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- The Department of Justice Report on MPD, the city's response, and much more tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined by a roundtable of journalists this week to talk about some of the biggest stories of the week, includes Laura Testino from the Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here again.

- Yeah, thanks.

- Toby Sells from the Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here, Toby.

- Thanks for having me.

- And Bill Dries from the Daily Memphian.

We obviously, the biggest story is the DOJ report.

We're recording this Thursday morning.

And so it came out, I think Wednesday, the city's response.

I think even as we're taping this, there's a news conference from the Department of Justice, and the city's gonna respond to that.

So we don't have everything, but we know a lot.

And maybe I'll start, Bill, and I'll kind of summarize some things.

And you fill in with what I've missed in what's a 75-page report from the US Department of Justice that was triggered after the killing of Tyre Nichols by MPD officers.

It's a pattern or practice investigation that happens in cities around the country.

DOJ has done this before, and there's actually, has done it, I believe, here, and you'll correct me on that.

What that report found beyond a series of really, really awful incidents that we'll talk about some, and some of which we've reported on and others have reported on.

Some have not.

MPD discriminates against black residents and those with behavioral health issues.

It accuses MPD of violating civil rights, of using excessive force, of conducting unlawful stops, searches and arrests, of unlawfully discriminating against black people when enforcing the law.

And that the city and MPD unlawfully discriminate, as I said, in their response to people with behavioral health disabilities.

This is not, Bill, just about, just to be clear, about the Tyre Nichols case.

This is many, many incidents they point to and data they point to over a multi-year period.

It was a 17-month investigation.

What did I miss?

- Well, this started in July of 2023.

Most of the time these kind of reports take years.

This one had a shorter time schedule, and we'll get into that a bit further into the discussion here.

But for me, in reading the report, what struck me is the gap between how officers are trained and then what officers do on the street.

That's the primary overarching issue that I think this report outlines.

- Yeah, Laura, your thoughts, I mean, you were reporting on it in part, one of the folks for us reporting on it yesterday.

Just thoughts and things that stood out for you.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I think to build upon your point, Bill, officials talk about this.

It's talked about in the report, just what this does to even de-legitimize the efforts of the police department to solve crime and be effective at their jobs as many people in Memphis want them to be.

One example of that is, you know, the way that the police department does the saturation policing that it did with the SCORPION unit that was involved in the beating of Tyre Nichols.

That sort of policing being more generalized to a neighborhood rather than specific to particular people or even particular streets rather than an entire neighborhood is when we see a lot of these interactions that are outlined in the report where excessive force is used, where what the DOJ says is often unlawful search and seizure is used.

And then just one other kind of point that was of particular interest to me on the education beat is that this report points out that police also escalate with children.

These are not-- - Children as young as eight, not just teenagers.

- Children as young as eight.

- But children, there are examples of children with 8, being handcuffed.

- Yes.

- Et cetera, go ahead.

- Yeah, yeah, not, yeah.

So children as young as eight, teens, there are examples of, you know, using pepper spray on teenagers, and other examples, you know, spell out that this escalation can happen when children are not even, you know, found to be, you know, engaged in criminal activity.

Often found when they were victims of crime.

And then you see the indirect exposure of all of this for children who were watching this excessive force happen to, for instance, family members in their community.

- There's an example of a young woman who had actually called the police to, I say young woman, I think she's 16, 15 if I remember correctly.

Who had called the police to report an assault on her.

And ends up handcuffed, ends up being roughed up, ends up being, you know.

- Charged.

- Really charged, and then is then charged because she's fighting 'cause she wouldn't hand over her phone, and, you know, just a really awful sort of incident that's described.

Things for you Toby, that stood out?

- One of the top line things, of course, is the disparities between use of force, other things, just enforcement in general, you know, between the white population and the black population.

It's all in the report, but I was doing some research around this and found a great 2021 story from WREG, and a story that took them more than a year to report because they couldn't get the information from the city government.

But that report found that excessive force was used against black men in Memphis, seven times more than white men in Memphis.

And they had all the facts and figures.

It's a great story.

Go look it up.

So we've known this is a problem for a really, really long time.

And it's one of those, you know, kind of cynical opinions out there that we have in Memphis that we know that police treat black people different than white people.

But it's really based on cynical fact.

You start digging into some of this stuff.

I was looking at a, you know, some MPD data for a story for next week that showed that even traffic tickets, you know, seventy-five percent of them are, you know, for African-Americans, and, you know, and the proportions just don't work out.

We are a majority minority city here.

We're proud of that.

But these proportions on almost any criminal activity, cannabis possession, it is way disproportionate, blown outta the water.

- Yeah, and I believe a majority black force of MPD.

- That's right.

- I mean, obviously in the case of Tyre Nichols, as we all know, that the main people accused there were all black.

Let me do, take a quick second before I go back to Bill and say that Mayor Paul Young said in a statement based on this report, "Make no mistake, "we take the DOJs finding seriously, "and we'll review the lengthy report with an open mind.

"I believe it is critical we take the necessary time "to thoroughly review in order to formulate a response.

"Our dedication to improving MPD is unwavering.

"And we believe that working with local stakeholders "and national experts will yield a plan "that effectively meets our community's needs versus a government consent decree."

And we're gonna come to you, Bill, and talk about what a consent decree is and the complication of that.

Let me also though, quote from CJ Davis, the interim police chief.

"We believe in continuous improvement "and do not take this process lightly.

"We believe in improved policing and training "and the progress we are seeing daily.

"We will continue to improve, we will continue to work "with national police reform experts "and the DOJ to produce a plan that can be implemented effectively and efficiently."

But again, she points out, she makes the case, "Without federal constraint undue financial burden to the residents of Memphis."

Both Mayor Young and CJ Davis and others are very concerned about and pushing back against the idea of a consent decree.

Talk about that and the history of that and so on.

- A consent decree can be a memorandum of understanding between the Justice Department and the city or it could be something that goes into court.

If it goes into court, what that means is a judge oversees it, monitors to make sure the city is complying with it, are then employed in most cases paid for by the city.

- Yeah, and there's an example of in Baltimore, which is under consent decree that they've spent millions of dollars on, because of the consent decree that was put on them for some actions, so but continue.

- Right, and that seems to be what the problem is for this city administration.

- Yeah.

- We should point out, like I said, usually these studies take two to three years.

This one came to a head because of what happened on November 5th, who was elected president.

- Yeah.

- Donald Trump, 10 months into his first term, wiped away a study that the DOJ was doing like this into the MPD.

- Yeah, and let me go to, this obviously, that is what hangs over all this, a huge change in the DOJ from the top on down and a general belief that, I mean, it sounds cynical, but I just, I'm sure that there's a general belief for MPD and the city and for other cities facing this, that if we just run out the clock, Trump is not likely to enforce this the way that the Biden administration or a future democratic administration would have.

- Absolutely, I think, you know, you don't need a crystal ball to see that.

You know, Trump has always run as a law and order president.

He's promised that again in this one.

He's also, you know, when it comes to police force, he's said in rallies and things that, you know, when he watches police rough up protestors, he says it was a beautiful thing to watch.

Substantively, he said that, you know, he is immediately gonna roll back a 2022 executive order from the Biden administration that, it did a lot of things, but mainly it limited the amount of force that, you know, federal cops can use.

And also said that, you know, if you're a cop and you see another one engaged in this kind of enforcement that you gotta step in.

That executive order also limited the amount of military gear that the federal government can either transfer or sell to state and local governments, and all that's gonna be wiped out again too.

You know, so again, you don't need a crystal ball to see that, you know, the Biden administration is gonna be very different than the Trump administration on this question.

- Well... - Go ahead, Laura.

- I was just gonna say one, and without the consent decree it becomes very unclear what natural steps forward we have to implement some of the remedies that are found in this report.

And some of the problems found in this report is that MPD does a bad job at supervising itself, right?

There's a lot of instances here where it said, well, we watched a video, and what happened in the video is not what the officer said happened in this report.

And so, you know, without the consent decree, I think people are gonna be left wondering, you know, is this just gonna be another report that shows all of these problems that maybe we had an inkling existed, and we have no path forward for a solution?

- Bill.

- Just to talk about the past, I mean, the previous investigation took place in the last year of the Obama administration.

- Yeah.

- And it was still underway when all of a sudden Trump's Attorney General Jeff Sessions basically said, no, we're not doing that anymore.

- Yeah.

- What we're gonna do is we're going to better equip police departments with hardware, with support, things like that.

None of the issues in this report are new.

- Let me, I mean there are, it's such, people should read the report and the reporting on the report, but the report itself, 77 pages, there is an executive summary.

And there's these incidents and there's descriptions, and, you know, we've covered at The Daily Memphian, at this table, as crime really took off through the pandemic and has begun to kind of tick down, we've spent a lot of time talking to lots of different people in the criminal justice system.

Pretty much everyone who would sit down with me and Bill and talk to us, which isn't everybody, but it's been a lot of 'em.

And you know, no one, and when Tyre Nichols came out, and we did a bunch of, we did some surveying, and we did some community conversations, kind of focus groups, and it was very clear that people want more, better, overwhelmingly people want more, better policing.

They don't want police officers who beat people up.

I think Toby said this at the top.

People want that.

And when we did, Bill, you know, eight city mayor, the top candidates for mayor, former Herenton, Mayor Young who won, Van Turner always stands out to me, and I tell this to people from outside Memphis, that every single candidate we talked to, correct me if I'm wrong, wants more police.

And that includes Van Turner who is the former head of the NAACP.

And when I say that to people in other cities, they kinda look at me like, what?

That's wait, no, he was talking about five hundred more police officers, going from 2000 to 500.

And so, it's really interesting and difficult to reconcile, I think, some of the dissonance you're talking about, Laura, of they're not doing what they're trained to do.

They're not doing what, you know, the video shows, yet there's a city that by and large overwhelmingly wants more, better police.

And that is black and white.

And again, black people in this city are overwhelmingly the victims of crime.

And so, but they want good policing, they want smart policing and they don't want people to be roughed up.

And that's, it's kind of hard to reconcile all that in some form or fashion.

- Just to tag on that, you know, I was thinking I am not an expert in this situation.

There are very smart people, and I'm glad there are in this city that are thinking about this, working on this every day.

So I'm a tourist here, but, you know, I do think there are some simple things that we can do.

Should we stop pepper spraying people that are handcuffed in the back of a cop car?

I think we can do that.

Can we stop slapping cuffs on, you know, kids that have asked for help?

I think we can do that too.

You know, can we stop, you know, threatening, you know, kids with mental disabilities with prison and the taser if they, you know, if they ran away from home.

I think there's some simple easy things that we can do here.

As for the rest of it it's super complicated.

You know, now I'll get outta my Monday morning quarterback uniform here.

But boy, you see these things in there, and you think, how on earth is this Memphis, Tennessee?

- There are a couple more things I'm gonna highlight.

And I know there are people listening who are frustrated because they want crime to come down, 'cause they want they and their families and their loved ones and their neighbors to not be impacted by crime.

And that this is very, very difficult, and to just come down on the police is not gonna help.

- Right.

- It's not gonna help reduce crime.

There are a couple things in the report that are, these are small things that, they're almost incidental, but it's interesting when you get these reports, and there's a certain tone deafness.

And two things stood out.

One was highlighting the number of times, the number of citations for incidental things with cars like, you know, expired tags and tinted windows.

And I hear from people all the time, and maybe y'all do too, who are, why in the world are there so many expired tags in Memphis?

And why are tinted windows that are tinted to a certain point just allowed?

These things shouldn't be allowed.

Like if you say that you're not gonna enforce the law around all these expired tags, you have no credibility.

- That's right.

- And the report as I read it doesn't really get into that dynamic.

It gets into the old broken windows theory that if you, the chief of police in New York, and I think he'd been in Boston too, came in and said, look, if you're allowing, if you're looking past the broken windows or you're looking past people who jump over the turnstile into the subway, you're allowing a lawlessness, and you have to crack down on the small stuff in order to create a sense that, not with pepper spray, not with abuse.

Like I wanna be really clear with that.

But that you have to sort of enforce the laws.

And I think there are people who will read this report and get frustrated about some of those things, the way in which the DOJ report kind of dismisses these, the citations for low-level offenses.

The other disconnect that stood out to me for some reason, well, I know why it stood out to me, which was this thing, there's a little anecdote about marijuana.

It's not about an incident of violence.

It's about, you know, the DOJ is a little incredulous that a police officer might smell marijuana from a car going 60 miles an hour.

I smell marijuana from cars on I-40 on a basically a weekly basis.

- Every day.

- I mean, right?

If you're on I-40, if you're, I mean going 70 miles an hour, let alone 80 miles an hour, there's gonna be a car in front of you, and there's marijuana coming from that car.

I'm not saying that person should be arrested.

And I'm sure not saying that they should be abused in any way, but there is a kind of, it's just interesting when you get these third party reports, there's sometimes some disconnect that doesn't add up and reconcile with daily life in Memphis and in other cities.

We're not the only one with crime.

- I think the dilemma is, and what the report talked about was using traffic stops as a means.

- 100%.

- As basically the tip of the spear for law enforcement.

- Pre-textual, yes, yes.

- That I think is the distinction.

- Yeah.

- But you're right, most of the mayor's race was about do we pull people over?

- Yeah.

- For outrageous driving.

- Yeah, yeah.

- That was a major issue.

- Well, and has been, you know, in this set there's six categories of remedies, eighteen separate remedies that this report - Yeah.

- Suggests, most of them being to do things that are evidence-based and in response.

But, you know, to your point, you know, one of those things is to cut down on traffic stops for these sorts of things.

And we know how that has gone here.

There was a question, I listened to the DOJ press conference on the way to this where someone said, you know, how should Memphis reconcile the fact that the Federal DOJ is telling them to do something that its local government has tried to do, and the state has said you may not do that?

- Yeah.

- And just goes into, I think, you know, the continued question of, you know, now that we have continued to identify this set of problems, what can we do about them?

- Other last thoughts on this, and we'll talk about some other.

- Yeah, just last thought for me was, and, you know, in reading y'all's great reporting on this, reading some of the stuff myself, you know, one of the major arguments out there against the consent decree, no government agency wants, they all want independence.

They don't want another agency kind of looking over their shoulder.

I get that.

But maybe the second or third reason against it is that we can't afford it.

And I just, to me that was a little callous.

I thought that was kind of coarse.

You know, how can we not afford to do this to make better policing when we're getting ready to pay out easily millions of dollars to the Tyre Nichols family here?

You know, it's a tough, awful situation.

And I'm not saying the consent decree is the exact way to go, but to use that as a reason against it, just thought it was strange.

- Yeah.

- I think you're gonna hear a lot about better training.

Better training, the more times you talk about that and it doesn't happen, or it doesn't connect with the reality of what cops do, the less effective that becomes, the more frustrating it becomes.

- We'll move, we'll kind of segue onto some other things here with, we got seven minutes left here.

Toby mentioned the Tyre Nichols civil case from the family against the City of Memphis.

The city has talked about, you know, that being some hundreds of millions of dollars.

- That's right.

- Bankrupting the city.

I mean, to add a little more and recently came out with a filing that was rough, and you know, the filing I think was then sealed, but Sam Hardiman on our staff got ahold of it, and the city making some claims about Tyre Nichols involving a possible domestic issue with his child's mother back, I think was in California.

And obviously it seems, trying to get some leverage in this case.

It's getting ugly.

It's gonna get uglier.

I mean, you know, the city, most people would say the city, county, the local government handled the Tyre Nichols case once it happened pretty well in terms of coming forward, not making excuses, but this civil case is gonna get kind of ugly.

But let's do a hard segue to other big news in the schools, and in Frayser and Cordova, the two big high schools have been talked about to be built.

Talk about what's going on with that, Laura.

- Sure, so we had a replacement school for Germantown High School, which is set to close in the next seven years because of a state law that ceded those buildings back to Germantown.

That's one thing that everybody can remember from a couple of years ago becoming really necessary.

And as that happened, there was a new high school in Frayser that was also on the same timeline.

Those really came to a head after the wheel tax was passed.

And then these next cost estimates for the schools ballooned way above what the projected amounts were that these new dollars were supposed to be able to cover.

And so there was this question that was supposed to be solved by a budget amendment this month from the county that would say, here's how we're gonna pay for these.

And the point was that there were going to be meetings between school officials and the county to bring down those cost estimates closer to what the county had said that they would be able to pay for.

What happened is that budget amendment is coming, but it is instead accelerating the timeline for the Frayser High School that will replace Trezevant and old Frayser High and puts a big question mark on the Cordova project.

And that was really.

- Yeah.

- That really was set into motion by the fact that the City Council decided to vote down the zoning request from the school district, which was kind of the last check mark in this really years-long plan to build the Cordova school and just said that the land was inappropriate both for traffic and environmental reasons.

- Thoughts on the school construction.

I mean, you've watched this many times over many years.

- Well, there's gonna be a proposal to increase the county funding for the Frayser High School that goes to the County Commission in committee next week.

Basically it's moving money from other capital projects to this, including some of the money for Cordova.

- Yeah.

- Mayor Lee Harris is saying that the money will, the amount for Cordova will still be there.

- And the county owns that land, right?

They bought that land?

- No.

- No.

They have an option on it or something, okay.

- Yeah, basically it would only be purchased if the permit with through.

- We'll go over to you Toby, some of the things you've been covering.

I mean, one thing that's big national news right now is yesterday, Wednesday, the US Supreme Court was hearing a transgender ban case that came out of, out of Tennessee.

Majority of the justices appeared likely to uphold the state ban was the general take by AP, Washington Post, New York Times and so on.

I know you had thoughts on that.

I know you also have been covering some stuff at the state.

- That's right.

You know, really with the trans healthcare situation, it really has just put Tennessee at the top of the heap of states that are kind of fighting against some of this healthcare stuff.

And, and you know, advocacy groups are just saying, you know, stay out of it.

You know, this should be between the healthcare provider and these families and their kids, and they know what's best for them, you know, which is an argument that the other side uses for almost everything.

You know, the government doesn't know best, families know best.

So there's been kind of that similar tension going on there.

We'll see how it plays out.

Like you said.

- I'll interrupt, sorry to interrupt.

Twenty-six states at least have adopted laws restricting or banning transgender care for minors, and most of them face lawsuits.

- Oh, sorry.

- But again with the new administration coming in, it seems likely that that, and given the nature of the Supreme Court, that not a lot of that's gonna go very far.

- That's right.

- Go ahead.

- And the other thing is, you know, as far as state tax revenues, kind of boring, but you know, the new projection that just came out of the budgeting process shows kind of single digit one to 2% growth rate in the state budget there.

And this comes after years of double-digit growth in these things.

We've had, you know, kind of a flush bank account over there, and then, you know, state GOP, they gave a bunch of tax cuts, and they just gave money back to corporations.

I think what $900 million so far has gone back to what, 40, 44 corporations or something like that in Tennessee, just as a rebate, not as a cut so that that money went straight back.

You know, and that comes at a time when all the other, you know, during this budget process, we've seen all these other agencies ask for more money for everything, and they may not get that money this year.

And all that is on the back of a backlog of Tennessee infrastructure projects of about $35 billion, I think.

- I'll say, 30 seconds left.

In a normal roundtable, we would also talk about xAI, Elon Musk's company is poised to invest billions of dollars more in its Memphis supercomputer and that some big key suppliers, you know, companies like Nvidia, Supermicro, Dell could be building or investing in Memphis manufacturing facilities.

We could do a whole show on that.

We may end up doing a show on some of those things, but we're out of time.

Thank you all for joining.

Thank you, Bill.

It's good to see you back here.

The voice made it.

Rough, but getting there.

We're getting back.

So really appreciate you being here very much.

But that is all the time we have this week.

If you missed any of the show today, you can get the full episode at wkno.org.

You can get it as a podcast wherever you download your podcasts or you can go to YouTube, The Daily Memphian, or again wkno.org.

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

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