- (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 death of Tyre Nichols, investigations of the police, and much more, tonight on Behind The Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined today by a roundtable of journalists, starting with Toby Sells, News Editor from The Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you, sir.

- Julia Baker covers criminal justice for The Daily Memphian.

Thank you for being here.

- Thank you.

- Karanja Ajanaku is the Editor of The New Tri-State Defender.

Thanks for being here.

- My pleasure.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll start with talking about where we are as of Thursday morning with the Tyre Nichols fallout and investigation, and I think it's fair to say, by all accounts another tragedy.

But because it's Thursday morning, we don't know, when this airs on Friday, many things may have happened, maybe not a lot has happened.

There are a lot of rumors at this point that indictments will come out from the Shelby County D.A.

We don't know if that'll be true.

And then, the video is said to be coming out by Friday.

We don't know if that's in the morning, or that's after the show airs.

So apologizes to everyone for that.

But there's still much to discuss.

And Julia Baker, as we sit here Thursday morning, late last night Chief Davis, CJ Davis came out with a statement about what's happened, and really made some news about what's going on.

Why don't you fill us in there?

- So originally, the police department announced that it was five members, you know, of the police department who were involved in the death of Tyre Nichols.

It came out last night, which we reported before this.

But it came out last night from Chief Davis that they were part of the SCORPION Unit.

Another part of her announcement though, was that they're not saying all specialized units.

What exactly that means?

We don't know yet.

I think we'll find out in the coming days.

And then today, the District Attorney's Office is making an announcement at two.

So, I think we might find out something interesting there.

And rumors are that the video might come out Friday afternoon, so we'll see if that's true.

- When CJ Davis came out last night, the three of us were talking online about it and other folks from Daily Memphian putting that up.

Everybody else was too, but there was a couple of things that any kind of specialized unit such as SCORPION, and we'll talk about what SCORPION is in a second, was under investigation.

Also, other officers, she made very clear other officers beyond the five who were fired a week ago as this airs, and there are also two fire department personnel who've been fired, is that right?

Or just suspended, fired?

- No, no.

- They've been suspended - Okay, thank you.

- pending an investigation.

- So, let's talk.

You said, you mentioned SCORPION.

SCORPION stands for Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.

- Yes.

- But Julia, what is SCORPION?

- A specialized unit that came out in November 2021, and it was really developed to kind of combat gangs and violent crimes, and things like that, you know, so it's interesting because everybody we've talked to about Tyre Nichols says that, "He's not that kind of person."

I mean, I didn't know him so I don't know.

I guess we'll see more about the video, but it sounds like he was just running, so I'm not sure why they were... - The units, and I mean CJ Davis has said that what happened was "Horrendous.

It was heinous."

As a mother and a police officer, I mean there's no holding back, there's little holding back at this point.

I'll turn to you, Karanja.

But these units, these specialized units, I mean, we had a story this week, Marc Perrusquia from Institute for Public Service Journalism, Julia, Ben Wheeler from our staff worked on some of who is, what is the SCORPION units, and that sort of policing where they use data-driven, the premise is you use data to say this is a high crime area, we're gonna kind of flood the zone, my term, not theirs, with more police and we're gonna be, depending on how it is framed, aggressive, or proactive in pulling people over, and any kind of even marginal illegal, or possibly illegal behavior, we're gonna kind of look into that and see what's going on and it leads to a lot of arrests in many cases on more misdemeanor offenses.

But again, the theory that advocates will say as well, we wanna be proactive about these things, 'cause we know we're in an area where a lot of crime is happening.

It's a very controversial practice nationwide.

Thoughts on that.

- The main thing is accountability, whatever it is.

We need to know what they're doing.

I mean the thing that's disturbing about this is the nature of the beating, and how horrendous it was.

It makes you wonder, "What else is going on?

", you know?

And so there has to be accountability about that.

And just whether there is a systemic deficiency in the way that we go about law enforcement.

We have to look at that and we have to be accountable.

I mean even those of us in the news industry, we have to look at the situation, and figure out what changes do we have to make, and I've thought about it from The Tri-State Defender standpoint, and we don't do a lot of everyday type of crime coverage.

But just looking at the nature of this, I said to myself, you know, resources being meager, though they are, we have to look at do we need to re-deploy and make sure that we're in a better position, to, you know, to look at accountability at these types of things.

- Bill, I mean, data-driven policing, we'll stay on SCORPION for a second, and we can seque out of that, but you've covered Operation Blue C.R.U.S.H which was a data-driven policing idea that, you know, back a decade, fifteen years ago that started the Real-Time Crime Center.

All this data and tech would, you know, here we go where the crime is happening, we're gonna put more cops there, and we're gonna kind of extinguish it.

And again, you can go to New York, and Stop-and-Frisk.

All these things have their advocates, and they have their detractors.

- And the feeling about Blue C.R.U.S.H was that it worked in the short-term, but as it moved further and further, the questions began.

Okay, are you just moving crime around to different areas albeit following it, and what is the permanent solution to this, because you can't just keep playing whack-a-mole.

And you had a police director at that time, Larry Godwin, whose position was that Blue C.R.U.S.H amounted to community policing, and other people were very quick to say, "No, this is not community policing.

This is a get tough campaign on crime."

SCORPION was a response to that same thing.

Most notably, the reckless driving that was going on, and that was predominant at the time.

There is a very long history of this.

In the 1980s, when Jack Owens was Shelby County Sheriff, he decided to crack down on drug dealing.

Crack was a big problem here when it first surfaced, and he started these jump-and-grab, what we're called jump-and-grab sting operations, where sheriff's deputies posed as drug dealers, and when people came to buy drugs from them, they arrested them.

It was very labor intensive, and it involved some deputies who did not have the right training and, as a result, someone who bought drugs in one of these operations was beaten to death.

Here we are almost 40 years later, and we have the same questions, and the same problems about this.

- Toby.

- Just talking about police tactics, and talking about data, talking about tech, supposedly all of the officers were wearing body cameras, and that was supposed to have more accountability for the officers as they carry out their duties, and if I remember correctly, ya'll tell me if I'm mistaken, but the Tyre Nichols incident happened under a cop camera, is that right?

- There's some sort of statement - There's something there.

- we've heard, I know I have, I think you have as well Julia.

There's some sort of stationary camera, might be a SkyCop camera with the blue lights, it might be somebody's surveillance camera, there's some sort of stationary camera that captures the whole incident.

- And I think we've also, because there were a lot of different versions.

Were the officers in uniform?

- Okay.

- They were in uniform, but they were driving unmarked cars, which raises a whole bunch of questions about okay, what happened when they moved to pull him over, because the driver in the car sees an unmarked car, may not know it's a police car.

- Right, and, if you joined us late, and I'm sorry, I'll go back to you Toby, we are taping this Thursday morning, so the video, by the time this comes out, the video may have been released, so, but go ahead finish your thought Toby.

- The only to finish the thought, is that, you know, if we have this tech, and we have all this for better accountability, for our officers, it didn't work here.

And, you know, saying that this is all being recorded live somehow didn't communicate that, "Okay, I need to back off.

I need to do something else."

So, maybe have another look at that and what we think about that.

- One of the things, there's just so many elements to this, but in the Tri-State Defender of this in the last week, Antonio Parkinson, who's been on the show, he's a State House Representative, for probably maybe a decade now was on, and the column he wrote for you all, I really encourage people to read.

It's very thought provoking, it's very interesting.

It gets to some of the complexity of this.

The headline, I believe, was "I just didn't expect to see five black faces on my TV screen."

And he talks about the pain, and the confusion, that he feels as a black man, about this.

He thought there could be some black people, and he goes through it and it's very complicated, because these are complicated issues.

And when you got that call from Representative Parkinson, what did you think, and what did you think generally Karanja?

- I thought that I was glad to have it, because I knew that people were talking about that.

I think that, my mind goes to Ben Crump, you know, because he was asked a lot about that question, and the fact that there were five African-American officers, and what he said during the press conference and rally over there are Mt.

Olive Cathedral, is that, his experience with this excessive force type of situations is that, "It's not the race of the police, it's the race and ethnicity of the citizens that makes a difference."

Okay?

And so you're sort of getting at sort of a police culture, that leads to that.

I live in America and so I think it's probably even deeper than that, you know?

And you just look at the history of our country, and how it was founded in slavery, and what that's about and the dehumanization of African-American people that finds its way into the culture.

It has over time and we have not really systematically dealt with the roots of that.

And it's becoming even more difficult now, with a lot of the legislation that's coming up, where you can't even teach basic history.

- Right.

We talked with Russ Wigginton from the Civil Rights Museum last week, Bill and I did about some of those issues.

Staying with that, RowVaughn Wells, and you mentioned Ben Crump is one of the attorneys for Tyre Nichols' family.

RowVaughn Wells at that same event, Tyre's mom, which was just utterly painful to watch and just heartbreaking, said, "I hate the fact that us, as black people, we are out here killing each other."

And I had this, you know, I had people say when at first there were rumors that some of the police officers were black, and then it comes out that all five, so far, who've been fired as part of this, and again, there are some investigations of others, that all five were black, this range of reactions from people to some who I think felt like well, "Oh this is almost like a them problem."

Which I don't think is productive, which is my opinion on that.

Others who immediately felt, and honestly, I think I felt, I immediately thought, "Well maybe this decreases "the chances of there being violent protests, because it takes some of that element out."

But is that, I don't mean to put you on the spot here, but is that even a fair way to think about it?

And a lot of people who gave reactions to me were white people who were horrified.

I don't know anyone, I have not heard from anyone, who wasn't horrified by what seems to have happened.

But that reaction of the range of reaction among, it does just change that dynamic for people, and I think it does and that's why I really encourage people to read Antonio Parkinson's column because it puts some definition to those question and that you're not alone in having those questions and trying to process all this.

- I understand the questions and everything like that, but it's like Ms. Wells said something else, in that statement.

She said that, "She just didn't understand why the violence was going on.

Not just the violence of African-American people, just violence period."

I mean, she talks about it in terms of humanity, and civility.

And she said, "We can't even talk to each other anymore."

And that's a real issue.

And while we have to get at all the things that we're talking about, she's hit on something there.

We have a really deep problem in this country, and you can see it from Washington to Nashville, to everywhere.

We can't talk about the issues of the day, and then when you bring in, you know, just the historic nature of race relations, and slavery, it becomes even more difficult.

But, I mean, who didn't think about that?

I mean hell, when I watch football games, I still look to see whether the quarterback is an African-American or not.

We live in that but the thing is that, you know, the way that slavery works in this country, you can be affected, your mindset, no matter what part of the plantation that you live on, whether it's the front or the back, and so, it doesn't surprise me that you could have, you know, officers going that way.

But it gets down to, I mean, again like what Ben Crump and others were saying, it's like, "Where is the humanity in it."

Although we've not seen the video, the descriptions of it from all who have is that it is just beyond anything.

I mean, Rodney King, I mean just such violence, what is that, you know?

- You've talked about the video, we've talked about the video for weeks now, when is it gonna come out?

Should we see it?

Julia and I were talking before the show that, in the course of a routine investigation, the cops would say absolutely not!

You can't see this.

It's gonna go to court.

We're gonna have to use some of this.

And then, maybe later, we might see it, but in this, as in other cases that have come before this one, everybody wants it released as soon as it possibly can.

The officials they're not necessarily dragging their feet.

They're saying, "We need to do this in the right way."

The Nichols' family has seen it, and described it.

The attorneys for Tyre have described it as, "This awful thing."

And its got this power to it right now, right?

You know that if it comes out, we see it, everybody's kind of planning for this major civil unrest even what Chief Davis was saying, you know asking everybody, "To be peaceful, and non-violent in the wake of the video itself."

You know, the officials have taken flack for not releasing it immediately, people online calling them "cowards", and everything else but this is still under investigation and I don't know what, if anything will change after we see the video.

It must be that bad to have that much power, and I don't know what's gonna happen when it comes out.

- And I think there's a lot of debate still to be had because there are some people who see any kind of protest in the street as being an incidence of violence.

You know, when the term peaceful protest is used, I think a lot of people think, "Okay, well, you know, everybody was in agreement "on this, nobody was anguished about it, that's a peaceful protest."

Peaceful protests are not that.

Peaceful protests are uncomfortable moments.

Peaceful protests are tense.

They're all of that, yet peaceful at the same time.

- I think it's, - Go ahead.

- I think you started touching on something that it's the role of so-called activists, I think it's also interesting in this, freedom fighters, if you will.

I noticed in the press conference, and other places that the folks on stage were very deliberate and conscious about talking to the activists.

So there is a connectivity that's going on, and I think there is a realization, certainly since the bridge shutdown that there are people in the community who are just not gonna sit around and wait.

And they may violate some of the norms about how we wanna go about doing it.

But I just think it's interesting that that activism level has risen to a point that there is a conscious reaching out to involve them in the unfolding of the situation.

- And the discussion about this is the purpose of the protest, and there are some people who believe that the purpose of the protest is, okay, let people let off steam.

And a lot of the activists who are involved in the protest, "No, that's not the purpose of it at all.

The purpose of protest is change."

That's why you protest.

- Right.

- Not so that everybody, you know, gets everything they wanna say out, has all of their frustrations expressed, and then goes back to normal.

- I gonna read, and then I'm gonna come to you Julia.

I'm gonna read from Otis Sanford, who wrote a column for us this week at The Daily Memphian: "Memphians who already feel beleaguered "by violent crimes that at times seems "out of control must now come to grips "with the fact that elements within "the police department, however small, are partakers of criminal violence themselves."

And he wrote a very beautiful column about the family and the mother, and Tyre as well.

But I was gonna seque to you, Julia, because you have been writing, and Karanja talked about a challenge all of us in news organizations have, I think, with never enough resources, how many individual incidents of crime do you cover, and how much accountability journalism trends just sort of here's where things are going, facts and figures, and you do a very good job of trying to balance that for us.

You know, and you did stories just in the last month about, what, two hundred and fifty new police officers as others retire.

We have a mayor going into his eighth year, termed out whose mission has been to get to something like 23 to 2,500 police officers for 7 years and he really is, basically, we're still at about 2,000 for all kinds of national reasons, and so, whatever reasons.

We have a new D.A., whose more of a reform D.A., we have a new Juvenile Court Judge, who just this week, transferred one of the accused killers of Reverend Autura Eason-Williams to adult court, which was a very controversial issue that Amy Weirich, the previous D.A., did.

It really puts a spotlight on the kind of reporting that you and others do about these trends, changes, and efforts within the whole criminal justice system.

- I think we're seeing a shift in how things are handled, you know.

Decades ago, we were kind of more Republican-minded in Shelby County, and we're seeing a more reform-minded community.

I know that Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy and Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon, I think, you know, if it had been in place, they would have wanted to do blended sentencing on Miguel Andrade, who, I believe, was 16 years old, and was the accused shooter in Reverend Autura Eason-Williams's murder.

So I think they reached a happy medium, where they transferred him to adult court, and then the other juvenile in that case, they kept him in juvenile court.

So he's gonna be in there another couple of years.

- Correct me if I'm wrong, he was the driver?

- Yes, he was the driver of the getaway car.

He never got out of the car.

- Both of you, I think, Toby, and I'll go to you Toby were a big of this criminal justice, the reform.

I mean it actually started, I think, before Steve Mulroy was elected.

One of the few things that Amy Weirich and Steve Mulroy agreed on was bail reform is not working.

The bail system is not working.

You both went and visited the new bail court, which kicks in what, mid-February.

- Talk a little bit about that.

- They have been held, and the county officials have been holding training sessions on what this bail reform is gonna look like.

I went to it on Wednesday, and they were quick to say, you know, "It's not reform.

This is improvement."

You know, cash money bail is still gonna be a part of what we do, but we're gonna have these other options to elevate the thing.

And it was fascinating, because they were kinda going through a lot of things were really in the details.

But, overall, they are gonna use a calculator to say, you know, once you are arrested, you know, you're booked, this calculator basically reads like a personal budget that says, you know, "Here's what I have income.

Here's what I have expenses, and here's what I can afford as far as bail is concerned."

And they take that into account when they set this bail.

And it sounds like a small thing, but it's a huge change from what we've done in the past.

And all of the officials that I talked to yesterday, and listened to, they're going into this thing wide-eyed.

They say, "They say, okay, this is a big change.

It's not gonna be perfect as we go in.

We're gonna learn along the way, but it's a brand new day, brand new system."

- And I've not met anybody involved in the criminal justice system who disagrees with it.

Another thing is that they're working on getting more people in a conflict panel.

You know, if there's a conflict with the Public Defenders, they have this conflict panel, kind of like how they have at the Juvenile Court.

So they'll have this conflict panel that'll help with that if there is a conflict of interest in the Public Defender's Office.

- And you also wrote a really interesting story in the last couple of weeks.

Time, it has no meaning for me anymore, about for some people, certainly for everyone, the complexities of who is arrested, and released quickly.

Sometimes what seems to be violent criminals with long track records coming out quickly, there was one very prominent one that was an administrative or bureaucratic mistake, but I don't know, thoughts on doing that story about all the complexities of when people are released, how they are released, and again, I encourage people to read that.

- It's a complicated issue.

You know, one example that really stuck out to me was there was a registered sex offender who sexually assaulted somebody outside of our office, and, you know, he's a repeat offender, and he went to jail for that incident, was bailed out the next day on $40,000, and just a couple months later was arrested again for indecent exposure, and was bailed out again the next day, and, you know, I talked to Judge Bill Anderson, and he said, "Indecent exposure is, unfortunately, a misdemeanor."

You can't just say like, "Okay, this is a felony, lock him away for good, even though he is a repeat offender."

What they can do, is they can double the bond, if he's got an active charge, you know.

So there's that and he was optimistic that this new bail hearing room will kind of help with that.

- We have just two minutes left.

We have other things going on right now, but I think, you know, Justin Pearson won State House District 86.

We're hoping to get him on soon.

The legislature is going to session with all kinds of things on deck, but I think we'll just skip over those.

Sterilization services at City Council, and some pollution in South Memphis.

There's a lot going on.

I think we'll just come back to those all another day.

Again, for those who maybe joined late, we are taping this Thursday morning, so all kinds of things have probably happened by the time this airs.

There's likely indictments have come down, have been announced, at least some of them, against the five officers.

Again, there's, you know, further investigation of other officers that are happening.

A probe into the special units, like SCORPION, that these five police officers were a part of.

The video may have been released, and we all haven't seen it.

Final thoughts in a minute and a half left?

- Sure, my thoughts go to the Wells' family.

My heart goes out to them.

My mind also goes to the family of the police officers.

Now the police officers, they gotta deal with what they did, but they have families too, and I'm sure that they have children, and they're all caught up in this web that we're dealing with, and so we just gotta be holistic in our efforts to heal.

- There are already discussions about long-term reforms on the City Council, and in the Tennessee legislature.

You will see bills about that.

I think what people will watch for locally is the reaction when the video goes national.

That is going to be a key moment in this, in terms of what comes next, and where this discussion goes.

- Again, I was really struck, you know, sometimes when these things happen, there's a lot of maybe double-speak, or qualifications coming from police, and local officials.

There's none on this.

And to that, it's heartbreaking.

And as a parent it's heartbreaking to hear the description of this young man, Tyre Nichols from, you know, his mother and father.

He was a young man, he worked at FedEx He was a skateboarder.

He lived at home, I believe, and he enjoyed Starbucks.

He would take photos.

He would love to go watch sunsets at Shelby Forest, and, you know, across the board, it's just a tragedy, and, I think, a tragedy for a whole lot of people, and I think Karanja's right to think about that as well.

That is all the time we have this week.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show today, you can get the full video online at WKNO.org, or you can get the full podcast of the show on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you and we'll see you next week.

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