- (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.

- Early voting has begun, what school buildings will be closed, and the impact of guns in Memphis.

Tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined this week by a roundtable of journalists, talking about some of the biggest stories of the week that includes Toby Sells from The Memphis Flyer.

Excuse me.

I got hung up on the word Memphis already.

- Thank you for having me.

- Absolutely.

Laura Testino, reporter at The Daily Memphian.

Thank you for being here again.

- Yeah, thank you.

- Along with Julia Baker, who covers criminal justice and public safety for us at The Daily Memphian.

So thank you all for being here.

We'll start without Bill, which is scary, but we're gonna talk about elections and early voting.

And I've written down a lot of notes.

Bill can do this without notes.

I cannot.

But early voting has begun as we tape this Thursday morning, but it began on Wednesday and goes through October 31st, obviously, Halloween, and Election Day is November 5th.

In 2020, early voting accounted for 78% of the total 384,000 votes.

You can learn more about where you vote, what's on the ballot.

We're gonna talk a little bit about that and dig into some of the issues on the ballot.

All that you can get it on The Daily Memphian, you can get it on other news sites.

You can also go to shelbyvote.org and get all where to vote early, where to vote on Election Day, all much more detail about this.

But I'm gonna just do a quick summary and we're gonna drill down on the gun referendum, which, in Memphis at least, has gotten probably the most attention.

The federal, obviously, the presidential race.

Senator Marsha Blackburn versus State House Member Gloria Johnson is a big race.

Steve Cohen and David Kustoff, the US House of Representatives are up, without a whole lot of opposition, honestly.

In the State House, all 13 districts that cover Shelby County are up for reelection this year, or election, I should say.

State Senate, two of the five Senate races that cover Shelby County or up.

And in the suburbs, there's a whole host of races in five of the suburbs that includes two mayor races, that includes education, includes aldermen.

You can get all that again at Daily Memphian, Shelby Vote, or other news sites.

Only Arlington of the suburbs doesn't have races.

But the big one, and I'll bring you in here, Toby, the big one that people have focused a lot on for all kinds of reasons, both the content of it, the potential ramifications of it, is the three-part, the ordinances around guns.

I'm gonna summarize very, very quickly as one vote, or one referendum, is: Require a handgun carry permit within the city limits.

Another would ban possession of assault rifle without a permit, but only then it'd be on one's own property or at a shooting range.

And then allowing seizure of guns under an extreme risk protection order.

That is about a page-and-a-half long on the ballot.

But those three have been incredibly controversial.

We've talked about them here.

Give me your take on it, and we'll talk a little bit more.

- Just the drama.

You know, this summer, when the City Council was deciding whether or not to put these things on the ballot, even just to put the question to voters, they knew that it wouldn't do anything, you know.

Just to say, let's ask the question.

Let's basically poll city voters, see what they think.

Boy, that caused headaches, you know, from Nashville to East Tennessee, with these lawmakers threatening to pull taxpayer, state taxpayer dollars for Memphis for even putting this on the ballot.

Leaders of the House and Senate weighing in on these things.

And that was just a disappointment, you know.

There's gotta be a better way to fix this problem.

I have ideas, but... And then to say that we're gonna go ahead with it and put this on there.

So there are triggers, right?

I mean, there are kind of trigger laws.

If things happen, then these laws go into effect.

- The cities, I mean, and JB Smiley, who really pushed this, the Chair of the City Council was on the show some weeks ago, you can get it at wkno.org.

He said, in a way that I had not fully grasped, honestly, until I talked to him about it, even though I'd read it, that, look, this is not unlike other laws, abortion laws, particularly, where a state has put laws in effect that can't supersede the federal law.

But when Dobbs went through, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, Tennessee's law kicked in.

And that happened in other states.

How JB Smiley and others view these gun, they can't usurp the state laws around guns.

They know that.

But they could sit there.

If there was a change at the federal level or at the state level, these would then go into effect.

That's the legal mechanism about it.

- Yes.

- Toby, I'll come back to you.

- And I wrote a whole story earlier this year about, you know, who's got the power, right?

The state government loves to tell Memphis and Knoxville and the big cities what to do, and what they can't do, frankly.

We tried to decriminalize marijuana in 2016 here.

The State said, "You can't do that," you know.

"Our law says you can't do that."

We didn't.

Other things have gone in other cities.

But the state government loves to fight the feds on everything and anything, you know.

That's kind of what our Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, he loves to get in those fights and go there.

So there's this constant struggle about what we can and what we can't do.

And so a lot of these, the things on the referendum, the referenda, I suppose, you know, are City Council trying to roll back some of these big gun issues that have come from the State legislators.

And, you know, the idea that I had, I see this go all the time.

I'm, you know, from rural Tennessee, and, you know, I see this.

There's no communication between what cities need and what, you know, suburbs and the rural parts of the state need.

And they're so, they don't hear each other at all.

I would love to see some kind of rural-urban committee, where we just sit down and talk about these issues for real, you know.

I mean, we're gonna vote on this stuff.

If it gets a hundred percent of the vote on all these things, nothing changes.

You know, Nashville's gonna say, you know, I say Nashville, I mean, you know, state lawmakers from, you know, more rural parts of the state are gonna say, "Look at that woke garbage they're trying to do out in, you know, really liberal Memphis."

And they're not gonna do anything about it.

They're gonna think, "Well, great, we're doing our job."

- And I should say, you know, that it will be an interesting measure of people's sentiment.

We did a poll a year ago, there've been polls done statewide, that people do want what is kind of generally referred to as common sense, pretty overwhelmingly, some amount of restrictions, some amount of limits.

There are, obviously, nuances and differences of opinion on that.

What I'll also say that we have rarely in the last few years had anyone, any politician of any background, who didn't want some amount of restriction on guns.

And that includes Bill Gibbons, a lifelong Republican, former DA, Head of Public Safety for the state, who would like to roll back some of these kind of, the openness that's been done.

So I don't want to say that there are...

There's another point of view.

I'm sure there are people listening who have a different point of view, but the overwhelming amount of public officials, law enforcement officials, and the polls, have shown that people do want more restrictions in Memphis, Shelby County, and they're frustrated, so.

- And you can almost put a data point to that.

You know, when they passed a guns in cars bill from the legislature, you know, folks, law enforcement officials, were way against that almost across the board.

And then you saw gun crime with stolen guns go up in the state.

You know, I mean, it's... - Yeah.

And again, virtually every, I think every law enforcement person, from DA, to Police Director, to all public officials, have likened that, have talked about that.

Why are there so many car break-ins?

People are looking for guns by and large.

Which segues to you, Julia.

You and others on The Daily Memphian staff are in the midst of, I think there are a few more parts maybe to come, on guns, just the impact of guns.

We did a look back.

I think Bill wrote a look back on just the history, like the permitless carry, "Guns in Trunks", it was originally called, I think it was back in 2023, or 2013, excuse me.

Talk about some of the ones that you wrote and things you found.

I think you did one even that published this week.

Was it on switches?

Was that you?

A lot of people participated, so apologies.

Let's talk about what you found in terms of this look at guns.

People can get all these articles at dailymememphian.com, but let me turn it to you.

- Yeah.

So, you know, there's also the 2021 Permitless Carry law.

Some of our Republican legislators voted against that, like John Gillespie, and I think Mark White voted against that.

So that's pretty significant.

My story that published today was about gun switches.

We've really seen a proliferation of those on the streets.

You know, those are often 3D printed or brought in from overseas.

The ATF has, they did a report last year saying there's been something like a 570% increase in the seizure of switches.

It's a relatively new device.

Our police department doesn't really track it.

We're hoping that they'll really start tracking it soon.

But the limited data that we have gotten from them indicates that we have seen an increase of those on the streets.

- And the story you did today was, on Thursday, was, I mean, taking a, you know, a semiautomatic weapon that might have, whatever, 10 bullets or something in it.

I'm not a big gun person.

But you put the switch on it, you can just pull and shoot all those as if it were an assault weapon, as a machine gun.

You can also then get a high, you know, you get 30 or 40 rounds with a different clip.

And so it suddenly turns into a handheld machine gun, which, you know, your story pointed to a number of big incidents where many people were shot and/or or killed as a result of people using these switches.

And they can be, they're very hard to trace.

They can be ordered overseas.

They can be made, like you were saying.

So other stuff in the series included, I think Sam Hardiman did a really painful but really well done story on emergency rooms.

He talked Le Bonheur and Regional One and the emergency room people there, and the amount.

You know, we talk about the number of murders, and 300 plus, but there are some, you know, over a thousand gunshot victims every year that are going through the emergency rooms.

We do a look back on these bills of who voted for what.

We also touched on the arming teachers just this last session in 2024, the ability for school districts to choose to arm their teachers, partly a response to the Coventry shooting.

And with that, I'll switch to you maybe for a little bit, Laura, and we'll segue into some education stuff.

But obviously, school safety has been a huge issue.

I think you wrote about that.

I think I have that right.

- Sure.

- School safety issues and false alarms, and talk a little bit about that.

- Yeah.

So there was, I guess about a month ago now, a day where MSCS completely locked down all of its schools.

This was over some threats that made it to a handful of schools.

And then, you know, eventually the decision was made, you know, we're just gonna lock everything down.

When we talked to the State Department of Homeland Security, you know, he shared he's been at that department for five years.

He said that, you know, the number of threats that he's seen since August 1st is the most significant that he has seen.

What he did say is that there's not a proportional correlation though, with how many of those threats are credible.

So what's happening is that the department is having to spend a lot of time assisting local law enforcement agencies and school districts in just weeding through those threats to really assess the credibility.

And, you know, that department is less focused on is there a probable cause for arrest, so they can make arrest, and more focused on is this a legitimate threat?

How do we respond to it to keep our students and staff stay safe at schools?

- Yeah.

And I think with, you mentioned the Memphis Shelby County Schools shutting down, but I think most, if not all the suburban schools did, probably some private schools.

I mean, because if it seems credible, and given the frequency of school shootings in this country, it is hard for a school district to say, "Nah, we're not gonna respond to that.

We're not."

And so it, I can't imagine the difficulty of the decision-making that the schools are facing.

- Sure.

Yeah, there's that.

And then, you know, another instance that I wrote about, probably, you know, not too far ahead of that, also about a month ago, there was a school in Frayser that was, you know, very much enveloped in the crime scene that developed after a couple of men fled arrests from a car.

One of those men was fatally shot by police officers, but that all happened right in front of a school.

So you see instances where the school is the direct threat.

You also see instances where community violence is just encroaching upon schools, and then the schools have to make those decisions to do soft lockdowns as well, to just make sure that those things don't intersect in a bad way.

- Let's stay with schools in shift though.

We're about midway through the show here.

A lot going on.

We had Marie Feagins, the Superintendent of Schools, on the show a month ago, or so ago.

You can go to wkno.org and get that.

I thought it was, not for anything I did, but it was very interesting.

It was great to meet her.

It was probably the fourth, or I think probably the fifth superintendent we've had on the Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Shelby County Schools, Memphis City Schools, all those successor schools, on the show.

But one of the things we talked about there, and there's been more movement on this, is school closures, which is just a huge hot button issue for people, for parents, for teachers, for community leaders.

You know, you got a community.

When you take that school and you close it, school officials will look at it clinically and say, "Look, this school is maybe half full, "maybe it's a third full, and it has all this deferred maintenance."

There are some 200 buildings, most of them schools, but also administrative and maintenance buildings.

Where are we in that decision-making process that Marie Feagins touched on, but there's been some more movement since then?

- Yeah.

So I'll start this by saying, you know, I think people are probably sick of listening of like, "This is coming, this is coming, this is coming."

We've been talking about how school closure decisions are coming, consolidations are coming, for a couple of years now.

We had a plan that, you know, the quick summary is Superintendent Hobson left a plan, retired, COVID happened.

Joris Ray updates that plan in spring 2021, presents it.

Couple of closures happen, very small things change, and then he leaves.

We have Toni Williams come in.

She says she's very committed to making a plan that lasts.

And now we have Superintendent Marie Feagins, who's opted to have the results of school building evaluation.

So, essentially, there was $1.9 million spent to hire an outside company that does this all over the country, to look at and create a database that stays updated of like, you know, everything, from, "This is the condition of your door and your window," to, "This is the condition of your roof, and here's how much it's gonna cost."

And so what, the thing that's changed now is that we have all of those results back.

So the school district has all of that data.

It hasn't been shared publicly yet, but they know the number.

They know the value of the deferred maintenance bill, that is expected to be over a billion dollars, that would bring all of the buildings back up to par.

And they're gonna have to look at that.

And that's what Marie Feagins has decided to do, is use that information to determine consolidations and closures.

- And we don't know yet how many schools she's gonna close.

My impression, from what she was able to say when she was on the show, is that she's gonna close some buildings.

I mean, that she's gonna try real hard.

Does the school board, I think they have to approve that, which gets into local districts and the kind of... A little more political.

I don't mean that in a bad way.

I mean, they represent districts around us.

What's the timeframe for more decisions being done?

- So, right now, Marie Feagins has said that she will have that plan by April.

School Board policy on closures requires that community meetings and votes made about closures happen by February.

So closures of existing school buildings right now, less likely, if we stick to the timeline for next fall.

What could be likely is we see more decisions about consolidation of administrative buildings, which may not stick to that timeline as specifically, as well as rezoning, which is something that hasn't come to the board as often, even those zoning decisions, so like where your address dictates which school you go to.

- Oh, not use of buildings, but what district you're in.

- Yes.

- Okay, that kind of zone.

Okay.

- And where, what your home school is, for lack of a better word.

Yeah.

- We're gonna come back to some school stuff.

I would encourage people to go and read some of Laura's stories, though.

There's one that, it's just this painful, maddening story about a building that was bought, the Bayer building.

- The Bayer building.

- The Bayer building, that, for seemingly very good reasons, there was a lot of deferred maintenance in the existing headquarters for the administration.

"Let's buy this building."

They felt like they got a great price.

They put $23 million in, but they really need to put another $70 million in.

They've only moved 500 people up there.

I mean, it's just kind of, as a taxpayer, you just bang your head against the wall.

Which brings me, Toby, to MATA, which, speaking of deferred maintenance and banging your head against the wall, and just a kind of really epic disaster.

I mean, this isn't even a, that's not even a subjective assessment of the situation.

I'm not trying to be biased.

- I've covered a lot of boards, I've covered a lot of city governments in my time, and watched these people go through, you know, work-a-day problems, right?

So kind of at the beginning of the year, our new reporter, Kailynn Johnson, she got on the MATA beat, and her stories were those kind of work-a-day stories.

You know, this problem, this problem, this problem.

Then all of a sudden, it was this implosion of, first, it was a $60 million budget deficit that was coming for the next year.

Wow.

You know, any board's gonna have an issue there.

To fix that, they came in 200 layoffs.

Well, they stopped trolleys, they were gonna cut bus routes and all these basic services, that just really opened people's eyes up.

The MATA folks, and I don't, you know, I'm glad they went up there and glad it wasn't me, but they went before the City Council and just really got, you know, raked over the coals, you know, City Council members saying that somebody knew, somebody was lying here.

You know, just a really tough time before the City Council up there.

All the while, you know, Mayor Young brought in a consultant group, Transpo, to see what happened.

That report just came out.

- And that is, by the way, if you're into, if you watch this show on a regular basis, you should at least skim that report.

We're gonna do a deeper dive on it.

I know you all have written about it.

You should read everything about it.

It's epic.

And it's so disastrous.

- It really is.

- And it shows that this was years and years, if not decades, in the making.

One of the things that stands out, they bought some 20-something buses from the Tucson system that were in good shape to update the fleet.

They've got 21 of 'em that they've yet to be able to put into service because of just all these systemic problems.

The really sad fact, and I don't, the really, I don't know how they solve it, the situation of very important routes that lose so much money.

I mean, none of the system makes money.

Very few public transit systems in the world make money.

- That's right.

- But the, you know, the trolley line is actually the most revenue-producing, but is really more of a tourist thing, which, there's nothing wrong with that.

It's just, it's 80 pages of just sadness, [Toby laughing] of just like, "Oh my gosh, this is so bad."

- That's right.

And again, I mean, if you watch this show, you're into this stuff, go check that report out and it'll just peel your eyeballs back.

You know, one of the big things, the criticisms they have of the past MATA Board was this budget they just passed.

Sixty million dollar deficit, these huge cuts, all these things, this dramatic budget, and they didn't talk about it at all in meeting.

They just unanimously passed it without saying a word about it.

And they thought, you know, the Transpo people thought, "Okay, there's a problem here."

And so we went from that.

We saw, what, late Friday, this past Friday, Mayor Young says, you know, "I want to completely reset over there at MATA."

And they did that Tuesday with the City Council.

- With a whole new board, and so on.

We are trying to get, we had her scheduled, there's obviously a lot going on, the interim CEO, Bacarra Williams is, we think is coming on soon, maybe some board members.

We definitely will be covering this more.

With six minutes here, I want to come back to you though, Julia, on a couple of things.

One is, always a huge issue at this table and in the news around criminal justice and public safety, is bail, releasing.

There were some changes.

The standing bail order.

Let's talk about all that, the changes to the standing bail order, and start with what that is, and then, what those changes are.

- Yeah.

So the standing bail order was brought about when Just City and other organizations threatened to sue Shelby County for its bail practices, and not considering the ability to pay, and it instituted a bail calculator and bail hearings within 72 hours of arrest.

But the legislature passed a law this session that takes away the ability to pay from the bail consideration.

So we're no longer using that bail calculator.

And so Just City has since sued Shelby County for not using that anymore.

So that's one thing that we've got going on.

We've also got a new Public Safety bill, that it adds the consideration of public safety in addition to flight risk when a judicial officer is considering ROR on a defendant.

- ROR being Released on Own Recognizance, - Which is release without bail.

- Which is one of these things that get people real...

When somebody's released on their recognizance, and many, many people are, and it all goes fine, but when it happens if that person goes out and re-offends, and particularly if it's a violent situation, they're like, "How in the world was this person ever released?"

Right, that's the dynamic that gets people so frustrated.

So the changes to that, go ahead.

- So, John, lead judicial commissioner John Marshall recently said during a panel discussion that that gives judicial commissioners more teeth when it comes to setting bail.

Another thing is that judicial officers can deny bail on non-capital cases, so rape, torture, things like that.

That has not passed yet.

It passed for the first General Assembly this last year, and then it has to pass another General Assembly for the referendum, and then that will be put on the 2026 gubernatorial ballot.

- And that would be a Tennessee state constitutional amendment.

- Yes.

- I wanna stay with you.

We can do a whole show on everything you're, on everything everybody's covering here, so we're moving a little quickly, but two stories you did.

First is, and by the way, it's Bacarra Mauldin is the interim CEO of MATA.

That's my fault.

Apologies to her.

I screwed that up.

You did a really interesting story on officers leaving the Memphis Police Department, 134 officers that left in the last fiscal year.

I assume that ended in the summer.

So 76 of them did exit interviews that were public.

And you culled those together and were able to talk to some of the former police officers.

And it was a mix of reasons they left.

It was very fascinating.

And I say the backdrop of that is we have about 1,990 MPD officers right now.

Everybody, it seems like, every mayoral candidate, every former mayor, wants to get us back to something like 2,400 or 2,500, the Crime Commission, and so on.

There are people who don't want that, but many, many people do.

And the City has struggled for, and most big city police departments have struggled increasing their officer ranks.

What did you find in those exit interviews and the conversations you had with former MPD officers?

- So the top two reasons that officers decided to leave were family reasons and going to another agency.

You know, one of the officers I talked to, you know, he really talked about, you know, the level of crime and violence, not just working with the crime and violence, but even just, you know, being affected by it himself.

He has a family, and so he moved all the way to Salt Lake City, where they have a whopping eight homicides, or from January to September, they only had eight homicides, compared to our nearly 250.

So that's, you know, a stark difference.

Other reasons though, were work conditions, work hours, company culture, and overall compensation.

And so, you know, this May, we had the lowest complement that I've seen in my time covering crime.

We had close to 1,800 officers.

Usually, we hover around 1,900.

Our city has been wanting to really reach a short-term goal of 2,300.

The ultimate is 2,500, but they have not been able to reach that for several years, since benefits got taken away in, I think, 2014.

- And others had really interesting reasons.

They had loved the department, they had loved the work, and they just had, whatever reason in their life, they were moving, transferred.

It was really an interesting story.

The last thing with, we don't have near enough time to do this, and you were at the Tyre Nichols trial.

Really, 20 seconds.

We all know how it turned out.

We all have seen, or seen parts of the video.

What was it like to be there virtually every day in that hearing room?

- Yeah, I mean, it was a range of emotions from the family.

You know, they were there mostly every day.

You know, anytime video was played, they walked out.

I can imagine why.

You know, we heard from various witnesses, use of force experts, MPD trainers, you know, of people who received text messages from Demetrius Haley, who texted pictures of Tyre Nichols after the beating.

And we even heard from one of the defendants himself and one or two of the other- - Which was remarkable, - Yeah.

- That they testified.

I didn't give you enough time on that.

I didn't give enough time.

There's much more we're gonna get to, but we are out time.

That's all the time we have this week.

If you missed any of the show, you can get it at wkno.org, The Daily Memphian and YouTube.

You can also get the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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