[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.

- A look back at 2022 and a look ahead at the year to come, tonight on Behind The Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

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

Thanks for being here, Toby.

- Thank you, sir.

Happy New Year.

- Marc Perrusquia is Director of the Institute for Public Service Reporting.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you, Eric.

Along with Julia Baker, reporter with the Daily Memphian, and Bill Dries, also reporter with the Daily Memphian.

So, we'll look back at some of the year and some of the biggest stories.

We won't get to all of 'em; we'll try to spend some time looking at sort of where we think things will go next year, and some of the biggest stories we can sort of anticipate.

It is hard not to start though with looking at crime, and it was a year in which crime was up in many categories.

We'll talk a bunch about that.

The Eliza Fletcher case, the abduction and murder, was, you know, obviously kind of overtook the city for those days, and I think rather than reliving that moment, which was a horrible moment for everyone, the family and friends of her, most of all, I think one of the biggest stories that came out of that was the follow up, and I'll start with you Marc, and your stories on that were ran in The Daily Memphian, about the rape kit backlog that I think many of us naively thought had been eliminated, the lack of DNA testing and rapid DNA testing.

Talk about how that all came about and the stories you did, and we'll go from there.

- Well, of course, it all happened when, Eric, when we discovered that the defendant who had killed, allegedly killed, Eliza Fletcher, Cleotha Henderson, had been investigated a year earlier for rape and had never been charged.

And there's all kinds of issues that have spun out of that about, you know, police accountability, proper investigation, but a big part of it was this backlog that, as you said, everybody thought had been cured.

You know, we saw this in the early part of the 2010s where MPD had this massive backlog, and they spent millions of dollars to eliminate it, but now, there's this new backlog, and it's because of the state crime labs.

This city does not have a crime lab.

TBI, at one point, did have a crime lab in Memphis and moved it to Jackson, but as we're finding out, they're just overwhelmed.

They don't have enough staffing.

Their pay is low.

There've been a lot of pledges by the governor to, you know, raise the salaries so they can get these forensic biologists in there to do the job that they need.

but it's just been a, you know, one thing after another that has spun out of it that we see deficiencies in the system from all angles.

But it is, to me, amazing that a city this large doesn't have a crime lab.

And whether it's run by the state or the police, or like in some cities, they're independent agencies like Houston, we have to send all of our evidence an hour away to Jackson, Tennessee, and that does cause problems because the way these crime labs are supposed to work effectively with police is that you have detectives who are talking regularly with these scientists, prioritizing cases, communicating, and we don't have that here in this city.

- And in the case of Eliza Fletcher, I mean, they were able to expedite, get a DNA match quickly and find Cleotha Henderson in some number of days, and it did not save Eliza Fletcher's life, but maybe potentially save the lives of others as Cleotha Henderson, the alleged murderer, was taken off the street.

You covered all this stuff for us, Julia.

You cover criminal justice for us.

I mean, how, since that time, how have things changed, if at all?

There's more talk about should Memphis build a crime lab?

How have things changed within the world you report on?

- I mean, directly a week after that, you had the Ezekiel Kelly shooting spree and, you know, that kind of rocked everybody.

You know, really both of those things back to back kind of drilled home, like, how bad this problem is.

And, you know, there's been a lot of talk about trying to fix things.

You know, new District Attorney Steve Mulroy, you know, he's got all of these reforms that he plans, has already put in place and plans to put in place.

And, you know, it'll take some time to see whether these will work, but, yeah.

- A lot of what you focused on this last year, you just had a story I think today or this week about, you know, juvenile crime is up 40% this year, and it's a national phenomenon.

I mean, the way I always put it is Memphis had a bigger crime problem in many cities before this national increase in crime, and so ours is even bigger.

But that juvenile crime, I mean, even if you look back at Cleotha Henderson, I think first, you know, was arrested as a juvenile, I think.

I believe Ezekiel Kelly was, as well.

The focus on that with now Steve Mulroy having run on a very much a reform agenda, you know, really raising a lot of questions about the previous Attorney General, District Attorney General, Amy Weirich, transferring so many juveniles into adult court.

Tarik Sugarmon beat Judge Michaels and took over the juvenile court judge.

There's all this sort of new thinking, but meanwhile, there's these massive increases in violent crime.

What was the number just, and especially massive increases in juvenile crime, what was the number about break-ins and the age?

- So in 2022, I believe it was from January 1st through the end of November, there were 9,600 auto thefts in Memphis.

Average of 30 a day.

- Yeah.

- And then 16-year-olds were the highest age group to be arrested for that.

It was something like, I think 1,000?

- Right.

- And then 18-year-olds came after that.

- Yeah, and Bill, you and I, in the last year or year and a half of doing this show have done, I think, probably half the shows we've done have been somehow criminal justice oriented, whether that was having the sheriff on or the debates we did with the district attorneys, or it was having the mayor on and spending a great deal of time talking about crime or reformers like Josh Spickler and people trying to intervene like, you know, Youth Villages.

Your take on where we are, and again, sort of looking ahead where we go next year with all these reforms about to happen, but people very worried today about the crime problem.

- Yeah, I think that first of all, 2022 was a convergence of so many events across so many different sectors.

The sea change in the criminal justice system with the election of Steve Mulroy in the DA's Office and Tarik Sugarmon as the juvenile court judge, I think will continue to be a big story in 2023.

For me, I think, I don't think anybody is advocating simple solutions to this.

I think everybody who works in this every day realizes that this is a complex undertaking.

And I think the question for this year, it is going to be about timing.

When do you start talking about immediate measures, and when do you start talking about long-term measures?

What is the timing of those two?

Can they go at the same time?

I mean, we had a series of discussions around this table from some folks who are very much into the reform elements who have said, "Don't worry about the immediate effects "of it because the long-term fixes, if we start now, will make that irrelevant."

- Yeah.

And we've had other people who have said, "We really can't focus on anything but the immediate "crime problem and then get to the long-term once that's under control."

We still haven't worked out the timing on that.

- One thing that is about to happen, Toby, is, and you've written about, you've written about a lot of these issues that you, and you folks at The Flyer, is bail reform and this new bail.

Talk that, well, it was one of the very few things that DA Mulroy and former DA Weirich agreed on is that there needed to be a change to how bail is handled in Shelby County.

That kicks in in February?

- February.

We are right now building a brand new bail hearing room where these new bail hearings will take place.

A lot of this came from a threatened lawsuit from the ACLU, Just City, some other groups, that said, "Look, you know, we're gonna do bail reform or we're gonna have this long lawsuit."

Nobody wanted that.

They came to an agreement, and they decided to actually do the reform of the money bail system.

So in the hearing room, you're gonna have probably prosecutors, a lot of other people that haven't been at the table before, and these alleged offenders, you know, whatever bail they get's gonna be based on the crime and also their financial situation.

A lot of other things are gonna go into how we set bail here.

It's gonna be a really, really big change.

- And the other thing we talked, Bill framed up these conversations about what do you do today?

What do you do for the long term?

One of the things that certainly Mayor Strickland has talked about since he was elected seven years ago, as he goes into his final year, is because he's termed out, is hiring more police.

But you had a story not that recently, Julia, about a new class of cadets coming in, but also a lot of retirements.

Where are they in hiring, and what is the prospect of them getting to their goal of 23, 24, 2500 police?

- Right, so currently, as of January 3rd, they have 1,962 officers right now, and that is including those new cadets that they did take in.

And we will see some more retirements here in the next month, so that'll probably bring it down, you know, 20 or so.

So they've got a while to go, especially with the 7.5 attrition rate.

So it's just-- - 7.5% of the?

- Yeah, 7.5% attrition rate.

And, you know, they are opening a recruitment center in Midtown, and they've partnered with Deloitte, you know, trying to figure out best practices for hiring.

So they are trying to bring in new officers, but it just kind of seems like a slippery slope.

- Yeah, let me bring Marc in.

We had C.J.

Davis, the police director on, oh, I don't know, it was probably in the summer, I mean, talking about all kinds of small things like visible tattoos, which weren't allowed, longer hair, police are gonna be increasingly able to bring their police cars home.

They're trying, there are bonuses, they're trying all these things.

One thing I was gonna ask you, though, Marc, I mean, you've covered the police, criminal justice, crime in Memphis for quite a few decades now, and I'm curious right now there is, does it seem, and you also have lived in Memphis for all these decades, does it seem worse, or is there an overreaction, or has it ebbed and flowed over time, and this is one of those ebbs or flows?

- No, this discussion of having enough, a large enough compliment, has been around for quite a while.

I mean, it goes back, I think a couple of decades.

I don't think it's been as bad as it is right now, but certainly, you know, the recruitment efforts are interesting to me that you're offering these very large bonuses and, you know, if they've got a 7.5% attrition rate, you know, that growth rate is not matching that.

There's gonna be that continued deficit, so that's the $64,000 question.

How do you plug that gap?

And I don't know, everyone's kind of scratching their head for that-- - But do you think the crime problem, yes, the hiring, but also just the general crime problem is, does it seem worse 'cause crime is both the statistics, and it's also a lot about perception and perception of crime.

- Well, I think many people look at the homicide rate and there's no question, the homicide rate right now in the last five years or so is as high as it's been back to when we had this peak back in the '80s and'90s and then it dipped down for years, but it has gone up.

And so there is an issue there, and it's a real concern.

So now how do you get a handle on that?

Those are the things that-- - Right.

Bill, I cut you off.

- Yeah, no, for all of the talk about long-term and short-term approaches, and this has been true for the peaks and valleys that we've had in the crime rate, when you talk to people who work with this every day, and you say, "Why did it drop during those years, "and why did it go up?"

They honestly don't know precisely why.

They don't know what the levers are that make it go up, what the levers are that make it go down, and the police manpower argument has been a perennial of this, going back to the 1980s when you had Ira Lipman, who was then head of GuardsMark, who commissioned the state and said, "Yeah, we need more cops," and the city said, "No, we don't.

"We're fine with what we've got."

At the start of the Strickland administration, the goal for the police force was anywhere from 2,300 to 2,500.

The Council and the administration settled on a goal of 2,500 about 2 years ago.

Mayor Strickland says that, by the time he leaves office, that the police force will probably, has a reasonable goal of having about 2,100 cops on the street.

- With the various graduating classes.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Just to say, I mean, just, it comes down to philosophy, too.

Like, you're saying that, you know, the levers and things, you know, does this work, does that not work?

We saw, you know, really tough on crime here didn't really work.

We didn't move the needle on a lot of things during that administration, you know, and then there's also just the overall philosophy, you know, is crime just a symptom of poverty and, you know, is education the way to fix poverty, right?

I mean, you know, we've gone through this cycle over and over and over again, and I certainly don't know the answer and hopefully our leaders are looking at some of these things, but, you know, are we treating the system or, you know, the symptom or are we treating the cause?

- I think, I mean, I would say, then we'll shift to schools and talk about the schools but, you know, the people who we've had on almost all agree about the long-term, generally speaking, about the long-term solutions of education, of mentoring, of parenting, of options, of jobs, of economic development.

And where they tend to disagree is do the cops, some will come on and they've said, "More cops now will bring crime down tomorrow."

Others have said, "That's not the problem.

It's all those long-term things."

But we talk about schools.

Schools were big; there was a lot going on with the schools in 2022 and a lot of questions going into next year.

Joris Ray, the head of the what now is Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the legacy county city school system, resigned in the summer after, I think after stories we did, if I'm not mistaken, originally about some improprieties with staff and the search is on.

And that comes as the third grade reading cliff, which is that, you know, the state passed a law a couple years ago, a year-and-a-half ago, something like that, that said if students, third grade students aren't hitting a certain level, they can't go forward in the public schools.

I don't know, who wants to take that?

I mean, Bill on, it's a huge issue, and it's a kind of thing the third grade reading cliff, people, I mean your a colleague at Institute for Public Service reporting, David Waters did a five, six-part series.

Abigail contributed to it.

It is a difficult question, but tens of thousands of students, not just in Memphis, but all across the state are, if their scores don't come up, they may not get advanced this coming summer.

- We went from shows we did around this table about how horrible it was that only 25 or 27% of third graders were reading at grade level.

Well, after the pandemic, that looks like kind of a pie in the sky goal for third grade reading levels in our school system.

We're at what, fifteen, sixteen percent of third graders reading on grade level.

The school system has a hole to dig out of in terms of leadership during Ray's tenure.

There's really no question about that.

And this year the big question is who is the school system going to pick to lead the school system, and what are they going to do to turn around these several years where the school system didn't just stay steady and make no progress, but actually declined.

- Yeah, and that third grade reading cliff is, I mean, Shelby County, Memphis-Shelby County Schools people really focus on that, but a lot of the suburban schools have a whole lot of third graders who are not testing at that level also.

And again, across the state, it's a problem as David Water's, you know, outlined.

And you've also, I'll just touch on it real quick, and we'll move on to whether TVA and MLGW, but also the big news of 2022 that the 3G schools went back to Memphis-Shelby County Schools from the, went back, sorry, went back to the Germantown School System, City of Germantown.

We did a show on that, you can read all about it.

It's a little complicated, but that got resolved in Millington, it was Lucy Elementary, right?

Went back to the City of Millington, Millington Schools.

- And the upshot of that is that over the next nine years, the Memphis-Shelby County School System will have a $100 million school in the Cordova area, which is the area of the county that saw the most population growth in the 2020 census.

- So this week, as we tape this in first week of January, we all had a wonderful holidays.

I was lucky I had water and power.

Many people didn't at this table, I assume, as well, but that followed what, February 2022.

We were doing a show remotely because the studio was shut down, and I remember, I think it was Bill, and it was Toby, and Abigail Warren, and like, as we were taping the show, people were, Toby went down, lost his power - That's right.

- February in the ice storm.

Then Abigail, and I think Bill was in and out, maybe just had audio, no video.

- By phone.

- Yeah, by phone, yeah.

I was in Crosstown, and I never lost power or water.

Not to brag, but the storm, I mean, that is a huge, and that followed 2021.

We had our first boil water advisory.

We just had one all against the backdrop of TVA, which did rolling blackouts across its whole network.

I don't, who wants to take this?

I'll start with Toby.

- I don't know, I mean, you said it, I mean, you know, from '21, '22 and now these storms are becoming the norm.

They never used to happen in Memphis, according to my older neighbor that, you know, we never had winter weather like this, and now, it's become a thing that we kind of look forward to.

Snow sleds were not something that you bought in Memphis [everyone laughs] because you never needed them, and now.

- There's also gotta be hills.

- We don't have any hills, but now they're becoming a regular part of what we do.

And, you know, we've got Doug McGowan, who's now the head over there at MLGW to try to look at some of these things.

But we had rolling blackouts here right before Christmas this year, and we were never used to that.

TVA had never really done that before.

It was called a Step 50, I don't know, it's jargony, but they were rolling blackouts all along the TVA service area, which is seven states, and we've never done that before, and it was all to kind of save the overall power grid.

- And it comes at the same time that we are still in the midst of this tremendous debate about whether Memphis Light, Gas and Water should stay with TVA.

- Yeah.

- Right.

- Or should leave.

There were other power providers who encountered the same thing, but rolling blackouts, while this was the second boil water advisory we've had in two years.

- Right.

- This is the first time Memphians have ever had rolling blackouts.

- Yeah.

- You report on TVA.

I mean the city, and I should say Doug McGowan, the relatively new head of MLGW will be on the show I believe next week, but, and we'll ask him about a lot of these things, but you've been caught reporting on TVA since this whole contract renewal came up and this idea of alternative power sources.

Your take on where we were with TVA this last year and the story really isn't over.

- No, it's not over, and it would be interesting to see if you could move these rolling blackouts back in time, how that might have changed this whole conversation because, you know, there were these critics who were saying, you know, "We need to really, TVA's giving us a bad deal.

We're not getting the best price," but they were really shut down by the, you know, the powers that be and the administration at MLGW.

If this conversation could be completely different had it happened before, because now you see a vulnerability in the system that wasn't there before.

- Well, and TVA was actually touting its reliability in terms of delivering electric power at a time when some of the rivals for the Memphis Light, Gas, and Water contract were having those problems.

- But let me say this, too, about TVA is that to a lot of people, they are a inaccessible, not very transparent organization.

And I, as a journalist and I know others have had difficulty getting information out of them, I have a Freedom of Information lawsuit that I filed along with the reporters committee for Freedom of the Press against them trying to get salary information, which is basically how do they spend their money.

There's a lot of questions about how they do business that are pertinent to this whole issue, so I'm hoping I get some traction out this year.

It's coming up for, motions for summary judgment will be filed in February and March, and we might have a hearing in sometime in April, but.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, with just five minutes left, I'll run through, I wanna ask everybody kind of what you see as the biggest stories you'll be tracking next year, but I wanna maybe note some other things of, you know, the Greensward Deal was signed this year between the zoo and the park, and that resolution happened.

The new airport concourse opened.

It wasn't all bad news maybe is what I'm trying to say here.

[everyone laughs] Which is this, if you haven't been in the new airport concourse, it's really, it's pretty amazing and very cool and a much better presentation of Memphis when, for people who arrive.

There were other big stories that in other years would've been huge.

Brian Kelsey, the former state senator, pled guilty to election finance charges.

There's a big fight over 1 Beale and the future of funding and it kind of gets into all the funding of stuff downtown.

And ongoing issues at the County Clerk's, at Wanda Halbert's office.

But I'll go around and I'll start with you Julia.

What are the big stories you'll be tracking going into 2023?

- I think a lot of it will be, you know, for one, tracking the progress of the police department in their hiring, seeing if they can get to at least to their short term goal of 2,300.

Also, we'll be following District Attorney Steve Mulroy and his progress.

He plans on expanding restorative justice, for instance, so that'll be interesting to see what kind of impact that will have.

And then, also he and Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon, they want to bring blended sentencing.

They want to have that passed in the Tennessee General Assembly.

So that'll be interesting to see if that passes.

- Toby, stories you'll be looking at?

- Sure, bail reform is one.

We'll be looking to see how that is implemented going forward.

Also, the state just got a really bad report on its lethal injection protocols.

We'll be tracking that a lot.

Also, Tom Lee Park is gonna, it's supposed to be done, finished this year.

Memphis in May is supposed to be back downtown.

We know that there's gonna be growing pains and concerns around that, so we'll be watching that too.

- And, Marc?

- Well, you know me, Eric.

I like to play my cards close to the vest.

- I knew you were gonna answer this way - But I will tell you this-- - I know some of what you're working on, but I'm not gonna say anything.

- Right, you do know some of it, but one thing that I really would like to test is this inequity in the system that we seems to have been apparent in it, you know, when police are investigating serious crimes like sexual assault, are they investigating them thoroughly?

We kind of get this superficial answer right now is that they're not, because Alicia Franklin, who is African-American, they did not do a thorough investigation on that case.

Now, I'd like to look at the big picture, and it's gonna be tough to see but, you know, piece by piece, can you quantify that?

Where do we lie in that?

It's an important issue.

- And, Bill?

There's nothing going on with the city or elections or politics this year, so I don't what you're gonna do.

- No, no, no.

We have city elections coming up in October, and we will elect a new mayor, and there are a lot of contenders in that race even now, even though petitions can't be pulled for that until this coming May.

The other thing is that in the city's spring budget season, I'm gonna predict that you're gonna see Council members have a very serious discussion about one of the points Marc made and that is does the city want to call for more state funding to beef up the state crime lab, or does the City Council want to look into financing the Memphis Police Department having its own crime lab, back to this question.

The other thing is we're not through winter yet.

And I think it's worth noting that for all of the problems that we've talked about with electric power and who should provide it, that we're now at a point where a lot of Memphians, when the weather gets cold, when the weather gets bad or, and in some parts of our city, even when the weather's not that bad, people worry about whether they will have electric power, heat, air conditioning, and light.

This is a new thing for a city that touted its power reliability over all of the other problems for most of our lifetimes.

We're at a crucial point in the city's basic infrastructure.

- Yeah, and we, again, I'll be talking to not just Doug McGowan next week about that, but the mayor candidates, as they kind of come together, we will start having them on the show as, if they'll come on the show, and I'm sure they want to, and talk about what's going on and their approaches to crime and to infrastructure and to spending and to whatever degree to education.

My last story that I would highlight next year, I agree with what everybody said here in terms of things to focus on, but also Blue Oval City, the Ford Plant, beginning to really start to hire, start to see even more impact from that out as more land is bought as more of the suppliers go in.

I think that still is just gonna be a huge impact on this area if you look what happened to Nashville in that area when those car plants started coming in, that is very much potentially about to happen to the Memphis area.

So maybe end on a good note there.

Thank you all for being here, thank you very much, and thank you for joining us again.

Join us next week, Doug McGowan.

Week after that, Russ Whittington, the new, Wigginton, sorry about that, the new Head of the National Civil Rights Museum.

We'll have him on in two weeks, and thanks for being here.

We'll see you then.

[intense orchestral music] [acoustic guitar chords]