- (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 DOJ and MPD, Clayborn Temple, 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 this week by a roundtable of journalists talking about some of the biggest stories of the week, including Laura Testino from The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks.

- Toby Sells from the Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks for having me.

- Along with Bill Dries with The Daily Memphian.

We'll start, Bill, and we're recording this Thursday morning.

I guess it was yesterday.

I mean, I was saying that yesterday alone there was enough news for us to do about four roundtable shows, but we'll start with Clayborn Temple, which was already just, I think it's fair to say, sort of a tragedy that it had burned, the damage.

And then it is alleged now that that was arson, both Memphis Fire Department, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Federal agency, are saying, and they have a person of interest.

So update us there.

- Yeah.

The investigation had taken long enough that there was a lot of speculation that this was probably going to be the cause of the fire.

Usually when it's an accident, they're able to find that out pretty quickly and confirm that.

So the investigation into that continues.

Meanwhile, the nonprofit that was rebuilding Clayborn Temple now embarks on trying to really rebuild what's left of the church, which is not a whole lot.

The walls that remain are now being propped up with supports.

The back wall of the church collapsed a few days after the fire was put out.

So it will be interesting to see what the path forward is for some kind of new structure there, possibly with a blend of what's left.

There's not much.

- Yeah, and the authorities have put out a photo, a person of interest.

It was on The Daily Memphian site.

You can get it on Twitter, X, I'm sure.

I think The Flyer probably ran it, all the news organizations.

I mean, Toby, there's a lot to feel about what happened, and there's not a lot we know, but, I mean, thoughts on just what is really just such a tragedy.

- Absolute tragedy, and very first emotion's gotta be anger now that they're looking for somebody.

They've named it arson.

That just makes it worse than tragedy somehow.

And, you know, if they make an arrest, and they find this person, once we know the motivation, I think, behind this arson, it could, you know, spark another kind of round of community emotions about this, you know.

Or if we don't find any motivation at all, it could make it more frustrating.

But, you know, we're just really looking down there.

It's such a big part of our collective history in Memphis, you know, with "I Am a Man" and all the great things that happened at Clayborn Temple.

The community's gonna be looking at that, and we're waiting to see what happens next.

- And it'll be interesting to see, I mean, you know, whether that's city and county and state and federal and then philanthropy.

I mean, it is not gonna be... Whatever rebuilding happens, it's not gonna be cheap and all that.

- Well, and it was a struggle to raise the money for the work that had been done on the church.

And the results were beautiful.

I mean, I can't tell you what it means to have lived long enough to see the sanitation workers become figures in a stained glass window in a 19th-century church in our city.

- Yeah, yeah.

We will be covering that more about the arson investigation and, you know, looking for this person of interest at Daily Memphian and The Flyer as well and other folks.

The other big news, the DOJ, the federal government, dropped some, really not unexpectedly with President Trump taking office, dropped civil rights claims against Memphis Police Department and maybe, what, 10 or 15 other cities around the country, Minneapolis included.

Really, the basically, I mean, this is what the City of Memphis had sort of calculated that with Trump winning, they would not go into a consent decree.

This all goes back to a really scathing, and the incidents in it, disturbing report that the federal government under Joe Biden put together, the DOJ put together, on patterns and practices at MPD.

Give us some more background, Bill, and we'll get comments from the others.

- The report had been delivered before Joe Biden left office.

And the City of Memphis said, "We'll talk to the Justice Department about this report, "but we're not going to enter into a consent decree that's governed by a federal judge."

So what the Trump administration did was they said, "Okay, the Justice Department is now not going "to pursue an agreement of any kind with the city.

"And our philosophy on this is going to be different.

It's going to be what do the police need to do their job."

So Mayor Young's conclusion on this has been, this really changes nothing in terms of what happens next with the conclusions in that report.

I might also add that during Donald Trump's first term, he did the same thing.

It was not a pattern or practice investigation by DOJ, but it was a review of police department policies.

And Trump stopped that process 10 months into his first term.

- Mayor Young said, "It really affirms the approach we've already embarked on," and he's talking about the various policies and oversight that they've put in place.

CJ Davis, the police chief, has also talked about this.

Mayor Young went on to say, "It does not change anything for our commitment to make sure there is integrity in policing."

Laura, I'll bring you in.

You wrote about this report.

It's on our site.

People can find it elsewhere.

There are a series of incidents in it that are really disturbing to read.

- Absolutely, yeah, and I focused a little bit on what the report found about children and interactions that the police had had with children.

Especially, there was one pretty unforgettable incident with a child who had disabilities and just sort of, you know, described a lack of patience and care in sort of handling that.

He was missing from home.

And so, you know, I think that it's still kind of what, you know, people were looking for when this report was released in December, which is, what is that response, you know?

And I think that officials will say and some community members that, like, this is going to take time.

Maybe you don't want to rush to any sort of reaction.

But I do think that that is what I expect and kind of am hearing continue to be the kind of community question about some of this, is, you know, what does it mean?

What are we going to still be doing about it?

- Yeah, and Toby, I'll bring you in.

And there are people, you know...

This whole, that report, the report itself, the potential oversight and what's called a consent decree, which would have a lot of control, of federal government oversight of local policing, brings up this huge tension in a city where everyone, I think, [laughs] wants crime to come down.

Crime is coming down.

Violent crime is coming down, not as fast as everyone wants, but it's been coming down for, you know, 18 months now.

It's coming down nationally.

People don't want, I think most people don't want cops to go out and beat people up and do these horrible things that were in their report, but on the other hand, they want to feel safe.

And that tension is difficult to balance and reconcile.

- It is, and the thing the report did was, you know, we hear about citizens of this community doing bad things every day.

We get news releases about it in our inboxes.

We see it on television every night.

It's rare to see police misconduct in a report like that.

And, you know, Laura touched on it.

That was an eight-year-old boy that, you know, had had a problem at the house.

They put him in the back of a squad car, threatened to tase him with "50,000 volts going through his little body".

There was a woman standing on a porch, a relative's porch.

The police came up, asked for her ID.

She said no and asked 'em to get off the property, which was her right.

She ended up in the back of a squad car with the cops standing around trying to figure out what they were gonna charge her with.

There was a woman who was alleged to have expired tags on her car and run a stop sign.

Police, MPD, pushed their way into her home and arrested her in front of her crying child.

There was a mentally ill man who, this was all in the report, mentally ill man stole a $2 Coke from a convenience store.

Nine cop cars showed up.

A dozen officers showed up.

He was subdued on the ground, tased multiple times, charged, went through the whole thing.

He spent two days in jail for this offense that took this many cops.

Those stories go on and on and on.

Sixteen-year-old girls after a football game slammed to the ground, you know, and arrested for whatever.

You know, this was kind of the first time, and it was a shocking report because it was the first time we saw, we got access to the facts that these cops do these things in our community.

And that just sent a shockwave through everybody.

So for me, I went back and refreshed myself on these things this morning to remember the gravity of what we're dealing with here.

And I hope we still feel that, you know.

I mean, it was only December, but it feels like a life ago that this report came out.

So, you know, I'm probably not supposed to say this as, you know, an objective news reporter here, but as a member of this community, I'll say it anyway.

Nobody else is coming to help us, so I'm rooting for Mayor Young.

I'm rooting for the Memphis Police Department to come up with some strategies to make this community safer for everybody.

- Last thoughts on the report.

And also, there's a civil suit by the Tyre Nichols family against the City over that.

That DOJ report was not about the Tyre Nichols incident really, but there's been talk that that, you know, the findings in there could be used within this civil suit against the City in some fashion.

Does pulling that, the DOJ pulling back in any way change that dynamic?

- No, it does not.

The lawsuit continues, and the lawsuit will be as heavily contested as it will be defended.

You can count on that from both sides.

All indications are that there's a lot more discussions to take place on it.

As for what people expect, well, let's not forget that we've seen incidents before, and the City's attitude, the City administration's attitude under a different mayor, was that the police department has essentially already remedied these problems.

Yes, they're horrible, but they've already been remedied.

We've reimagined police.

So there's a lot of cynicism about the City saying, "Yes, we're going to try to get to the bottom of this," because I think everybody's aware on both sides of this, the more time that passes, the more likely it is that nothing meaningful is going to be done.

- Has that been the pattern in the past?

- Yes.

I think so.

- Yeah.

Let's shift.

I'm gonna shift back to Toby, and you wrote about, and Bill actually wrote about Kash Patel, the FBI director, mentioned in just a short part of an interview on Fox News last weekend, referenced Memphis as, quote, "the homicide capital of the United States," I think.

Thoughts on that?

You did some research on that.

And Bill had some thoughts on it as well.

- That's right.

Kash Patel, the new FBI director, mentioned that on a Fox News show on last Sunday, and I think that was a screenshot that went all over the Memphis internet.

Everybody was like, "What?

Oh my gosh."

And it shocked a lot of folks.

And so I did a short story that looked at the numbers.

I couldn't get a hold of the Crime Commission for them to kind of get me some expert help on this to try to position that.

Are we actually the homicide capital of the US?

And our headlines said, "Maybe," and not a lot of folks loved that.

But when you get into crime reporting, there's other reporters that can tell you better than I, but they report this data differently.

They group this data differently, you know, so there is a difference between homicide and a murder.

There is a difference between how they report to FBI and how Tennessee reports to the TBI.

So it starts getting really wonky, and people are like, "Where's my simple answer on this?"

And there isn't one.

The conclusion that I came to was the next highest... You know, St. Louis had the highest homicide rate last year.

So I was comparing our two cities.

And so if you look at straight homicides, Memphis is ahead slightly or on par with St. Louis, but if you look at murders, we're actually, you know, pretty far down from St. Louis.

So it's how you slice and dice the information.

- I thought your piece was really interesting 'cause you also got into the history of Memphis.

Memphis has been a violent city for many, many decades, and got into that history.

But your thoughts on that comment from the FBI director.

- Kash Patel's entire comment about Memphis being the homicide capital was 43 words.

And I think what drives this is, first of all, it's basically a discussion about per-capita murders, how many murders does your city have per 100,000 people.

That measurement makes it possible to compare your city with other cities, compare where your city was in the past with where it is now.

I think what drives this debate is citing those statistics and then saying, "Memphis is out of control."

- Which some politicians, I think Marsha Blackburn, other politicians kind of jumped in on Twitter in various statements saying, "Yes, it's out of control, and that puts us-" - It becomes a little more clinical when you look at per capita.

Per capita, this city at one point in the early 20th century had a per-capita rate that was 89 murders per 100,000 people.

We're at, I think, about 40 right now for all of 2024.

So it is something to think about, and I'll just say the perception of whether you feel safe or not is just as important as the statistics that show that crime is going down.

When you put both of them together, you probably get a more balanced picture, but when you make them compete against each other, they don't reconcile.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

We could do much more.

We've done a lot of shows on crime and crime rate coming down and criminal justice and public safety in recent weeks and months.

We've had Steve Mulroy on the show, Josh Spickler and company from Just City.

We had Bill Gibbons from the Crime Commission on talking about stats some months ago, but it's still very relevant, CJ Davis, the police director.

All those shows you can get at wkno.org, go to The Daily Memphian, or go to YouTube and search for the shows.

And dug into those numbers and the trends, which are in general going down and certainly with violent crime.

Let's shift to you, Laura, and talk a little bit about Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Maybe start with the budget season, where we are.

We've got the interim superintendent presenting his first budget.

What does next year look like for MSCS?

- Yeah, I mean, I think a little bit to Bill's point, there is a kind of bit of a segue with this that the district is not proposing to add, or, excuse me, it's not proposing to make any major cuts.

There are a handful of additions that they are planning to make, which includes 40 security officers.

Under Marie Feagins, some of those positions, similar position was cut.

And so some additional security officers are proposed to be added.

Eventually the district wants to add 80 security officers, which they have said would bring them to like a one-to-one security officer per campus.

And I think, you know, just to the idea that the perception of safety matters, certainly four years ago you had urban districts across the country, including some in Memphis, pushing against having security officers in schools and that.

You know, there hasn't been a ton of immediate pushback to this kind of addition that the district is seeking right now.

In addition to those officers, they are also proposing a 16-person preventative maintenance team that kind of would address some of those long list of deferred maintenance needs that we've written about and talked about on the show before.

But other than that, the budget is looking pretty stable this year, which is, you know, newsworthy in that it was so unstable last year with proposed changes from restructuring that then Superintendent Marie Feagins brought plus the end of that one-time federal funding that the district has used for positions.

And so, you know, we're kind of expecting some changes.

So far, the county commissioners, you know, still a little bit early with them.

The district is asking for about $40 million worth of one-time funds, mostly for some capital projects and then about $1 million to help support an Excel Center inside of Shelby County Department of Corrections, plus support some additional tutoring in the district.

- Well, let me throw this at you.

I should know this, and I don't.

Where are we or where are we not [laughs] in a search for a new superintendent?

- Sure.

So I would say, you know, this budget is sort of a reflection, in my view, of the board really sticking some support behind Interim Superintendent Roderick Richmond.

He has an 18-month contract as interim, which would bring him through the end of next academic year, so next summer.

And that, you know, when that was selected, it was sort of the idea that, well, that's about how long it would take us to do a search.

There has not, however, been very much public discussion about what a search would look like and who would lead it.

And so maybe we see a little bit more of that this summer.

But as of now, that's not really been a question even that's come up really during the budget from any public people, yeah.

- And those who tuned out, the state was looking towards putting this kind of oversight board, management board, whatever you wanna call it, over the school board.

That was ultimately tabled for discussion through the summer.

We're trying to get Brent Taylor and Mark White, who are the two local representatives who were very much behind that on the show sometime this summer to talk about where things stand.

That would seem to have maybe influenced a slowdown in looking for a superintendent anyway because it wasn't clear what authority they would have come the end of the session.

- Well, the superintendent would've retained the same authority.

So that was one big- - Yeah, no, I meant, I'm sorry, the board.

- But of the board, yeah.

- The board's ability to even start a search and hire a superintendent was up in the air.

- Yes, and I think, you know, and that is still a question for sure with how far it went.

And you know, you have, if the County Commission brings through this recall, you could have a situation where the interim superintendent's contract ends at the exact moment that every single school board seat is up for election, which, you know, certain people on either side would argue that's maybe not the best way to make a right job attractive.

- Yeah.

We'll come back to some school stuff if we have time, but I want you, 'cause she mentioned the budget.

We're in budget season.

Especially the county budget season seems a little more defined, if not final right now.

Bill, why don't you give us the rundown of county budgeting?

- The county budget, Mayor Lee Harris is proposing a budget that would see the tax rate, county property tax rate, go from $3.39 to $2.73.

The mayor says that is the state's certified rate to reflect increased property values in this year's reappraisal.

It turns out some county commissioners have doubts about whether that is the state's certified rate.

And what that signals is that the county's gonna have another turbulent budget season.

You have a faction on the County Commission that is really questioning a lot of the budget.

The County Commission has two meetings, both in June, left to get this budget done.

And this faction on the Commission says this is being rushed on purpose to push the budget through.

- The CAO, Chief Administrative Officer Harold Collins for the county described, quote, "Name-calling, verbal abuse, "and verbal assaults by some commissioners against the administration."

So it's going well.

It's going really well.

Really, kind of comity, coming together, comity with a T. - And we should also point out that we call it budget season for a purpose.

And that is, while you've talked about the superintendent search, the city school board, Memphis-Shelby County School Board, is really not looking to do anything else at the same time that they're doing that budget.

So once the budget's in, I think that's gonna tell the tale on whether the search is really moving.

- Really briefly, City Council, has the mayor put his budget forward?

Where are we with the city budget, Memphis city budget?

- The budget hearings are underway, a much smoother process, even though the Council only has two meetings left before the end of the fiscal year.

The councilmembers don't seem to be as worried about this as some on the Commission are.

- We don't know what the tax rate based on the reappraisal will be, but one would assume that that tax rate would go down 20 to 25%, something similar to what we're talking about at the county level.

- It will be lower because overall, property values increased over the last four years.

- Okay, more to that Bill will be writing about it, The Flyer will be writing about it, other people are writing about that.

I want to get to you, Toby, you doing some work on the potential impact of federal cuts on local safety net programs.

- That's right, I wrote this week about a report from the Sycamore Institute, which is a Nashville-based nonpartisan think tank.

They do a lot of great work on budgets and crunching those numbers that are beyond me.

Really interesting study.

They looked at the federal safety net in Tennessee and compared all the different counties.

And Shelby County is the most reliant county on federal safety net funding and programs than any other county in the state.

That's not surprising 'cause we're the biggest county, the most populous county here.

- We also have the highest poverty rate.

- Exactly right, and those two things fit together like a glove, you know, because the biggest part of the federal safety net that we use here is Medicaid funding, which in Tennessee is called TennCare.

And that's over a billion dollars worth of TennCare cost right here in Shelby County.

The other programs, the safety net is, you know, TANF, Temporary Aid for Needy Families.

You have WIC, which is like a nutrition program for women, pregnant women and children.

Then you have SNAP, you know, food stamps and some of those.

Altogether, all those programs here in Memphis is about $2 billion every year.

That's federal grants given to the state that are then given to the folks who need it here.

And so we know that Donald Trump is preparing his budget.

The budget's going through.

He wants to really cut this safety net program by a lot.

We don't know what he would do with that money, if he would give it to states in a block grant program and let us do it.

But it has the potential not only to really impact the lives of a lot of Memphians that need that money, that rely on that money to help 'em get back on their feet, but it could pull, I mean, billions of dollars from the economy.

- We did a show on some of these issues recently.

You should look at Toby's reporting, but we had folks from MIFA and the Aging Commission talking about some of the impacts on seniors.

Particularly Medicaid was startling, the numbers, but also all kinds of programs.

You can get that at wkno.org.

With not near enough time, Laura, give us an update on third-grade reading and efforts, this third-grade requirements that were put in by the state some years ago that have kicked in.

Give us a quick update there.

- Yeah, here at the end of May is usually celebration time, but with this third-grade reading intervention law, you have some kids who are back taking TCAP again in these last couple of days of school.

Those will kind of reveal whether they have any summer school or tutoring requirements for the rest of their elementary school years to keep advancing, you know, all in efforts to improve literacy scores.

We haven't heard as much from the state department about that as we have about the efforts on the new voucher program.

Numbers for that, we don't have specific to Shelby County just yet, but we know that the applications exceeded the available spots, both for the income-restricted and income-free seats.

- All right, but you'll be reporting more on that.

We'll be talking about more on the show.

But that is all the time we have this week.

As I mentioned, if you missed any of this show, you can go to wkno.org, The Daily Memphian, YouTube.

You can also download the full show as a podcast, and you can get those past episodes that I referenced at all those same places.

Next week we've got Matt Thompson, president and CEO of Memphis Zoo.

Please join us then.

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

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