- (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 new Memphis Mayor Paul Young, tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I am Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian, thanks for joining us.

We are joined tonight by Paul Young, new Memphis Mayor.

Thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

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

I'll say this is the first two parts that we're gonna do, two shows we're gonna do with the new mayor, who's seven weeks or so into the job.

This first one will focus very much on public safety and related issues, maybe some other things.

And then next week we'll get to a whole lot more issues that are obviously top of mind.

But let's start with public safety.

When you ran and when you won, you've talked about the phrase, you know, we need to bring down the chaos, we need to end the chaos.

And obviously on Sunday there was some chaos, right?

- No question.

- With Courdarion Craft accused of a crime spree shootings, I mean a really awful situation, text alerts and so on.

What went wrong that that happened?

And what now, you know, as mayor, again in for seven weeks, but campaigning for a year and a lot of preparation and transition into it, do you look back and say that within the things you can control, something could have been done?

- You know, first my heart goes out to the families of those that were impacted by the events of this past weekend.

I mean, it was heartbreaking to see our community yet again in a state where we are wondering where some person is that is wreaking havoc in our community.

In terms of what could have been done, this individual had a number of charges over the past few years, and it looked to me like it's someone that should have been behind bars while they awaited trial.

And you know, for whatever reason that didn't happen.

And so when I have talked early and often about having this pandemic-level response where we have all of the actors in the room, this is why.

So that we can be aligned with what do we do with those that are wreaking the most violence in our community.

And, you know, we are continuing those conversations.

We have meetings constantly to have these dialogues, but we still have a lot of work to do clearly.

- When in meetings with whom?

- I have a meeting coming up with all of the judges soon, but mostly meeting with the district attorney, juvenile court judge, Shelby County Sheriff's Office, MPD, we're trying to stay connected.

Also Memphis and Shelby County Schools, we're trying to stay connected so that as we strategize and prepare for how we change what's happening in our community, that all of us are thinking alike on what the solutions are going to be.

- And on that, we had DA Mulroy on the show last week before this incident, talked a lot about issues that will bring up with you now.

Those issues are more in his purview around sentencing and around bail setting.

Although it's a complicated system with the judges and the judicial commissioners and so on.

You as mayor don't have anything in the powers of the mayor about bail setting, about keeping someone behind bars.

It's, unless I'm missing something, that's beyond you, but you are a big a public figure and the people are gonna put a lot on you.

The state legislature's in session, there are a bunch of proposals that are coming forward.

Many of them coming from Senator Brent Taylor from the Memphis area.

And again, I'll say that he'll be on the show next week along with London Lamar also a state senator to talk about some of these proposals.

And there's obviously a real appetite up at a Republican controlled legislature to make some changes around bail reform.

These things include things like ending the ability to weigh people's financial means when setting bail for higher level offenses, keeping people in jail longer when they've offended some of the truth in sentencing, the murder and some of the really violent things, increasing parental responsibility for juveniles and changing up how the judicial commissioners are overseeing.

Again, tho none of those things are, unless I'm missing something, are in your purview.

But what is your take on them and your support or opposition to them will carry some amount of weight?

- Many of 'em I support.

I mean the things that are intended to keep the bad guys, the ones that we know without a shadow of a doubt, we know these are the ones that have done these crimes.

We wanna make sure that we keep them behind bars.

The ones that I don't disagree with, that I don't agree with, I've had direct dialogues with those that are sponsoring 'em and let 'em know where we stand on them and continue to have dialogue around how we can potentially move some of the language in the bills in a way that might impact the community in a better way from our position.

- For example, what?

- For instance, the one where they want to do away with the ordinances that were passed at the City Council- - Around pretextual stops.

- Around pretextual stops.

- By MPD.

- Exactly, yeah.

So on that one, for me it's really a matter of local control and having the ability for our community to be able to, you know, dictate how we are going to police in our community.

And we've had dialogue and we agree to disagree on some of those things.

- All right, let me bring in Bill.

- To that point mayor, in terms of, of pretextual stops, in terms any policy like that.

Aren't there priorities that a police department or a sheriff's department, aren't there priorities that they're gonna set in terms of enforcement anyway in that?

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, my position is simply that we have enough laws being broken on the streets that we can get people that need to be gotten.

There is a lot of speeding and drag racing and all of these things that are clearly illegal over and beyond any of the ordinances that have been passed.

And so I think that we still have the grounds to pull many people over.

And so, you know, regardless of what happens on that front, my goal is to ensure that we continue the dialogue and collaboration around the things that we do agree on so that we can move those things forward as quickly as possible because the community is relying on us, relying on us, the politicians, the folks that have some influence and power over the situations to be able to get this thing right so that they can see the conditions change.

And so my goal as mayor is to continue that collaboration regardless of who the person is that we're gonna have to collaborate with to get it done.

- Is there pressure on you to just go out there rapidly and mount some kind of quote unquote show of force that people will see, but that may not necessarily really do anything other than just show a police presence out there?

- There's definitely pressure to get different results.

I do think people want to see the presence of officers.

They've appreciated seeing the state highway patrol on the interstates and we appreciate them for being partners on that.

What we're trying to do is make sure we're being smart about how we are policing in our community.

We're doing a lot of work around data to identify who are the ones that are wreaking the most havoc.

And we wanna focus our efforts around ensuring that we are capturing them, bringing them to justice.

We're working hard to increase the clearance rates within the police department because what we know is, you know, the individuals that are the shooters, that are, have homicides that they've committed, they are likely to do it again.

And so our goal is to get those that have already shown us that they are going to, you know, be out in our communities doing the wrong thing.

And so as we increase that clearance rate, we believe that we will get most of the bad guys off the street.

- How do you draw the line on that when it's someone who is accused of prior crimes but not convicted yet?

- Yeah, I think that's part of what I referenced it in another interview that as we talk about making sure that we hold those behind bars that are wreaking the most havoc, one, we wanna make sure we wanna have a preponderance of evidence.

We want to make sure that there's a lot of evidence indicating that this is the right person and then we wanna work with our courts to bring people to trial faster.

We have to get our court system unlocked.

And I'm not an expert on all of the things that are happening, but what I do know is that it's taken a lot of time to get many of these cases processed and we wanna make sure that we're getting as many of them through the system as possible.

- Through all of the discussion, and there's been a lot of it about Chief Davis.

You also talked about a public safety director for the city.

Where are you in that process?

And tell me more about what that role is, especially in relationship to the police director.

- Yeah, so where we are in the process, we have a job description and we're working, and having some conversations with some people that may be good candidates.

We wanna make sure we get the right person for that role.

The way I envision that role is someone that is going to be thinking about public safety every day, in its broadest context.

Right now, we have a police chief that is focused on crime suppression, that's what they do every day.

They go capture the bad guys, they respond to incidents when they occur and that's their role.

But public safety is much bigger than suppression.

You also have the intervention and the prevention.

If we know that people are headed down the wrong road or they've been engaged in a certain lifestyle, we need to be working with those individuals through other institutions, not the police department, nonprofits that are out there intervening and trying to change their lives.

And then we have the prevention side where we're trying to engage those young people with jobs and activities and things of that nature.

And so I want this public safety director to be working to coordinate all of those activities across the whole spectrum of public safety on behalf of the mayor.

We need somebody who's thinking about it every day, as well as coordinating that pandemic-level response that I've talked about so often, all of these actors and players that are in these other realms where the mayor does not have direct control, we need somebody that's working with them every day on behalf of the city to ensure that we're getting things done.

- Because we already have things like intervention programs there.

But one of the things that you and the other candidates heard a lot of during the campaign was, yeah, we've got all these things, but everybody's out there kind of just doing their own thing and maybe duplicating things, or you know, not a coordinated response on this.

- That's exactly right.

And that's the whole point of having a person that can coordinate to ensure that we're sharing data, data in real time from incidents that are taking place on the streets.

For instance, we have a group that's working with us, 901 B.L.O.C., when a murder takes place in a neighborhood or a community, they're on the scene responding and you know, talking to people around to figure out which groups were involved so that they can try and put potentially intervene behind the scenes to stop retaliation and things of that nature.

We need that type of coordination on a much broader scale.

And there are other groups that are doing similar things and we wanna make sure that we keep that connectivity because this has to be an all out effort to stop the crisis that we're in.

- That one challenge of that, both for your position as mayor and for public safety director is they don't have authority again over the courts, the judges.

You talked about working, meeting with the judges in the next week.

You talked about, you know, talking a lot with the juvenile court judge and office and the DA.

Is it just a matter of making your case?

Because you can't tell the DA what to do, you can't tell many of these groups to do and the public safety director can't either.

So what is that leverage you have or do you have to make change?

- I mean, I don't know that it's just making the case.

I think we're all aligned in what we want.

I wanna make sure that we understand what their impediments are to getting the results, to getting more cases heard.

And we wanna work with the broader cast of actors, the state legislators, others that can influence the thing that they need, the barriers that they have, so that they can get the cases heard, reviewed.

And I think it's just using the influence of the mayor's office.

The mayor's office has a significant bully pulpit and so I wanna leverage it so that we can get change for our community.

- As we talk about Chief Davis.

Chief Davis, there was a, you know, you were trying to get her reappointed by the City Council didn't really go well.

It was a bit of a, for political insiders, it was not the greatest day for a chief on talking to the City Council.

She's now chief of police, on an interim basis.

One, what does that mean technically?

And does that mean that she'll really only be here for 6 to 12 months and you're gonna start looking for a new police chief?

- No, so what it means is that we will go back to City Council at some date to be determined.

I presume in the next six months or so, they'll have us back and we'll talk some more about where we go, whether we stay in interim or whether they're ready to approve.

But at the end of the day, she is the chief of police.

And I understand the passionate feelings on all sides.

We are in a crisis.

And so it's not surprising that, you know, people want to know why we should keep the chief when we're in a crisis.

And so I made it clear that I believe in her ability to help lead us out of this, this situation that we're in.

We've been working hard over the last couple of months, even prior to me taking office, making plans on how we were going to move this community forward.

And now it is time for us to show and prove.

And so we're working to get the implementation going.

- It is a quandary with the Council in the sense, and Bill, and you know, these politics much better than me, but you had people who had said, look, going back to, you know, Tyre Nichols and the over-policing and clearer abuses, I mean, abuses is an understatement of what some of those police officers did on the video, it's very clear.

And then you've got others who's saying, hey, she's ineffective 'cause she's not tough enough in crime.

So the the six month period is to show both those sides that she can be effective?

- Yeah, I think if we reduce crime in our community, everyone will feel like we're headed in the right direction.

And what I wanted to do is get moving.

I didn't wanna spend a whole lot of time, particularly early in my tenure, I mean, we're still trying to, you know, get to know each other in some instances.

I don't wanna spend time going through a search for a new police chief.

And I felt like it was a good place for us to come to a compromise where we can move forward right now.

And I feel like once the energy changes and we get the community headed in the right direction, then all the approvals and things that we need will come.

- A couple things on the, on policing still, I mentioned Tyre Nichols, obviously a whole lot of documents and some more video and so on we're released this week.

We have extensive coverage of that on DailyMemphian.com.

Were there things for you that stood out as, I mean, it was a lot of problematic stuff that came out, but were there things that particularly stood out to you, again, maybe in the things that look like they are endemic and not unique to that situation, to the Tyre Nichols incident?

- I mean, I think most of the information were things that we already knew.

It may have given a little more color, but we know that we had some rogue officers that did a bad, terrible act.

And you know, our hearts goes out to the family and we wanna make sure that those that did this are held accountable.

- So you're confident they were the exception, by no means the rule?

- I believe that these were actors that knew the training and the rules and they knowingly broke them.

- Okay.

The Justice Department is doing this patterns and practice investigation as a result of all that.

Have you, now that you're in the office, do you see that being a good thing, a bad thing?

Do you feel their presence in any way?

- I haven't had a direct dialogue.

I think we've exchanged a few emails and we'll get a conversation going soon, but in terms of their investigation and the things that they're going through, we wanna make sure that we are as collaborative as possible and we cooperate through the process and we will continue to do that.

- Two more quick ones on policing, I'll go back to Bill.

The attempt to hire everybody who ran for mayor, everybody who sat in that seat, you included, that we interviewed, said we need more police.

I don't think any of the top eight candidates said otherwise.

What are you gonna, I mean, Mayor Strickland said that for eight years and was always basically at around 1900 to 2000 police.

What do you look at as a way to increase the number of police if that remains a priority for you?

- I think the Strickland administration had done some great things.

They increased salary, salaries went up by 14% last year.

They included hiring bonuses.

We're gonna be looking at some things we can do to enhance retention.

And so I think we continue down that road, but at the end of the day, we're gonna have to figure out how to police smarter with the officers that we have because we've been trying to get more officers for the past, you know, seven, eight years.

So we wanna start leveraging technology and doing some things that can help make our officers jobs more efficient.

- And I think we reported that something like fifyt percent of the current police force is new.

It's within years that they've been hired.

So they, to give Strickland credit, they've hired new police, but there was a tremendous amount of departures.

Last question, is it my imagination, or are there more, and this started in the fall, it felt like more police officers, more cars, more squad cars on the street?

Anecdotally, I will tell you in my travels within Memphis, it is dramatically different.

Is that something that was intentional and that you wanna continue or am I just imagining?

- Well, I definitely want to continue seeing a high presence of our officers.

We want to have high visibility.

And it's something that the chief and I have talked about often.

We're getting ready to roll some things out where we're gonna be more targeted in our interventions and where we're going to be presence wise.

And so yeah, that's intentional.

- Okay, Bill?

- In reading the accounts of what was in the latest release of documents on Tyre Nichols, the thing that struck me is that it is some of what you talked about, the training that police officers get and the difference between what a police officer learns in the academy and what they learn from other more senior officers out in the field once they are police officers, there seems to be a gap there.

So does talking about training or talking about improving training, does it get at changing the culture and whatever gap that that culture may create between training and what the decisions that are really made and how they're made?

- I think our officers do an incredible job.

They're on the streets and as we talk, as citizens and we talk about how we feel like we're in a crisis, our officers feel that too.

And so, you know, I think part of what we have to do is ensuring that we support them with training.

Not only training, but mental health, trauma.

They're seeing people at their worst in many instances, you know, unlike some of the other public safety officers like firefighters who, when they come on the scene, they're typically there to rescue someone.

They're there and people are calling for their help.

With our officers, when they pull people over and come into those situations, it's very tense and confrontational.

And so we just wanna make sure that they're supported through our training and through ongoing efforts to ensure that we are having holistic treatment for them.

- I'll come back to the legislature and I misspoke earlier, Brent Taylor, State Senator Brent Taylor, and State Senator London Lamar will be on the show March 1st.

Paul Young will be back next week to talk about other issues in public safety.

But the Chamber of Commerce and what some 170 business leaders sent a letter to the Governor, to the House leader, to the Senate Majority Leader recently raising the alarm about crime and asking for changes at the state level.

I won't go through all of them, but part of the framing of as many of the things that I talked about earlier that Senator Taylor has putting forward, there's also $50 million for a tourist zone.

There's support of juvenile blended sentencing, car forfeiture from drag racing and reckless driving and some other things.

But fundamentally what they said is, look, the crime problem in Memphis is making it difficult for us to do business in Memphis.

And the viability of Memphis as a business location is very much in question.

You and your past lives, especially with DMC work, with a lot of developers, a lot of businesses.

Do you feel that pressure and do you see that as an overreaction by the business community or a fair reaction?

- No, I think it's a fair reaction.

Certainly the reputation of having crime in a community has an impact on economic development.

That's why it's so important that we get this right.

I did have an opportunity to review the letter before it was sent and support the letter and we're gonna continue to work with our business leaders to identify how we're going to turn the tide for our community.

- Will you go up with the business community and lobby for some of these things?

I think, I don't think it's this year, they're going up soon to kind of, you know, work the legislature.

I'm sure they're making calls and up there now, but there's a big coordinated effort to get up there in a couple weeks.

- Yeah, I will be there on the trip when everyone goes, I was there earlier this week and had great meetings and discussions and what I'm doing is we're making sure that I build relationships for the sake of Memphians and making sure that we're able to bring home resources to the people in our community that need it.

- A couple weeks ago, and people can get this online, we had Cardell Orrin, Natalie McKinney on the show, two people who work in the community, work various neighborhoods programs, and had a very different perspective on the crime problem that in many ways it is probably somewhat over exaggerated.

And that if, Cardell Orrin used the example, if you're gonna put $50 million into tourism zones protection, take 30 million and do youth interventions, take 30 million and work with people and get them food and get them housing and make the kinds of interventions that prevent crime in the first place.

Does that resonate with you?

- Yeah, I think it's both and, it is not either or.

We have to do both and.

And when we talk about bringing resources, we are talking about the same thing.

I want to see resources go towards all of those early interventions that can deter people from taking this path.

What I've said in other instances is that our young people are making logical choices.

They're making choices based on the decisions that they have in front of them.

They have a pathway full of poverty and despair and a pathway to get resources.

And that pathway is oftentimes not one that we would agree with, but it's logical to a young person who sees no other path.

And so I think it's important for us to invest in ways to show them that there's a different route to get to those resources that they want.

But we also have some individuals that are terrorizing our communities that we gotta get off the streets.

So it's not an either or thing, it's a both and.

- We'll have some of the folks behind, or not behind, but who signed the letter and who led the effort to do that and who will be up, I think, or have already been up at the legislature lobbying for this.

That's, I think in about three or four weeks.

One criticism of that letter from the business community was that even if you agree, and I'm not, I'm not gonna put this on Cardell Orrin and Natalie McKinney 'cause I don't wanna put words in their mouth, but I've heard from other people I agree with much or most of what they laid out, but it felt like there should be another page around interventions around youth.

Is that a conversation you've had with business leaders that it is not just the thing on their list, it's also these other issues?

- Yeah, I mean, I say it in every instance, the instance that I get an opportunity to speak.

Because I feel, I firmly believe that that has to be our pathway.

- Okay, we're out of time, but again, we'll have a whole other half an hour with Mayor Paul Young to talk about other issues.

There are many, many other pressing issues in Memphis.

That'll air next week on WKNO at seven.

If you missed any of the episode today, you can go to WKNO.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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