eligible to attend a public school, then in 2025, '26 academic year everyone's eligible.

Is that correct?

- A private school, but yes.

- To a private school.

Yes.

- Yes.

- All the suburban districts are against it.

MSCS has also been against it in the past.

And I'm pretty sure I saw something from their chairman that said they were still against it.

The superintendents have concerns.

They don't want it to affect their funding.

There's questions about how it will affect their funding.

But then one statistic that both Superintendent Jason Manuel in Germantown, and Superintendent Gary Lilly in Collierville, they both brought up that Arizona's in the middle of a sour statewide voucher effort.

They budgeted $670 million-ish.

It's gonna end up costing $276 million more than that state planned.

And so there's questions about what that looks like.

You know, when Governor Lee made the announcement, he had a student from St. George's up there.

There was a single mother, and there was a, she had one student at St. George's, and one student at a charter school.

But there are a lot of questions.

I think there are a lot of concerns about what that does to funding.

Jason Manuel in Germantown, he put out a video that talked about how many state mandates they have, and how many unfunded mandates they have.

And Superintendent David Stevens out in Bartlett, he said there's an attack on public education.

And so there's just so many burdens that the public schools already have.

And then to have vouchers on top of that, is really a concern about what that looks like.

- And Governor Bill Lee was in town, and with Speaker Cameron Sexton at a event in Frayser.

One of the big questions is the fine print on the accountability.

What, you know, as you're saying, the public schools have all these standards, and rules and regulations that they are accountable to, from whether that's local, state, or federal, or all three.

Private schools really don't have that level of accountability, but now they're gonna be getting public money.

And I think that's the question that's gonna have to really be worked through.

- That's a really hard question, because, you know, they have TCAP tests that the state takes.

And one law that went into effect recently was the third grade retention law, where if third graders don't pass the English language arts portion of their test, they have to go to a mandatory summer camp.

And if they don't score better then they're retained.

There's some other remediation, but yeah, that's it in a nutshell.

And so, well, are private schools gonna have to do that?

There's kind of that question, and are they gonna have to take TCAP tests?

How do- - 'Cause generally, the private schools in Memphis use a different- - They use a different- - Totally different testing mechanism.

- Right.

I went to private school, and we didn't take TCAP, we took a different achievement test.

So it's one of those things to, it's just hard to know what that looks like.

Are the students, I mean, it's not even apples and oranges.

It's like apples and pecans that you're trying to- - Right, right, right.

Let me bring, Toby thoughts on this?

- Just through this whole thing, school vouchers, and other things, I'm wondering what is the Republican end game here?

You know, we just went through a series of hearings in Nashville, about giving up a billion dollars of federal funding, so that we could, as they say, you know, do it the Tennessee way, do education the Tennessee way here.

What is that?

Why are we trying to privatize this, and really get that going?

Why are we trying to give up these federal dollars?

I don't have the answer, but you can kind of read the handwriting on the wall a little bit.

I won't propose to know what that is exactly, but I just, I don't know what they're, what they're aiming at.

What's the goal here?

What they're trying to get at.

- I mean, Sexton will tell you that every child has the right to a quality education, and, but what that looks like, you know.

He complimented yesterday, or Wednesday, when he was in Collierville, he complimented that Collierville and Bartlett, and that the suburbs broke away from Shelby County.

And he said, "I wish more school districts were like you."

We don't know what the bill's gonna say.

Mark White is listening.

Mark White, it's from, who represents Memphis and Germantown, has said, he's listening to concerns.

The governor's presented a framework and he's trying to make them match.

But what the bill's gonna look like is one thing.

And also it'll be amended several times before it gets to the governor's desk, if it goes that far.

- What is the amount?

I skipped over this.

Of the voucher amount?

Do you know off the top of your head?

- I think it's $7,000 is what I've heard.

But it- - Yeah, I guess that's up for discussion as well.

- When the bill comes out we'll know.

- Seven thousand is a lot of money.

I mean, there are a lot of first grade private schools in Memphis that are about twenty thousand dollars for that first year.

And so that's a whole other part of this is, is what, you know, some private schools have just said, "No, we're not even gonna get into the voucher program that exists right now for Shelby and Davidson County."

So but it's clearly a huge priority for the governor.

So he's gonna push hard on this.

Let's stay with the session which starts in January, the upcoming state session.

Some of the, I don't know if Cameron Sexton talks about some of these other priorities, back to crime and public safety.

But there's a lot of pressure from outside to look at, you know, gun laws in terms of permitless carry, in terms of very lax laws, which you found, Ben, in your homicide series.

There's, a lot of people think, a connection between, you know, the widespread availability in guns and the rising homicide rate.

More about sentencing.

We talked about the juveniles, and also pressure on the district attorney, and on judges, which is widespread in Memphis.

We can go spend 10 minutes in the comment section of The Daily Memphian, and you'll have a lot of questions about people asking a lot of questions about when are the judges in session, how many cases they hear, why bail is said a certain way.

We've talked about a lot over the last year, a year and a half on this show.

So I think that as well is gonna come up and be, we'll try to do some shows previewing some of those conversations in the coming weeks.

Let's switch to trains.

A completely difficult transition- - Completely different thing.

- Different thing.

But it was a big proposal this week, a grant that came forward to study passenger rail between not just Memphis and Nashville, but Memphis, Nashville and beyond.

- That's right.

So good news on passenger rail.

There's some kind of concerning news on freight rail.

Maybe we can get to that in a minute.

But passenger rail, anybody that loves riding the train, I don't if you guys have taken in the city of New Orleans, it's fantastic.

It's a great way to travel.

Federal government just approved some money, five hundred thousand dollars to look at planning, to begin planning for a statewide rail system that would run from Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, all the way to Atlanta.

The mayors of those four cities put together a proposal, put it to the Federal Railroad Administration, and got, got this money.

So now we can start looking at, you know, do we have enough train, existing train tracks to make this work?

Where would the stations be?

All those things that would be necessary to get this kind of statewide rail system, which has been a dream for people for a long time.

And the beginning, the first line of that proposal would run from Atlanta, Chattanooga to Nashville, and when that was announced, you can hear everybody in Memphis just kind of sigh and say, "Well of course Nashville.

Of course they did."

But that was, that decision was made just on the amount of people they could move, the population sizes in those three cities, especially from Atlanta to Nashville, opening that up.

And then it also opens up Nashville to a lot of lines on the eastern seaboard and beyond.

So, you know, that made sense to get started with that one.

The second line would run from Nashville to Memphis, and that would also move a lot of bodies, but that also would connect the rest of the state over to our line over on the city of New Orleans, from Chicago to New Orleans, and beyond to the west.

So that was kind of the reason that that was, that was there.

The reason it was put forward, the state legislation put forward to have state folks study this, came from Antonio Parkinson in Memphis, and then Ken Yeager, Republican from Bristol, two very different parts of the state working together on this.

They know that these rail spurs are not just for fun, it's not just for, you know, like a Rick Steves fan going around everywhere.

It brings in people, it brings in tourist dollars.

And they believe that it can really breathe life into all of our cities here.

So it's important economically to get this done.

Probably some of the first decisions on this will be made in Nashville this coming session.

It's probably gonna be an uphill battle I predict to get this done.

But we're gonna plan and come up with something to, to see what we're gonna do there.

It might take a little while.

- Let's stay with trains, and a new state report on cargo trains.

- That's right.

Anybody in Memphis who's tried to do their errands, especially around east Memphis, anywhere, you pull up and here comes the train.

And you're sitting there, you have no idea how long it's gonna take, if you need to reroute, if you need to sit and wait it out.

This is getting beyond an annoyance.

A new state report from the Comptroller's Office just came and said that these are, these blockages are taking, they're happening a lot more, they're taking a lot longer, and it's becoming dangerous.

Pedestrians will come up to that and see, "Well, I can't get across."

So they'll crawl under the train, crawl through the train cars, not knowing if it's gonna start back up.

That could cause injury.

Also, emergency services vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks, you know, they don't know where the train is stopped.

They're trying to get to an emergency, they're stopped.

Do they reroute?

Do they wait?

Do they call somebody else?

That takes longer to get those services to the emergency.

He called it dangerous.

And so there's new state attention on this thing.

They're starting to count how many blockages there are.

Memphis doesn't rank anywhere near the top of the state data.

Last year we had, it's based on eyewitness reports.

You see these little blue signs, these crossings that says, you know, "Call us if you have a problem."

Overall, statewide last year, or this past year, there was more than a thousand people observed these blockages at these train crossings.

Memphis, there were 13 crossings that were reported.

Nashville, the top one had 46 different train crossings, blockages there reported so.

So Memphis not on the top of the list, but the number one blocked train crossing was at Macklemore, right there close to Southern.

That's over in district four.

People have reported to the government that they've seen cars or trains sit there for 6 to 12 hours at a time, sometimes more than a day at a time.

They've seen people crawl through, they've seen people, you know, ambulances couldn't get through.

So it's a problem over there.

And the Memphis City Council, they just brought in somebody from BNSF railroad to talk to the transportation committee last month about this.

They promised more hearings about this down the road.

So it's an issue that's starting to get local, state, and national attention.

Because John Oliver just did, dedicated his whole show to it last week.

- Yeah.

Let me, we just, what, three minutes left here.

A couple things I forgot to get to when we're talking about schools, was the Collierville School superintendent search.

It's their third search in the 10 years they- - This is the 10th year.

- This is the 10th year.

- Yeah.

- So they had 19 applicants.

They hired a search firm that named three finalists.

They're supposed to interview five people, including two of the finalists.

So right now they're scheduled to interview Leanne Rainey, who's the chief academic officer in the district, Roger Jones, who's the high school principal, Tyler Salyer, who's the West Collierville Middle School principal, Jeff Jones, who's the assistant to superintendent, and then Russell Dyer, who was the high school principal, he was the chief of staff when Collierville Schools got started.

And the last eight years he's been in Cleveland, a suburb of Chattanooga being their superintendent.

So those are the five candidates that have an interview scheduled.

There's also a finalist that TSBA named out of Fort Benton, Texas, which is about 15 minutes outside Houston.

But they haven't scheduled an interview with him yet.

- Is it some reflection of a problem?

I mean it seems like a lot of superintendents in three years, or is that just- - I think it's just when they hired John Atkin, who was the original superintendent, they knew that was not a long term.

John- - He was informed.

He'd been the head of the Shelby, the old Shelby County School system is kind of, was....

So, yeah.

- And John had just retired from Shelby County, and he came out of retirement to help Collierville get started.

Gary Lilly, who's the superintendent, is taking a job with Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents.

He'll be at the legislature fighting about different education laws, but he's from Bristol, he's got family there, he's got in-laws and parents that are aging.

He's got a grandbaby there, all that.

- With just a minute or two left, And I think you mentioned this Ben, coming back to the series that people really should take a look at on on dailymemphian.com.

There's a lot of information on the demographics of victims, but years, it's a really deep look.

But you talked about having gotten the data, and maybe other stories that could come.

What further data do you hope to get, and what sort of stories from this, the data you have now, or the data you may get in the future?

- Yeah, so we have requested updated data on this.

This request comes from 2022.

You know, some of these unsolved rates may have changed.

We are still awaiting that.

And then we've also requested the 2022 victim data as well.

We're still waiting on that.

So I mean, just looking at further expansion of, you know, what our solve rates look like.

You know, is there a shift in, in, you know, any kind of numbers type base?

Because we did have a drop in 2022 before we saw a pickup in 2023.

But you know, since 2017, by the end of the year, we might have almost doubled where we were to now.

- Alright.

It's really impressive work.

Thank you.

Thank all of you.

I appreciate it.

That is all the time we have this week though.

If you missed any of the show today, you can get the full episode at wkno.org, or you can download the podcast of the show from Daily Memphian, WKNO, or wherever you get your site, your podcasts.

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

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