- (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.

- Memphis Police Chief, CJ Davis, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I am joining tonight by Chief of Police, CJ Davis.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you, thank you for having me.

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

Thanks for being here.

You're a little over a year into the job.

I thought it was two years, but I think that's my sense of COVID time.

We'll talk about as much as we can today.

We probably won't get to everything 'cause there's a lot going on with the police, with crime, with where we are with the crime rate and so on.

I wanted to talk about something that so many people have talked about over the years we've been doing this show.

From politicians to your predecessor, to advocates and critics of criminal justice, criminal justice performance, which is the number of police.

And we're right at, we talked a little before the show, right under 2,000.

- That's correct.

- As long as I can remember, everyone has talked about getting back to something like 24 to 2,500 police.

- Yes.

- If you got magically another 200 police in the next month, that's not gonna happen.

We'll talk about all the efforts you're going through, but what would you do with those extra 200 police?

- You know, I think my main focus would be to ensure that we have more proactive and preventive types of programs in the Memphis Police Department.

I think many times in law enforcement, we are in response mode and we don't put enough time into how do we educate our community members to be safer in the manner in which they operate every day in their homes and just the environment, what type of environment we have, and utilizing officers to be a soft presence in areas to help prevent crime.

Also, I have to admit, the city of Memphis has some notorious road rage going on.

A lot of erratic driving, reckless driving, and just being a citizen on the streets every day.

I think our citizens want safer streets, not just on our interstates, but also on our major thoroughfares throughout the city.

And I would like to see more traffic enforcement, more ways to calm traffic, more officers to be a presence and not necessarily enforcement.

But sometimes when you see an officer in a place, you have a tendency to do the right thing.

- If you don't get, and again, we'll talk about the impediments to hiring, but as long as we've been doing this show and since the police force really saw its big decrease, people have struggled to, we've been around 1980.

- Yes.

- We've gone a little over 2,000.

- Yes.

- A little bit under.

If you don't get over 2,000, if you don't get to 2,100 in the next year, - Yes.

- What do you do?

- Well, I think we do more of what we're doing now and we don't have what we need right now.

So, what we have to do is reallocate manpower, identify where we can move officers in places where we need the most.

We can't have a cookie cutter approach to staffing.

North Main Station, which is our downtown area, they may need more officers than some of our other stations.

And I think sometimes we have a tendency to ration out our officers, you get 100, you get 100, you get 100, when we really need to reallocate and move 10, 20 officers from a particular neighborhood, put 'em on the interstate, or put them in the downtown space where we're having more problems.

So, the demand typically dictates our deployment.

- Yeah.

- And right now the demand is in areas where we have highly populated, visitation.

As you know, we moved some officers downtown, we needed them downtown.

We have a high population of visitation in our downtown space and we need to make sure that our visitors are safe.

So, to answer that basically is that we'll do more of how do we reallocate and continue to assess what the needs are for the city.

- Bill?

- So Chief, now we have bonuses.

We have incentives for not only bringing new police officers here, but retaining those police officers.

There is no residency requirement at all.

How have these things helped in filling the ranks and getting qualified police officers to Memphis?

- So, it's still relatively early.

Some of those new incentives just begun.

But, when I got here last year, one of the incentives was to provide a signing bonus for new officers.

And also, we have a $5,000 referral bonus for our officers.

So, we've seen more engagement in our officers participating in the recruitment process.

As a matter of fact, last week, we gave one officer five checks, he brought five people on board.

So, we're using our officers as a force multiplier, if you will.

And they are engaged and involved in the recruiting process.

We graduated a class of 73 and just to have 73 officers go out on the street is a big deal out of one class.

Many of the other cities around the country are struggling and we're struggling too, but we've had some great success because of the administration's incentives that they've sort of attacked it from different angles.

The residency.

Now our officers can live relatively close to the city, but not be confined to living in the city.

And that's an incentive for someone who already lives across the bridge, or someone who lives in Southaven to say, "You know what?

"I can join the Memphis Police Department and not have to sell my house."

So, these types of incentives I believe will help and a year from now we'll be able to have some real empirical data to demonstrate what works and what doesn't work for us.

- Right?

You also, I think from the minute you walked in the door, you took a look at the different standards for hiring.

What does the state require?

What's a hard and faster rule there?

- That's right.

- But what are some other things on which you have some wiggle room and that really seemed to go more toward recruiting people who live here.

- That's right.

- Live within the city too.

Has that worked?

- That absolutely has worked.

I'm glad you brought that up because I'm really pleased to see that some of the changes that we made in our hiring process, it didn't lower the caliber of officer that we have, but at the same time, it opened the door for somebody, say for instance, someone who could not meet the physical requirements going into the academy.

The requirements are important for the officer to be able to achieve that as they go out on the street.

So, why would we eliminate a person going in the academy by making them run a mile and a half in 15, 16, when we can get them in shape through the time that they're in the academy and graduate a class of a larger group of people who meet those minimum requirements?

Before we would send people walking and they would go and join another agency.

Now, I can have 25 people who may not have been able to meet those requirements.

In this last class, that was the case.

And we ended up graduating those folks because we got 'em in shape and we helped them to meet those requirements.

So, that's just an example.

- There were also some cultural things.

- Yes, yes.

- Hair, hairstyles.

Tattoos.

- Tattoos were a big thing.

Where just on site before that would've been, you're out.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

I can give you an example.

I had a young lady, I won't call her name, but her relative was a firefighter and she always wanted to be a police officer and she had tattoo on her hand and the tattoo was a tattoo of a rose, something relatively harmless, but because of a strict tattoo policy, she had been denied an opportunity to come onto the department.

So, what we did is we looked at how do we examine tattoos and take a look at what's offensive, what's not offensive, and provide what we call a tattoo waiver.

We put together a committee of officers and we gave them the responsibility.

You're going to evaluate your peers to determine whether or not that tattoo is something that will be offensive to a citizen or not.

And if it is, then they will continue to wear a sleeve on their arms.

If it isn't, then they can wear their tattoos.

And it's sort of, you can't find too many officers nowadays that don't have tattoos.

And so, that has been fully implemented.

Officers are excited.

You're gonna see 'em wearing their tattoos.

And some of 'em didn't pass that waiver and they're having to continue to wear their sleeves.

- Mm-hmm.

- Yeah.

- Sorry, another small, but I think important thing, is that you're moving towards allowing police officers to take their patrol cars home.

- Yes.

- What is this?

It sounds like a small thing, but it's been- - Yes.

- It's a big thing.

- Yes, it is a big thing.

It's a big thing in two ways, Eric, and it's a big thing for community members to see a patrol car in their community and to see more movement of marked vehicles in a neighborhood.

And it's also a big thing for an officer to be able to have that vehicle as an incentive for the work that they do every day and be able to commute back and forth.

What's helping, and I knew this would potentially happen because of my previous work.

We had a take home car program.

We found in the first year of our take home car program that the maintenance on vehicles, the cost went down 40% on our fleet.

That's because that officer is taking more responsibility for his car and he's keeping it clean.

He's keeping it maintained.

And we saved in that regard as well.

- To what extent, over the last years, you know, Black Lives Matter protests and George Floyd, a kind of heightened focus on abuse by polices.

And I wanna be the first to say, I don't think the media's trying to say that all cops are like that.

Maybe some media is, certainly were not, but there have been abuses and a history of distrust, particularly with black and brown communities.

- Yes.

- That has been exposed.

Some say, well, that has gone too far and it's really driven people to not want to be a police officer or to get out the business, the life of a police officer.

How much, I mean, you've been a police officer for 30-something years now?

- 35 years.

- Thirty-five years.

How much has this heightened awareness of this small number of really bad incidents hurt retention and recruitment?

- Well, you know what we see on the national stage, you know, people believe the media, they believe what they see.

And sometimes the hind story or what's between the lines doesn't get put out there.

And right now there is a narrative where there is tension between the community and police.

I think it's incumbent upon police leadership to face those issues head on and really have uncomfortable conversations with our community members about what my philosophy is as, not just as a police chief, but as an African American police chief who come from the community, raised in African American community.

And I understand.

Sometimes when I get up in the morning, my mouth drops open just like a regular citizen about what I see around the country.

But my responsibility for the Memphis Police Department is to make sure that our officers understand that there are consequences for us crossing the line and not following policy and procedure.

But at the same time, we also have to understand that the work that we encounter every day, sometimes is very physical, our officers are trained and are supposed to use the training that they have been provided to mitigate situations in a way that is as safe as possible for that citizen, and is as safe as possible for our officers as well.

Some of that has to do with how we train our officers, how we train them to deescalate.

Right now we have crisis intervention training for certain groups of officers.

I found it very beneficial that every officer on a police department should be crisis intervention trained 'cause you can utilize that training and that skillset in a myriad of different ways, not just when you have a domestic violence situation or a mental health situation.

When a person is on a bridge about to jump.

You may not have a crisis intervention trained officer there to help mitigate that.

You don't have time to call somebody.

You need to start talking and try to save that person right then.

So, we plan to implement crisis intervention training in all of our officers on the department.

- Bill?

- Is distrust a barrier in getting community cooperation in actually solving crimes?

Is the distrust that pervasive in our city at this point?

- You know, I don't feel, and I'm just gonna talk about how I feel about the relationship between the Memphis Police Department and the community.

I do know that the Memphis Police Department has worked over the years to have a presence in the community that is beyond enforcement.

We have all kinds of programs, we've even expanded some of our programs, our community engagement unit, to have more proactive and positive relationships in the community, getting to know community members so that when an incident does occur, there is some level of trust that we're there to do the right thing, that we care about the community.

So, it's important for our officers to help build those relationships as well.

You know, getting out of the cars, communicating with community members at every opportunity that they get.

We're bringing back retired officers.

I don't know if you all were aware of that, but we're bringing back some of our retired officers who used to work in community engagement capacities and having them to be out doing some of the light lifting and crime prevention kind of work, dropping in on businesses and all of that.

- The other side of that then is concerns about over policing.

- Yes.

- Which, from what you said, I think goes to why the police officers are there.

Are they just pulling up because someone called or are they talking to people on a basis, in a context that is something other than that?

- Absolutely, and it's important for us to find that balance.

It shouldn't be just that I go into this particular apartment complex because I'm responding to a call.

It's okay to drive through the complex, stop, and our officers do this on a regular basis.

Sometimes they stop and they may play a little basketball, you know, with a community member or whatever, their group of kids.

And that kind of relationship and that type of interaction I think is important to the community.

My interaction with the community is important because I think it's important that they see that I'm a part of the community.

I want to get to know my community members.

So, you see me out on the weekends on a regular basis.

And if I lead in that way, I think the rest of the department will understand that the philosophy of our department has to be that the police are the community and the community are the police.

- Yeah, because on the question of balance, I think it's also a balance for civilians, if you will, because a civilian can be concerned about issues of overpolicing and how police do their jobs, but also want this major crime problem- - That's right.

- That we have, want something done about it and done about it quickly too.

- Absolutely.

- That's not an easy balance.

- It's not.

And it requires us to communicate on a regular basis about the various operations and enforcement that we're planning.

So, when community members see us, they can say, oh, they said that were gonna be doing, you know, a slowdown Memphis detail so that it doesn't appear that we're overpolicing our community.

We're responding to a need.

We're responding to a public safety request.

And I think not communicating, it sends the wrong perception sometimes that we might be overpolicing in a particular neighborhood.

- One of the things I hear, we report on, but just anecdotally, is the frustration people feel with repeat offenders.

- Yes.

- And I will not ask you to talk about any specific case 'cause that puts you in place you don't wanna be, but it happens.

And, you know, somebody who is arrested for a carjacking, arrested for a murder, they're arrested and it comes out that they have this long history of escalating crimes.

Some of them very, very severe.

- Absolutely.

- You as a police officer and as a police department, you can arrest, you can try to prevent, you can take someone to jail, you can't keep them in jail.

- That right.

- And does that, it upsets and angers citizens, obviously family members who are the victims of crimes when it's a repeat offender.

Does it demoralize police?

And does it impact their decision making in terms of do I bother even arresting this person 'cause they're gonna be out in a day, a week, a month?

- Oh, oh absolutely, it does.

It's frustrating for me because our job is really to look after the community and to stand on the side of victims and prevent crime as much as possible.

And when we see individuals who have been in and out for the exact same crime over and over again, especially violent crimes, you know, misdemeanors and first-time offenders, we have programs for that.

We wanna see people get second chances, but individuals who have demonstrated over and over again who they are and what they are willing to do, in my mind I'm thinking, who's next?

Who's gonna be that victim?

Is it gonna be somebody that survives the attack or the carjacking?

Or is it gonna be somebody that their lives is ended?

Is it gonna be another homicide?

Because this is a person that probably should have been incarcerated.

It's frustrating for myself, it's frustrating for our officers because they're the ones that do the heavy lifting.

They're the ones that build those cases.

They're the ones that present the case over and over again.

And they see that person back out on the street committing the same level of criminal activity.

And it's a slap in the face to them and they want something done about it.

We've been in conversations.

Myself and the mayor has gone from precinct to precinct.

We're actually doing rounds right now, talking to our officers about the state of the city, how important it is for them to be here.

- How much has that changed?

We have a new DA who has a very different philosophy than DA Weirich.

We have a new juvenile court judge who has a very different philosophy than Judge Dan Michael.

Are police nervous that we're gonna see more, right or wrong, I mean, I'm not, are they nervous about the new key law enforcement elected officials?

- Well, police are nervous all the time.

[panel laughing] That's just the nature of police.

I'm constantly trying to talk 'em off the ledge, that everything is gonna be okay.

And what I have tried to convey to our officers is that we have a job to do and we will continue to do the job that we've been paid to do, that the taxpayers expect, that our community members and business members expect, regardless of who is in the DA's office.

It's still early on.

I haven't had an opportunity to talk to our new DA, but I'm gonna remain optimistic.

I'm an optimistic person in general and I'm gonna remain optimistic and try to support as much as I can what the new DA and what that office is gonna require of us to present cases that can be prosecuted.

- Okay, five minutes, Bill.

- Is that going to include recommendations on bail?

Because that looks like it's shaping up to be an early test of how this is going to go.

- So, I think as we have those communications and those talks, I'm sure that's gonna be a subject matter that comes up.

Who controls bail is normally our judicial commissioners, I believe.

And we've had conversations about, you know, and with the DAs and ADAs, to say that this is a person that we've arrested twice in the last three weeks and he continues to commit serious, egregious crimes.

This person needs to remain incarcerated so that they don't go out and commit another crime.

And we're hoping that that kind of communication influences the decisions about bail.

- And what do you say when they say, "Okay, we're going to release that person, "but there's gonna be a mental health counseling aspect "to it and there's gonna be a different kind of supervision than being in the jail"?

Does that remedy, or does that ease your concern about what they're going to do immediately after their release?

- Actually, I think we have to remain optimistic and open to all kinds of interventions.

If a person is determined, if it's determined that that person needs some type of mental health support, or some type of oversight, or there is a new program where there is oversight for that individual, we will support anything that is tried until it fails, you know?

And naturally, the police department, what we are concerned about more than anything is the increase in the number of calls we get.

And the 20% of the people who are committing 80% of the crimes over and over again.

And even the officers, they'd love to have a break, but it's a daily grind.

- You mentioned speeding at the top.

- Yes.

- And we have people driving really fast on the roads, on the highways, and this is even separate from drag racing, it's just very fast.

- Yes.

- There's an argument, it's almost like a new version of broken windows, that the idea that people are driving so fast without getting pulled over, without seeing a lot of police on the highways with radar guns, that it creates a kind of environment.

"Well, not only can I drive fast, "I can kind of take that from a car.

The police aren't here."

And broken windows was this idea that if you didn't address people who did minor, minor crimes - That's right.

- They could start to do more and people just begin to feel a lawlessness.

- That's right.

- It is very odd that you can be driving on the highway at 75 miles an hour and someone will just blow past you.

- That's right.

- And there's no police in sight.

And a version of that can happen on Poplar.

- Yes.

- What can be done?

- So, that's part of some of the changes that we made in the police department.

We've separated our traffic enforcement operation from our tactical operation.

We had one person that was over there.

Now we have a colonel that does nothing but focus on traffic in the city.

We plan to heighten our presence along the corridors of the city as we add new officers to our traffic enforcement.

And you're absolutely right.

It's like the broken windows theory.

If we aren't doing regular traffic, then it gives the impression that we're not going to do any traffic.

So, the conversations that we're having with our commanders, and we've already seen an increase in traffic enforcement on city streets for just regular, I'm not talking about the Chargers, the Challengers, the Camaros, I'm talking about regular folks in Volkswagens that are ripping our streets to pieces, but it's given the impression that you can do whatever you want in the city of Memphis.

And I've told our officers that we're changing that narrative.

You will not be able to just speed up and down the streets because we lead in fatalities in the state.

Busy city, reckless driving, we lead in fat fatalities.

We wanna change that.

We're also working with Tennessee Highway Patrol.

We've started seeing some presence.

- The governor had promised something like 16 new, where are we in terms of getting more presence from highway patrol?

- So, last week was the first time I actually saw some real notable kind of activity.

And we were excited to see that.

As a matter of fact, I sent a tweet out thanking the Tennessee Highway Patrol for their presence on just doing regular traffic and not responding in accidents.

We're doing much better.

- Okay, I cut you off.

I didn't give enough time.

We'll hope to have you back sooner or again anytime.

Appreciate you being here.

- Thank you.

- Bill, thank you.

Thank you for joining us.

Next week we've got Dr. Michelle Taylor, Shelby County Health Department Director.

Missed any of the show today, go to wkno.org, go to YouTube.

You can also get the full podcast of the show with a little bit more questions for the police chief online.

Thanks so much.

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