- (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 police perspective on public safety and criminal justice tonight on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by two police officers and two members of the police union leadership here in Memphis.

They are Matt Cunningham, President of MPA, Memphis Police Association.

Thank you for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- And John Covington is Vice President of the Memphis Police Association.

Thank you for being here again.

- Thank you, Eric.

Pleasure.

- Also here is Julia Baker who covers criminal justice and public safety for us at the Daily Memphian.

Let me start with, start, one, by noting that we taped this a week ago, so just so people know, and if there's things we don't talk about, it's 'cause of my schedule.

We had to tape this early, and I appreciate you both being here.

But let's talk about, we'll get into lots of details and things going on, but I wonder for, and I'll start with you, Matt, what in your mind, is missing for the conversation?

A conversation that dominates in Memphis and in a lot of cities in the country, but in Memphis.

What's missing from the conversation about public safety, about criminal justice that you think there needs to be more of?

- So, I think that the overall view of how to fight crime in Memphis needs to be discussed a little bit more.

Obviously, our purview is operations of the police department and how our role is in that overall crime fighting strategy.

I think with the new administration in the city and the new administration in the police department, they're doing the best they can to try to address those issues.

I just think it's gonna take time to watch that turn around.

For us, it's a recruitment and retention problem.

[clears throat] Excuse me.

We are grossly understaffed right now.

We've had a problem with officers, too many officers being gone from the department.

We have about 1,850 officers on the department today, and we needed a complement of about 2,500.

So, we've been barely breaking even with attrition over the last several years.

And we need to do more to recruit and retain officers on this job.

- How much of that are you as police association, police union doing, how much is the city and the department itself, or is it, do you try to work together on that?

- So, yeah, it's a collaborative effort with us.

We approached the city and the administration with our ideas of what we think we need to do to recruit and retain.

A large portion of that has been paying benefits, especially since 2016.

The city cut pay and benefits in that year.

Through the 2019 Public Safety Referendum, we were able to restore some of those.

Now, it's a matter of trying to keep us the best paid and the highest benefits of the regional departments, because our workload is so much heavier than neighboring agencies.

It's gonna take a very good package to draw officers to come work here.

- Again, to you, John, what do you feel like there's missing from the conversation or flip it around, what is there too much of in the conversation about crime and criminal justice?

- Well, piggyback off what Matt said, it's a question of understanding there's no quick fixes.

Back in 2011, we had the highest paid, most officers, and the lowest crime that ever recorded.

I think they started recording back in the early 2000s.

And so, this time, there's an understanding that we get, and there's a lot of people who don't wanna be police right now, but there is one group that does wanna be police and that is the police.

And so, we have to focus, for a lack of a better word, enticing officers, I think, away from some other regional departments.

That used to happen back in the day, and then they started taking them from us.

And so, you talked about what our role is in this.

Of course, we in the fire association worked so hard to get the referendum passed, because we lost 500 officers when cuts were made to pensions and benefits.

And so, we got that done under Jim Strickland.

We worked together and became number one here regionally in the pay for the first time in years, we had been at the very bottom.

So, right now, we're in the midst of negotiations with the city and our focus is it's not enough to be number one.

You've gotta be number one by a lot, because quite frankly, it's more dangerous.

It's more busy here.

And if we want to attract these officers from other departments, that's the way we're gonna do it.

And there needs to be a focus on that.

- Well, before I go to Julia, a quick question that's probably a long answer and I think I know some of the answers, but I wanna hear it from you.

You mentioned that there are a lot of people who don't wanna be police right now.

- Yes.

- Why?

What do you hear?

- Well, there's a lot of pressure as far as the police was once held up on a pedestal.

Of course that's kind of changed.

And a lot of police have to make so many split second decisions out there.

And it's so easy to come in later and kinda Monday morning quarterback and they're expected to be so many things, to now be a mentor, be a sociologist, be a psychiatrist, be a caregiver, be law enforcement.

So, you've got all these things to do.

You've got a lot of pressure.

You're gonna be scrutinized in everything you do.

And so, it's just at a time when people can go into other things, they seem to be choosing those paths.

So, it's a real struggle.

- Julia.

- So, you all recently, put out a statement questioning the bond that was set for Geronimo Kee.

He is accused of shooting at an officer.

And I know in the past you all have written a letter to DA Steve Mulroy, kind of firing at him for maybe not prosecuting defendants accused of shooting officers enough.

And I know y'all mentioned that y'all wanted to talk with him.

Has that happened?

And if so, how did it go?

- So, our attorney sat down and met with Steve Mulroy and Paul Hagerman, his deputy.

The conversation was very fruitful.

We expressed that I think the unseen ramifications of Mulroy's, his policy to possibly go a little bit lenient on perpetrators of crime against police officers, such as it was quick to dismiss resisting official detention charge, stuff like that.

And I don't think he was aware of the potential ramifications to police on the back end of that decision, where it could leave officers open to liability in a civil realm, something like that.

He admitted to that.

He said, "We weren't thinking of that."

And he agreed to provide more supervision over cases that involve police officers as victims.

He also agreed to additional training for both himself and Lorna McClusky, who's the head of his justice review unit.

[clears throat] And they went and took some force science training in Nashville, which I believe opened their eyes quite a bit to the decision-making process that we go through in split second critical incident situations.

And why we do some of the things we do as police officers.

And so, as a result of those things, we've seen some new directions that Mulroy's office has taken.

And I think he's going in the right direction.

- Got it.

Piggyback, I will say this.

Our biggest roll down at the MPA is to be the voice of officers and to bring that voice to the table with the major decisions.

And I'll tell you right now and feeling of many citizens and many officers is there's a lack of accountability in the criminal justice system.

They're out there working their tails off.

And in many cases, arresting a lot of the same people over and over, hearing from citizens, hey, this thing that's going on down the street, why are they out of jail, and so forth.

But we have had some fruitful conversations with DA Mulroy and we appreciate the fact that he's willing to have those conversations, but in a general sense, there is a feeling we're understaffed and working hard out there, but it seems like it's a small group, they're perpetuating a lot of the crime and they're just not being held accountable.

- And we're still seeing, even though, like I said, the DA's Office is going in the right direction, we're still seeing quite a bit of a revolving door at the jail at 201 Poplar.

So, there's a long way to go.

But we were happy that he sat down and met with us and we look forward to continuing to work with him.

- So, y'all had a win this week, I think it was this week, with an arbitration where you filed a complaint against the police department for, they started a new rank, a second lieutenant rank.

Tell me how [guest coughs] this developed and why you all were opposed to the second lieutenant rank.

- Go ahead.

[chuckles] - Well, I was gonna say that in our MOU that there's a process when there's a disagreement on language between the city and us, and that process is, if we can't work something out, it goes to federal binding arbitration.

And so, the issue was we had come to them, the department a couple years ago about a new rank.

The idea from our point of view was to be able to create a rank, a field sergeant, this idea to keep boots on the street, but add promotional opportunities for people as a recruitment and retention aspect.

And so, we just about had that worked out.

Talks kind of... Well, Matt, I can let you get into the details-- - It kind of, to a little background.

On the Memphis Police Department, it's unique than other departments around the country where sergeants on the Memphis Police Department are not frontline supervisors, their investigators on the job.

So, they work in the investigative bureaus for the large part and they investigate the crimes that our uniform patrol takes report on.

So, what we're trying to do is create a rank where we can put sergeants in the field, let them stay in patrol, supplement the shortages we're having in uniform patrol and keep boots on the ground.

So, to catch back up to where John left off, at the spring of last year, talks broke down and the department decided to go its own direction with the new second lieutenant rank, which was a supervisory rank, which they lowered the eligibility requirements to become a second lieutenant.

So, the implementation of a new promotional process without a mutual agreement and the lack of a two years in grade as a sergeant were both MOU violations to become the lieutenant rank, the second lieutenant rank.

- And just real quick, we think for supervisor, it's important to have that experience and to have that investigative experience to be an effective supervisor, because, and this is nothing against anybody with five years on, but I think you need a little bit more time and grade to if you're gonna be an effective supervisor out there.

- Well, and that gets to, I think a question people have, and I hear from people, because of the attrition and so many people leaving after the changes in benefits and so on.

And then, the hiring isn't something, you did this story, I think, Julia, over 50% of the entire force is less than five years experience, less.

It was a very relatively inexperienced.

- Yes.

- That's been the hiring is bringing in new people, - Right.

- As old people, older people hit a retirement age or have other opportunities or whatever.

So, how do you manage that as a force?

You wanna give opportunities to people, to young people to less experienced people coming - Sure.

- You both were at one point, didn't have any experience.

That's just the nature of it.

- Sure.

- How do you balance that with everyone, with all these new people coming in?

- So, it's a matter of training and it's a matter of opportunity.

We, as the union, we met with Jim Strickland in 2016.

We had a backlog of lack of promotions in the decade prior to that.

We were able to sign an agreement where we normalized, we scheduled two-year promotions where we would have a promotional process every two years.

That went on from 2016 through 2022 without a hitch.

And we were seeing those seniority levels come down very far, very dramatically for officers with lower seniority, younger officers that were being able to promote to higher ranks.

So, it was working, we were able to see these younger officers have the advancement opportunities that they're craving.

It just needed to continue.

Now, the department said that they had a need to put these new lieutenants, these frontline supervisors, these second lieutenants in immediately.

And they wanted to go forward without the mutual agreement and without abiding by the MOU.

So, our dispute resolution mechanism as a result of the strike from 1978 is the grievance process.

So, we filed our grievance, it went to a federal arbitrator and he ruled in our favor that the city had violated the MOU with the promotional process.

So, his order was to put everything back prior to the test and go back to the table to try to continue to negotiate the new rank, which we're more than happy to do.

We had Mayor Young stood in front of 400 officers in January and he said that he was going to abide by the arbitrator's ruling.

We fully expect he's gonna do that.

We're just looking forward to getting back to the table and try to fix it.

- How does that play out for the people listening who maybe get pulled over for a speeding ticket, who call because there's an alarm went off, who had something worse happen.

The general public who interacts with the police at a time of immense change in the staff and all these kinds of rules and regulations.

What does that mean to them?

I don't mean that in a callous way, but you know what I'm saying.

How does that play out good and bad for them?

- Well, I would say this.

In a situation, you want, and I think it's become clear, especially as you talk about, we have this fourth, we don't have a middle class anymore.

We have these older group of officers, a newer group of officers and we have this gulf in the middle.

And with those newer officers, you do want supervision, but you need to have that make sure you have that experienced element out there with them.

We saw a situation, the tragic events that happened with Tyre Nichols.

I think that the person with only had five years on the most experience on that scene.

And you just generally, I think it's important to have, especially with the younger cohort, to make sure you have people that are really, and the system that we have set up, I think channels that correctly.

And then, this idea of when we get back to the table, and I think there's a few tweaks and we can all get to where we want to be, but make sure that we're covering all of our bases.

- Bring in Julia.

- Obviously, there are dangers to the job and part of that is probably why there's a - Sure.

- Relaxed chase policy where police only chase if there's a dangerous or violent crime going on.

What is the update on the chase policy?

Do you know if the police department has changed it?

Are there more chases going on?

- Are you talking about in terms of Brent Taylor and what he's worked on, or just generally about it?

- Just generally.

- The chase policy now, it's one of those things, it's easy I guess to have an opinion on it.

But when you really get into the nuanced aspects of it, chasing can be a very dangerous thing.

But ultimately, my position is the criminals really create the liability by running.

But we have to take that balance between getting the bad guy and making sure we're keeping the public safe as well.

And so, it's a complicated issue.

- It's really complicated and it's very dangerous.

And so, our policy has not changed as of today.

Maybe by the time this airs, it will, because there is state level legislation going on that could affect it.

But in the meantime, our policy is to only chase violent felons where we have probable cause to believe a violent felony occurred.

Now, state law also mandates that we exercise due care during those chases, even when they're authorized.

And so, it's a very, very fine line to walk.

Police chases very rarely go slow.

They very rarely stay within the speed limit.

They very rarely observe stop signs and red lights.

The criminals aren't trying to do that.

And so, we have to constantly weigh in that situation, is the risk worth the reward?

How dangerous is this criminal?

How crucial is it that he come off the street right now versus breaking off the chase and getting him another day?

- And you brought up why people may not wanna go into the topic.

Imagine you're at your job, it's going smoothly and suddenly you're involved in a chase that you're having to make these split second decisions that have huge ramifications, and that's extremely, extremely stressful.

- Yeah.

So, back before the holidays, Senator Taylor, you were at a press conference that he had where he announced some of his initiatives coming into the legislative session.

You just referenced one of those, the House and Senate just passed a ban on pretextual stop bans, as well as some bail laws.

Go into that and how do you feel about how that's progressing?

- Well, I think that's moving forward on the, I would not call it pretextual, I would call it upholding laws here locally.

Because when you get into things about taillights or bumpers, that's not just about pulling people over for investigative purposes.

It's a safety issue, because the majority of people I pulled over for a taillight did not know I've been pulled over for taillights.

There's a reason we have those things.

You remember when we used to have inspections and we all hated it, at least I did.

Maybe I shouldn't speak for everybody.

- I agree.

- You agree with that?

So, we had those and they went away and I was one of the person, yeah, great, this is gone, but what are the consequences?

We've seen some things out there on the road that maybe shouldn't be or not, and that's a danger.

If a bumper falls off or headlights or taillights.

So, these are important things that serve it as a public safety officer, you need to be able to address those things.

So, when you have an ordinance from the city level and then state law, it creates some confusion.

And I talked about officers have to make so many decisions, we want things to be as clear as possible for them.

- But you meant, you brought up the tragedy over a year ago now of Tyre Nichols.

People say that was part of the whole issue there was they pulled him over for one thing and everything went horribly, horribly wrong.

And I'm not saying that you all are defending what went wrong there, but that's the other side of it.

That's the other side of stops for small things that go haywire.

- That's one, yeah, that's the perception.

Now, in the Tyre Nichols case, the initial traffic stop that they were stopping Tyre for was not one of the ones that would've fallen under the pretextual ban.

So, the way we look at it is the police have a number of tools in their tool belt to use.

And when you have crime in the city of Memphis, as bad as crime is now, you don't wanna limit the amount of tools in their belt that they can use to try to stop the crime.

And piggybacking off what John said is that, it's also, we want to make sure that the vehicles on the road are safe and they're well lit.

They have bumpers that if you are involved in a crash, no one's injured or killed.

So, in addition to the public safety aspect, there's just, you don't wanna limit the number of tools or the opportunities that officers have to try to maintain safety in the city.

- About seven minutes left.

So, we'll try to run through some things we could do two whole shows on.

And again, I want, for those who maybe joined late, I want to say we taped this a week ago, the legislature's in session, there's a lot going on, but because of my schedule, we taped this early.

So, just contextual for that.

What else would you like to see?

And either of you can speak on changes that are being proposed or moving through the state legislature.

Specifically, we talked about the DA, but also bail reform.

Huge, huge.

And I don't know how much you guys step into that.

- Well, we were at the press conference where Speaker Sexton announced his bail reform legislation.

I think it's a good idea right now.

State law limits denial of bail to only someone that's accused of a capital crime.

I think that list should be expanded to a number of violent felonies, including attempted homicide or homicide that may be second degree, aggravated assault, aggravated rape.

There's a list of violent felonies that, in my opinion, a police officer's opinion, that the person should not be granted bail for when they're committing a crime of that nature.

I'm not saying restrict bail for all arrestees, but for the violent criminals, absolutely.

- What about guns?

At the time that you all have been police officers, Mike Rallings, former police director was on, he has since, not the police director, but talked about the changes in the gun laws and the difficult, I mean, back when there was permited carry where there were more restrictions on guns, whatever you think the reality was from I think, a police point of view, you could go to someone and say, hey, you can't have that gun here.

- You're right- - Now, your officers can't say that so clearly.

So, do you expect anything from the Tennessee legislature that changes the way gun laws are in the state?

- Well- - Or in what would you like to see?

- What I would like to see and I'm pro of being able to have these rights to have firearms and so forth, but Memphis is a little bit different from the rest of the state.

And I think we have to take that into account.

And I think it's pretty clear once you saw a loosening of these laws and you saw more guns being stolen out of vehicles, you just seen more guns.

And now, somebody could be walking down the street with a weapon and before we could stop and check them, because it's not that we're trying to hassle or violate, we're just trying to make sure that everything in this day and age, but we can no longer do that.

And I would love to see some more flexibility, take some of the charged politics out of it and we're dealing with the reality here.

Guns are a massive problem here, so.

- Yeah.

Julia, a few minutes left.

- We mentioned earlier the turmoil with Tyre Nichols and we did a story recently where MPD Chief Davis, she's the highest paid city employee.

She's currently an interim police chief after the City Council recommended to not reappoint her.

I know you don't have a crystal ball, but what could you potentially see going forward?

- That goes down, I would not make money, much money predicting Council decisions or mayoral decisions.

And luckily, that is completely - Out of our purview.

- Out of our realm.

Whomever is in that office, we are pulling for and supporting in the sense we want to see good programming, good policies, and get this crime down, because we're all dealing with it.

And so, as I say, we have no say in that and we'll just step back and let the elected officials handle those things.

- And Mayor Young's indicated to me that he plans on keeping Chief Davis as an interim until he finds a replacement if she's not reconfirmed.

So, we're gonna have to work with her regardless.

So, it's my goal, our goal for the MPA to do that as long as she's here.

Whether it's a short amount of time or if she's here for his entire term.

- Sure.

- Oh, go ahead, Julia.

- One thing I wanted to ask, y'all both were elected to your new positions late last year.

You're now the president, you're now the vice president.

You were the vice president before and you were the chief steward.

What are some goals that you have going forward?

- Well, I think the biggest goal immediately is that we're in contract negotiations now for wages.

So, we'd like to see a wage increase.

We have plans to increase retirement benefits down the road.

We're wanting to try to work on some benefits for retirees.

Retirees over the last nine years have only had a one percent raise in nine years.

And so, we would encourage that.

Those are some of the lofty goals that we have right now that we know they're gonna take years.

They're not quick fixes.

What about for you?

- Well, and we also, we've talked about this younger cohort of officers.

One thing we wanna focus in on is connecting with them.

And two, I've had this dream and Matt will probably laugh, we bought a trailer, [chuckles] we're gonna go out to a precinct the month, start cooking for these folks at six in the morning and be there past midnight.

Just out there more talking to a lot of these young officers, hearing their thoughts, say we wanna be your representative, we wanna be your voice and we want to find out the thing, 'cause this is a newer generation.

What are the things that are important to you?

What do you wanna focus on?

So, that's a big goal as well.

- People have talked to, and this might seem trite compared to many of the things we've talked about tonight, but I've heard folks, I don't know with the two of you, but others talk about the importance with younger recruitment, recruitment of younger officers.

- Yes.

- Things like visible tattoos, things like longer hair, things like taking their car home, so you're not driving to work, getting your car, then going out on patrol.

Some of those things, I think maybe you all would say add up to big, big differences in terms of hiring and recruitment and the appeal of the job.

- Absolutely.

In fact, it was working with Chief Davis, so we brought the thing, and so a new tattoo policy has taken place, and so it has to be - It's covered.

- Signed.

Well, no, right now, it can be exposed, but it has to be signed off on.

You have to make sure that it's appropriate and what is the Supreme Court thing on pornography.

I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.

So, if it's a problem, we kinda know it when we see it.

And so, but that has been an expansion, the take home car program.

That chief- - And is that expanding as well?

- Yes, yes.

- Yes, yes.

And so, you're straight on point.

And a lot of these new officers are interested in technology and things, so that's we're all trying to find out what are their goals, how do they think in terms of career.

And because our job is to help them achieve those goals.

- All right.

I think we're out of time.

Appreciate very much what you do.

Appreciate you guys being here to talk.

We always love to get the police perspective on.

We've had a whole lot of folks over the last few months, really the last year, but certainly over the last few months.

Brent, we mentioned Brent Taylor, London Lamar, folks with lots of different perspectives on crime.

And more coming on that in the coming weeks and months.

But that is all the time we have tonight.

If you missed any of the show, you can go to wkno.org, you can go to YouTube, or you can download the full podcast of the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much.

We'll see you next week.

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