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- How to address crime and criminal justice in Memphis, tonight on Behind The Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Cardell Orrin, Executive Director of Stand For Children Tennessee.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you.

- The Reverend Ayanna Watkins is the Executive Director of MICAH.

Thank you for being here.

- Thank you.

- Josh Spickler, Executive Director of Just City.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks, Eric.

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

You all together are part of the Justice and Safety Alliance.

And I should say to everyone, we talked a little bit before the show, we booked this show six, seven, eight weeks ago, and it has been quite a six, seven, eight weeks in terms of crime and so on.

We are taping this Thursday morning, so what we know now, obviously, there was a shooting spree yesterday, four people killed, another three were shot, and things could have changed some by the time this airs on Friday, so I just need to acknowledge that.

And, also it is obviously, as I said, been a very rough week in terms of crime.

Couple of months, on top of a very rough couple of years.

The whole country has seen a big increase in crime and violent crime, particularly, and Memphis is very much a part of that.

Just in the last week, Eliza Fletcher was abducted and killed, Yvonne Nelson, what, about a month ago?

A community advocate in Whitehaven was killed during a carjacking.

It was a potential carjacking, I think they determined it was not.

In July, the Reverend Autura Eason-Williams was killed during a carjacking in Whitehaven.

And I think I'd ran some numbers on the MPD side.

There's something like, in the time since we wanted to do this show, something like 30 murders, other murders, and I've just picked some of the high profile ones and some that have gotten a lot of attention, but it's pretty awful.

I'll go to you, maybe go to you first.

I mean, what can we do about crime?

And also if you could talk a little bit about what MICAH is very briefly for people who aren't familiar with MICAH.

- Sure.

So MICAH is an organization of organizations.

We are a coalition of faith, community and labor organizations in the city of Memphis.

We have been around since 2016 and have been doing public meetings, actions and working on issues since 2018.

Our issues are economic equity, education equity, and race and class equity in the justice system.

And that's sort of where our energy has been focused in these last few years.

And so when we talk about what we can do about crime, we do have to start there.

We start with the justice system.

But because we're people of faith and because we're people who are based and grounded in this community, we can't stop there.

We also have to talk about how education is working.

We also have to talk about how mental health resources are shaping up.

We also have to talk about whether or not people have enough food to live, enough money to pay rent and so on.

All of these things impact crime.

And it makes a whole story if we're gonna tell it well.

- Okay.

And we'll come back to you, obviously, for more.

Cardell, what does your organization do?

What can we do about crime?

- Stand for Children's a organization, we're a national organization.

We're focused on educational equity and racial justice.

A lot of our work centers around advocacy, organizing, a lot of recent work is around coalition building towards the end of what you're saying, not just about what can we do about crime, but in a way of what can we do about crime is ensure that as many people as possible have thriving lives and thriving communities to live in, and we believe that's the core of what we can do about crime and addressing many of the issues that we have of poverty, of education, of all of these myriad of issues that we can.

And that's the core of what we believe solves the problem.

- Josh, you've been on the show a number of times and in the last year we've done a lot of shows.

I meant to count, that Bill and I have done on criminal justice in various ways.

The former DA, we had a debate of Steve Mulroy and Amy Weirich.

We've had the sheriff on, we recently had the police chief on, county mayor, city mayor, Dan Michael, the man who beat him, Tarik Sugarmon, Bill Gibbon's former DA, I mean a whole lot of folks talking about crime, legislators and so on.

One thing I think all of them have agreed on.

And I don't remember in the history of the show, anyone disagreeing with the notion of really root causes around mentoring, around poverty, around education, around parenting, about all those, that really one way or another seems like, virtually everyone we've ever interviewed in 13 years agrees with that.

Maybe some don't, they didn't say it.

What is hard to reconcile on a day like today, and I'm gonna put you in this spot, is what do we do now?

What do we do tonight?

- And that's the frustrating part about this type of pain and this type of anguish that we're going through as a community right now is that we feel like society in some ways is failing us and it's failing people or the feeling of failure is impacting people who aren't used to that.

But the fact of the matter is, that for generations, there are people in this community who feel like society has failed them, who feel like the systems that keep us safe, the systems that allow us equal opportunity and protect us, are failing.

And so that has happened over generations and the solutions and the response to get us to a place where we feel like we can trust our neighbors, where we feel like we can walk outside without being afraid, those things are gonna take generations to repair.

And it's not gonna be something that we can do tonight.

So, what we can do tonight maybe is recognize that.

Is say, sit in the grief and understand how it happened and know how complicated it is, so that we can steel ourselves for the work ahead because it's very deep, complicated work that's gonna require people from all across this community to do it in a sustained way for a long, long time.

- I'm gonna bring in Bill.

- The frustration though, is that at times when more people, many more people, are specifically attuned to this entire spectrum of an issue are the times when it can feel like the immediate solutions and the long-term solutions are in conflict with each other.

Is there a conflict?

- I think there's a misnomer of what you said, immediate solutions.

I think that it's mistaken to say that there are immediate solutions and folks who are telling you that are not telling the truth.

That if they're saying, because the immediate solutions I'm assuming you're saying, are more police, are harsher sentences, are, as the mayor said last night at the press conference, the responsibility of judges giving out tougher, longer sentences.

Those are things that have been proven that we know are not gonna work.

Those are the things that we've been doing for the last few decades.

So clearly they're not immediate solutions.

So I think that even when they talk about those pieces that we think about as what can we do right now?

They haven't happened.

They've been talking about them for years.

They've been making promises about them.

They've been creating magic numbers that we can get to in policing and the time of sentencing, all of these things are not things that are going to work.

And so the things that we have to focus on is what are the things that we know will work and will support the people and communities, so that we can see a different tomorrow.

- But while we're waiting on those longer-term solutions, it seems, especially after the week that we've had, as if the hole we're digging is getting deeper and deeper.

And it's not like things are staying the same, more people are being victimized by this.

- But we also have to think about the time period that we're in, right?

We're coming out of pandemic.

We're seeing this in schools, we're seeing this in other avenues that it's, as Eric said, it's a national trend that's happening.

So these things are not happening in a vacuum.

They're not just getting worse because they're getting worse.

And if we don't recognize the reasons that they're getting worse, we don't drill into those things, we won't come up with the actual solutions that might matter for people.

- So how do you think we balance that?

The immediate and the long term?

- I agree with Cardell, there's not an immediate.

I can't get my child to clean up her breakfast dishes immediately after, I have to work on that so that she can get to to that place.

And I do think that's important.

But the immediate part for us now is to focus on healing and restoration around this harm that we're feeling.

And a lot of times, and this is just psychology, when we're hurt this deeply, we try and find that quick fix.

That's what we want.

That's what our brains and bodies want to be true.

But what is true is that the best thing we can do is sit with the feelings for a minute, feel them, let that drive us to our neighbors instead of away from them, find ways for us to start coming together and having these productive conversations and work together.

I think about the two young men, I think about all of the young men in the cases you just raised.

Each one of them was caught quickly.

Am I right?

There was not a long period between the crime and them being put away.

But also so many of them were in or should have been in high school when they were first committing the crimes, either the in question or the ones that led to the ones that we're experiencing today.

They were somewhere eight hours a day, where they were supposed to be building character, learning civics, figuring out what they wanted to do with their lives.

How did those places fail them?

How did no one see that they were hurting?

Or did someone see and there weren't enough resources and tools and places to send them?

We're just talking about this today.

When folks are having a mental health crisis, it's hard for those with money and privilege and insurance and access to get services right away.

What about, we're talking about folks who are in families that are broken in places and communities that are broken in places, struggling in schools where the ceiling's falling in on their heads, thinking about Cummings school.

And we want them to go ahead and walk around like everything is fine and they have everything that they need.

We can do better, to resource one another, both in this immediate moment, circling up, doing our prayers, coming back to those things and our faith.

I'm in a interfaith organization, coming back to those things in our faith that ground us, that remind us that the ground under our feet is still firm.

And we are people of action and hope.

And if we can't continue into that hope, then we've lost it all.

And so we reground ourselves, we get our hope together.

And then we try and find smart action plans towards that change that we're looking for.

- Again, keep you in this, Josh.

We've talked about this a lot over the years, when you've been on the show and there are people who push back, the mayor would push back on some, the city mayor.

And I've had lots of people on the show and I hear from people who push back and who would say, you know, there's gotta be kind of an intermediate step, again, agreed in principle, maybe not the details, but in principle with everything you all are saying, but they're gonna say, look, were the people who did these killings in jail, those people would still be alive.

And so that it may be that this person came from a broken, tragic, horrific, forgotten childhood.

And as you have often reminded me, these are children, you know, 15 year old, I think the person who is accused of killing Reverend Autura Eason-Williams was 15 or 16 years old.

That person couldn't have done it if they were in jail.

- The thing we can do right now is reject people, isolate them, put them in a facility, that's jail, that's prison, that is a thing we can do.

And if incarceration kept us safer, we would be the safest county, in one of the safest states, in the safest country in the world.

It doesn't work.

And it is.

- But wait, let me interrupt you, 'cause we have time.

You say it doesn't work in, I get that.

I think virtually every one of these incidents involved a repeat offender, of some sort, of prior burglary, you could sort of see that, again, all of them accused, none of them have been convicted, but all of them you could see in their records a stair stepping up of petty crimes to bigger crimes and so on.

In the most literal sense, people are gonna say and push back on you and you hear it all the time.

Incarceration works because if you're in jail, you can't pull that trigger.

- It's a component of the solution, of course.

Accountability is often unfortunately the chief component of our response as society to these problems, accountability.

Call it what you want.

Punishment.

And it's an important part because we do have to bring people to account and people who cause the harm that has been caused in our community this week in particular, need to be held to account, there's absolutely no doubt about that.

But there's so much more that we've been talking about here.

And what's happening while people are removed, rejected, isolated from us has to be a part of this conversation.

I mean, it's written into the law.

I mean, we can talk all day about programs and we can break down the components and the theories behind incarceration, where there's incapacitation or deterrence and what the studies say.

I mean, we can talk about that.

But that's just one part of this.

And the restoration, the wholeness, the healing, that Reverend Ayanna talks about, is not happening when we have the opportunity.

And so again, I say, if this worked, if removing people, if giving them longer sentences, if saying, if they were still in jail, worked, then we would be safer and yet.

- And again, I'm not giving you my opinions, but you know, y'all, I mean, we're just trying to have a good debate and people are in pain.

And so again, I'm not trying to argue with you so much, but just to, I think, express what other folks who might otherwise be at this table and be at the table in the future will say the other side of this.

So I just wanna be clear about that.

But I'll go, Cardell, talk about police.

We talked about policing and this, the mayor has had this goal to get back to something like, it used to be 2500, which is where I think the city was, twenty-five hundred some decade ago, it really, for the entire mayor's tenure, we've been around 1900 to maybe 2000 or something like that.

I mean, when these things happen, I think most of us, I don't know, most people are happy that the police are there.

They're chasing this person down.

They're catching these people, as you said, catching them pretty quickly.

So is it your point of view that we're over policing or that we're just doing it wrong or?

Talk to me about policing and the role of policing.

- I think there's an imbalance.

And so if we talk about law enforcement and the system, that there is a place for policing.

And even when we think about how do we have enough people to staff to address issues that arise in our community, more police isn't always the answer.

One of the first things that we did as a coalition was released a report, "Policing Reimagined" with Dr. Dwayne Loynes and Demetria Frank, to talk about the history of policing, where it's been and think about ideas that can augment and supplement the ways that we think about policing.

Even the city, in 2015, when they had their five-year strategic plan, talked about having non-commissioned officers who could go out and address some of the issues.

The paper, it talks about an example of a program called Cahoots, where there are interventionists who can go out and address issues.

So even when we think about the issue that has been brought up by the mayor and the police chief in saying, we need more people, we need more people out, that we end up saying, well, do they have to be police?

Do they have to be people with guns?

Are there things that we can do to address the issues, the challenges that are happening in our community that doesn't involve the police?

And so part of it is, let's have this conversation, not centered in what is this magic number that gets us to supposed safety and what really helps us to really address the issues that are in our community.

- And I believe you were in Chicago working?

Do I have that right?

- Say it again?

- That you were in Chicago before Memphis?

- That's correct.

- And Chicago has had a seen tremendous increases in crime.

Other cities have as well, but can you or anyone, but Chicago just comes to mind because you're right here, cities that have taken this sort of approach and reduced their crime rate.

- Yes.

- Okay.

How did that happen and where?

- So I can even attribute some of my own, the fact that I'm sitting here with you to the Interrupters and the work of Cease Fire, then Cease Fire now Cure Violence.

- What is that program?

- So that program involves folks who've been involved in criminal activity in the past, who are willing, ready and able to turn, not only their own lives around, but try and cut off violence before it can happen.

And that's, it's in the name in terms of interrupters.

I think we want police to deter violence the same way we want punishment to deter bad behavior, but psychology forever, criminal justice system forever, all the research has shown us that that is never going to be sufficient.

So what the interrupters do, is when a crime happens, they talk to the folks who are affected to try and stop retaliation.

When a crime is threatened, when they know that there is a chance for criminal activity, hurt, violence, pain, even murder and death, they try and interact with the folks who are most likely to commit those acts and head them off at the pass, remove their weapons, get them to another physical space, talk to them.

They have met folks in the hospital.

In fact, they most frequently do, who have been shot and try and say, what are we gonna do so that what happened to you doesn't happen to the next person and that you're not the next one pulling the trigger.

- That was a program in Chicago?

- That's correct.

- Yeah.

And there's similar program, I think Youth Villages in Memphis has done some of that.

Just to be clear for people not familiar with this, those are not police officers.

Those are volunteer people.

- Some of them are paid.

Some of them are volunteers, but they are folks who have experience in that life.

- I gotcha.

Bill.

- So I have to tell you some of the reaction that I've heard sounds very similar, the immediate reaction, to what I've heard after similar incidents in the past.

People feel like, I think, that compassion is seen as weakness at a moment like this.

And we seem to be running out of things to do, candlelight vigils, crime summits are another favorite that crops up at a time like this.

So what can we do that shows our resolve in a realistic way, do you think?

- I can say that as a member of the new district attorney's transition team, and as a person who's, obviously, been watching that office very closely for the last few years.

If this community, if people in this community think that a DA, the most progressive DA ever imagined, is not gonna respond to the types of crimes that we've seen very recently, firmly and quickly, and with all the resources at his or her disposal, then they're not being honest because this type of harm needs to be addressed.

It will be addressed.

We have the tools in place in our prosecutor's office.

We have judges in courtrooms ready to go and ready to deal with these problems.

We do it day in and day out.

And we have many professional people working long and hard hours at 201 Poplar at our Justice Center to do it and they will do it in this instance.

And I believe the people charged with these crimes will get fair trials and they will be sentenced fairly by the people or by the judges and their cases be heard by the citizens of Shelby County, if that's what they want.

So those systems are in place.

And I have all the confidence in the world that the new district attorney is going to treat these cases with the seriousness that they deserve.

This is not a situation where anyone is gonna open the door to the jail or demand that it be so.

The supporters of Steve Mulroy are not gonna ask for that and I don't think that's what Steve Mulroy is gonna do.

So there will be a firm response.

- There's a new district attorney, but these two defendants have been in court before.

They've been before judges before.

They've been subject to statutes that are still on the books, what's going to be different?

- Absolutely.

- So I think it's time and many people have been doing this, but it's time for the majority of us to stop treating jail as out of sight, out of mind.

To say that when we send people to jail, then that's the end of it.

We stop thinking about what's happening to them in jail, what resources they have in jail, what's happening to them all day long.

If the young man who was out shooting last night was in jail for 11 months, what happened in 11 months of incarceration that could have turned his thinking around, that could have started to deal with some of the pieces in his life?

And if length made a difference, then the person who kidnapped Eliza Fletcher, then the 20 years he spent in prison versus the 20, what 22 or 24 that he was assigned, in truth of sentencing should have kicked in in two decades.

In two decades of time in incarceration, something should have happened.

And in fact, some things should have happened to begin to turn folks around.

If that's not happening, we have to stop turning a blind eye to what happens when the jail door is closed and we have to get invested.

- And what do two more years get us?

Or what do 25 more months get us?

And that argument, it just rings very, very hollow because does 25 more months in jail mean that we don't have this crime on our hands this morning?

- Let me just add in, 'cause I think this addresses some that Eric mentioned too, that so many times people come around this table in the community and say, we all want the same things.

We do want people to have more resources and supports.

What they don't do is use their political will and capital to make those things happen.

And so when we talk about what can change, what can we do?

We talk about what a moral budget looks like.

We can say that we shouldn't wait 10 years to get the budget that MATA needs today, in 10 years, when they're gonna need a whole 'nother budget to make it an accessible transit system that actually works for people so that people can get to jobs, if they are trying to do right, they can get to jobs.

They can get to their bail hearing.

They can get to picking up their children.

They can do things effectively.

We got 30, 40,000 deficit in affordable housing.

We can invest in affordable housing.

We can do these things.

We have mental health, issues, access to mental health.

This is specifically.

These things require resources.

So when we look back 20 years ago, the difference between what the city was giving to police and what it was giving to education was only about $50 million.

In that time period, the amount given to education has gone down to zero, well, $6 million for Pre-K and the police budget has doubled, and we have not invested.

And over just the last two years, we gave away $200 million in additional revenue that we could have gotten by keeping the tax rate the same as it had been the previous years because of the increase in wealth and value that was happening in properties in our community.

So when we talk about what are people doing, what are the answers to this?

The answers are not just to talk about it, but to invest in it and support it.

And even, I would say, Eric, as you mentioned and say, hey, we've had conversations about justice and you mentioned we had the DA and the police chief and the mayors and all these.

You didn't mention, we had Gary Rosenfeld on, we had Roshun and Steve Barlow on about The Works, that all of these things are about justice and safety.

So when we have the folks on from the school system, then when we are having those conversations, we are talking about what works and what will get us to a safe and just community.

- We have 30 seconds left.

[all laughing] - And so I don't think it's probably fair for me to ask any other questions at this point, just because of the complexity of it and obviously the pain that the whole community and obviously, you all are feeling, we're all feeling.

- And I'll just say, I think there's a good deal of frustration and probably some of it is going to be directed at this discussion once it airs.

- Barnes@dailymemphian.com.

- And we will keep talking about it.

- Yes.

- And can we just say that if you wanna have that discussion with us, justiceandsafetyalliance.org, is the place to come and find out about our information.

- Okay.

Thank y'all for being here.

Thank you for joining us.

Join us again next week.

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