- (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.

- Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo, State Senator Brent Taylor, 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 Mayor Mike Palazzolo from Germantown.

- Good to be here.

- Thanks for being here.

Absolutely, and State Senator Brent Taylor, thanks for being here again.

- Thank you.

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

We'll talk quite a bit about crime and public safety.

It's been heavy on people's minds, and for a time now, we had Steve Mulroy, the district attorney on the show recently, Jim Strickland, mayor some, a couple months ago, talking about a lot of crime issues.

We'll talk about other issues, as well, going on in both your guys' purview.

But, I'll start with you, Mayor Palazzolo.

Germantown, you and the people you represent in Germantown, view the crime problem in the Memphis area how?

- Well, Eric, it's definitely a regional problem, and we're all part of the region, and we all touch each other as far as city boundaries.

And so it's something that's heavy on my constituents' mind all the time.

We've put in so many dollars into public safety over the decades, and we will not discontinue that, but it's something that weighs heavily on our folks.

And not all the people.

I'm an example.

I work in Memphis, I live in Germantown, and there's an anxiety that, it's hard for me to describe, that not only the people of Germantown, but a lot of the people that I see in the region in Memphis, it's heavy on their minds, and it has been for the last couple of years.

- Has Germantown seen an increase in crime?

- Not really.

Statistically, we're holding our own, but we've got to work very hard to put our resources in the right spots.

What we have seen in Germantown, an attempted carjacking here, shots fired there, things that had never happened 10 years ago.

And so those things, when your baseline is zero and then you add in essence one more than zero, you've doubled a carjacking, people begin to worry.

And we've done more training in the last year on situational awareness from our police department to our residents in group meetings and HOA meetings.

People are aware of their surroundings and they're being more cautious now.

And, you know, the days of maybe when I grew up in the '70s in Germantown, leaving your doors unlocked and your windows up, those days are gone by many years ago.

- Brent, you represent District 31, that's parts of Collierville through Germantown, all the way to Eads, Lakeland, parts of Arlington, so, much of that sort of suburban area.

What do you hear from your constituents?

- Well, first of all, thanks for having me.

Fourteen years, and this is my second time on the show.

- Fourteen years of Behind the Headlines.

- People are gonna start to think I'm a regular at this point.

- I know, we're making up for lost time.

- That's right, so.

So yes, crime, it continues to be an issue.

And I represent, half my district is Memphis.

And so I spend a lot of time working on crime and how we can lower crime, what resources the state has available that we can bring to Memphis to help augment what the police department's doing to help lower crime.

And there are a lot of initiatives that we worked on this past session.

Some things I'm working on for the session starting in January.

- Yeah, and the special session coming up in August.

What, before we get to Bill, that August special session called by the governor in part as in response to the horrific, tragic shooting at Coventry School, killing there.

What do you expect to come out of that?

What do you, it's in August, I mean, what are you looking, what do you know about that session, and what will be tackled, and what won't be tackled?

- The governor called it.

We are still waiting on his official call, so we don't yet know exactly what he's gonna ask us to do in the special session.

We know it's in response to the Covenant School shooting.

Whether or not he will focus on a red flag law remains to be seen.

I'm hearing through the grapevine that he has softened his position on a red flag law, but he still wants to call the special session to perhaps deal with mental health or other gun legislation besides a red flag law.

- For, I'm sorry, Bill, red flag law is, for those who don't know, is what?

- Yeah.

So red flag law is where somebody can report a gun owner that they feel is a threat to themselves or someone else.

They can report them.

There is a court hearing.

And then if the judge agrees, then that person is required then to hand over all of their firearms.

It's been tried in other states across the country.

It's pretty controversial, at least among Second Amendment advocates.

And quite frankly, I'm not sure the support is there in the legislature to adopt any kinda red flag law.

- Yeah.

Bill.

- It's so controversial that the governor has said it's not a red flag law, but that it's an extension of domestic violence court orders that take guns away from people who are accused or charged with domestic violence.

Does that make it any more palatable for you?

- It doesn't.

Just renaming it simply does not solve the issue.

The challenge is how do you remove guns from people that shouldn't have them?

Really, I think most of the people in the legislature, they're looking to figure out, okay, how can we remove people who are a danger to themselves or someone else?

How do we remove them from society and get them the help, the mental health help that they need?

So it's really separating them from their guns, rather than separating their guns from them.

And I really think that's the direction the legislature wants to head, particularly in January, is how can we enhance our involuntary judicial commitments so that we can put people into, to a hospital where they can get the mental health help that they need, rather than going after people's guns.

Because these red flag laws have been abused in other states, and we're just trying to figure out the best path forward for Tennessee.

- So do you know of legislators who have proposals?

Do you have a proposal that might come to the surface in this special session?

- I don't have anything that would be akin to a red flag law, or an ERPO, emergency order of protection.

I am working on some gun legislation that really would match up state law with federal law.

For example, convicted felons aren't allowed to have a gun.

They're a prohibited person from gun ownership.

Currently under federal law, if a prohibited person is found with just ammunition in their pocket, that's a felony.

And currently under state law, they could be a prohibited person, they can't have a firearm, but they're allowed to have ammunition.

So we'd like to make that a felony as well.

The other is to make it a felony for straw man purchases.

Typically under Tennessee state law, somebody can go in and buy a gun for somebody else, and it's simply a misdemeanor.

And then the third bill that I'm working on would make it a felony to be in possession of a stolen firearm.

Currently under state law, if you're caught with a firearm, if it's less than $1,000 in value, it's just a misdemeanor.

We're gonna create a whole category of firearms would actually be a prohibited item to, a stolen firearm would be a prohibited item to even have in your possession.

It would be a felony if you're caught with it.

- What about the idea that Memphis and other urban areas should somehow be exempt or have different laws in terms of open carry?

- That has been talked about.

And it, I think it's worth exploring.

I will tell you, if you look at the general assembly, outside of myself and maybe one other senator that represents an urban Republican district, all of the other Republicans, and we're a super majority, they all come from rural areas.

So the legislature is dominated by rural legislators.

And to try to get them to understand the unique challenges that we have in an urban area as it relates to guns is quite the challenge.

So that's been talked about.

Quite frankly, I'm not sure it would garner enough support to be able to do a carve out, but it's certainly something to consider, particularly in January.

- Mayor, you talked about crime perception as well as the actual problem.

In your view, is this a problem with law enforcement, or is this a problem with what happens after the arrest of someone?

- Well, Bill, that's a good question.

I think so much over the last year or so, a year plus, we've talked about where the system may or may not be broken.

And it's pretty complex.

And your publication Daily Memphian, has done a great job with surveying the community, exposing the process, whether it's setting bail, the judicial oversight, whether it's at the judge level or the judicial commissioner, you know, the rest, you know, how does the process start and end?

And a lot of people have a lot of anxiety.

And of course they're trying to find areas to put as much blame or responsibility as possible.

What we have, I guess, in our city, what we see a lot is we see our professional police officers, they're making consistent arrests of people that are breaking into cars.

They're looking for guns and cars and other items.

Most of those juveniles are arrested, issued a summons, and sometimes they're back in our community within a week or two.

And our professionals continue to do their work and make those arrests.

As a member of the Memphis Shelby County Crime Commission, which I've been a member for nine years, one of our platform items in the general assembly is to seek some assistance from the state to either build a new Wilder facility in Fayette County, operated by the Department of Children's Services, for violent juvenile offenders.

Right now, that facility holds about 35 beds or so, thirty-five people there that could be rehabilitated, and then taken out of the system.

Our community, the greater region, probably needs 400-plus beds.

I think if you ask any law enforcement professional in Memphis or Bartlett or Germantown, they know who the same 4 or 500 juvenile or young adult criminals are.

Right now, they're getting a summons, and then they're back out on the streets.

And so that part of the chain or the pipeline or the broken system needs to be fixed.

And we're looking to help in the state legislature, and lobbying for that, because as much as a lot of us want to see reform, reform, you have different versions of it, long term, intermediate, and short term.

And the short term fixes need to be to take juvenile and young adult offenders out of the criminal pipeline, maybe they can be rehabilitated, but at the end of the day, they don't need to be breaking into cars or houses, kidnapping or doing assaults in our greater region.

And we see that as a real problem for Germantown residents, Bartlett residents, Collierville, Memphis.

There's even a big crime wave recently in Southaven, you know, outside of the state of Tennessee, but in the greater region.

So it's a big priority for my community and others.

- We talked a lot last week with Steve Mulroy, I mentioned, district attorney, about a lot of the process, and it was actually a very good explainer about how things work, how things don't work.

But you can get it at wkno.org.

Go back to guns for a second, you know, are you on the same page as Senator Taylor here in terms of, you know, and do the people you represent have the same ideas about guns that we should be able to have open carry, that, you know, we don't need red flag laws, that there isn't, major changes to gun reform or gun control are gonna come out of this state legislature?

- Sure, well, you know, when you operate as a municipal leader, and then, you know, we have our state legislature and our state government, sometimes locals like to say one size does not fit all.

And then you apply the particular ordinance or rule or law.

This may be one of those situations, a dozen or so years ago in my community, we wanted to regulate whether guns could be in parks or not.

And it was tough.

I mean, that was a heavy lift.

It was about 50% wanted to have guns in parks and about 50% did not, our community, I think on a 3-2 vote by our board.

So again, you know, a very tight vote on an issue that got a lot of, you know, a lot of coverage as well.

But the locals got to decide that.

And then if you wanna hold anyone responsible, you hold your local official who voted for something.

This one with the Second Amendment and the ability to have firearms and for protection and other things.

And I think I echo what I hear the senator say, and, you know, we need to make sure that good people have guns and bad people do not.

I don't have an answer for that, but I do know that if you look at statistics from the Memphis-Shelby County Crime Commission, you can see when different laws were initiated and how crime spiked differently.

- I mean, most people who've come on and talked about crime have said, you know, when the legislature extended, you know, the car is like the home, you can have the gun in your car, that there's just a huge increase in car break-ins, a huge increase in the use of stolen guns in crime.

I mean, I think everybody who's, I mean, statistically there's a kind of, it's pretty clear that that's when that started.

The likelihood, I can ask you, would the legislature ever go back on that?

But I think you're saying, given the rural, especially given that the legislature is a rural-dominated legislature, super majority of Republicans, they're not gonna roll back anything like that.

- I don't anticipate 'em rolling back anything, but let me just address the guns in cars.

Part of the issue is that we have created all these gun free zones.

You can't have a gun in municipal buildings.

You can't have a gun at a church, place of worship.

You can't have a gun at a bar.

You can't have a gun in restaurants.

So when people leave the house in the morning, they're not thinking through all the stops they have to do during the day.

And when they pull up to a business that has a sign, "No Firearms Allowed," they're forced to leave their car, their gun rather in the car.

And so those who are looking to steal the guns know exactly where the gun free zones are, and that's why you have this rash of break-ins.

- But shouldn't they have, they should have a case and a lock, and some, that the gun should be put away properly, right?

- Well, people shouldn't be breaking into the car to begin with.

- Well, yeah, yeah.

No, I mean the whole thing.

I mean, it's just, but they are, we know they are, and we know they're taking those guns, and we know they're shooting people with 'em.

- If we had fewer gun-free zones, people would have that gun on their person rather than in their car.

And I will say this, the gun, to many Memphians, has a value beyond its lethality.

Crime is so bad that the homemaker or the single mom or the dad that leaves the house, the only way they're able to carry on any semblance of a normal life with crime as rampant as it is, is the fact that they have security knowing that I've got a gun and I can protect myself if somebody tries to carjack me or steal my car or steal my purse.

And so the gun has value besides just ever being fired and to try to shoot somebody.

It's that protection, that security they have, and being able to go about their daily lives.

If we would solve crime, we probably wouldn't need the, have the need for everybody to have a gun.

- About 10 Minutes here, Bill.

- But the legislature took out the requirement that you have to have training when you buy a gun.

So the person who has a gun may feel safer, but if they don't have the training and they pull it out and start shooting, and think they're shooting at a bad guy, but they're not, or their aim is off, haven't you created a bigger problem?

- Well, I think the courts have created that.

I mean, the Bruen case, and there are a lot of changes that are gonna come related to firearms as a result of the Bruen case, the Supreme Court case, because Bruen is the one that lowered the age from 21 down to 18.

And the Bruen decision is what is allowing people to have gun without the proper training.

I went through 25 years ago, went through the training and got my concealed carrier permit.

And that training was very helpful.

And what people don't realize, Bill, I think to your point, is that gun may give them security, but if it's not used properly, you may wind up being the one placed in jail, rather than the person you're using the gun against.

- Right.

Right.

I believe you had some legislation that took effect this week in terms of what judges hear what cases.

In other words, for a violent felony, that the initial decision about bond would be made by an elected judge, a general sessions court judge here, as opposed to a judicial commissioner.

It's been just a few days, but I believe the County Commission had a request that the judges, general sessions court judges, go ahead and start taking that jurisdiction ahead of this, because they could do it anyway in our case, right?

- That's correct.

And I think we have a broken bail system here, and bail is, the Constitution says that bail should not be excessive.

The Tennessee State Constitution actually goes further and says that a defendant has a right to bail.

But some of the judicial commissioners and the judges are thinking that affordable bail, if it's not affordable, it's excessive.

So some of the bail that's being set is really based on how much money they may have in their pocket at the time.

One of the bills that I'm gonna file in January will remove financial status from the criteria in determining how to set bail.

That shouldn't even be a consideration, as to what their financial status is.

Set bail.

The purpose of bail is really an insurance policy, is to make sure that that defendant shows up for court.

And if it's so low a bail, they'll just not show up for court.

So it needs to be a big enough bite financially that they're not willing to give up that money, or the family is not willing to give up that money, and they'll make sure that the defendant shows up for court.

- Can you legislate a middle ground between no bail and a bail in which someone could conceivably lose their home, a relative of a defendant could lose their home because they miss a court date?

- Well, and I think that's what I'm looking for is, look, I don't want anybody to lose their home, but the person who could potentially lose their home, I can assure you, they will move heaven and earth to make sure that defendant shows up for court.

When they're let out with a bail of $2,500, they put up 250, well, that's no, you know, that's not enough money for them to even bother to show back up for court.

But if somebody could potentially lose their car or their home, you can rest assured that they'll make sure that the defendant shows up for court.

- One quick thing.

Those changes you wanna propose, are those targeted at violent crimes or all bail setting?

- Violent crime.

I mean, that's what I'm really focused on, is to try to help solve this violent crime issue that we have in Memphis.

- Mayor, what do you hear from constituents?

Because Germantown does have a city court system, but your city, like the other suburban cities, like Memphis, relies on a Shelby County juvenile court system, a court system that, for adults, that is a mixture of Shelby County courts and state courts as well.

- Well, I think our residents, I know our residents wanna see justice served.

We obviously, you know, not enough conversation has occurred about victims, and what are victims' rights, and how do we take care of victims.

When I hear, you know, statistics about only four and a half percent of people that are let out on bail commit violent crime.

You know, the zero sum game in me tells me that there's no margin for error.

You know, if your family's impacted by that four percent in violent crime and a life is taken away, there's no margin for error there.

This isn't something that we're looking at about low-level shoplifting and those type things.

We're looking at serious crime that has occurred in this region.

And it's impacted every piece of the region.

And so, you know, we had, at our last board, mayor, and alderman meeting, we had citizens come forward to talk about a pop-up party that occurred in their neighborhood, and it was awful.

But most of our citizens said, we will be glad to pay more in taxes for more public safety.

My community, since the year 2000, we've doubled our police force, but yet we've only gone up 13% in population.

We didn't double our police force because we had a crime problem.

We doubled our police force because we wanna keep crime at a manageable level, and that's a low manageable level.

So we're constantly focused on that.

And we see so much pressure from the greater region.

And I think people are frustrated in the city.

I mean, when you can't go to a gas station or a grocery store, and you're telling your spouse to be sure that you're making yourself aware of your surroundings, or your children, to make sure they're aware of their surroundings, that's an anxiety that, and I grew up here in the '90s, and we talk so much about how crime was so bad in this country in the mid 1990s, and in this region, but it's at an epidemic rate in my opinion, and we've gotta get a handle on it.

And it only starts with the help of the senator and folks in the legislature.

And I haven't seen a lot of the captains of commerce in our region come forward.

You know, there's a lot of good work going on with Memphis Allies through Youth Villages.

Mayor Strickland's done a lot of reform in the sense of having child programs in the summer, youth programs, and Boys Club introduced to the Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

All those things take time to produce results, but right now, we gotta get our hands on crime.

And it is something that people will begin to move, not from the urban core to the suburbs.

They're gonna move from Memphis to some other state in the union.

- On the house party, was the issue the open carry of guns?

I mean, were there limits on what police could do?

- Well, there'll be another hearing coming up, so I don't wanna use the disclaimer that it's still an investigation.

But yes, brandishing of firearms, narcotics, marijuana, those type things, impact of a quiet community with 300 or so visitors, those things are not common.

Now, these pop-up parties apparently are occurring in other suburbs and in pockets of the Memphis area as well.

But, you know, people are not used to seeing assault rifles out of car windows.

- But how, and Memphis police have talked about this dilemma.

What does a Germantown police officer do when someone has a weapon, and the state has a law that this is an open carry state, you don't need a permit for certain firearms?

- Well, and our police department does three times the national average for a police department our size and training.

And so they are constantly being trained in deescalation training.

And so how do you begin to have a conversation with someone that you encounter that has a firearm, and what's the proper way to, again, position yourself with that person?

It does make it a challenge.

My police chief and the police chief's association across the state was not in favor of open carry, because they have to differentiate who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.

And that's a split second decision oftentimes by law enforcement officer.

- With just a minute left.

Both of you have mentioned, and really virtually everyone, I think, that we've ever had on this, at this table talking about crime and public safety and so on, have expressed some degree of desire to try to rehabilitate people.

Maybe some people are just too far gone, but by and large, especially with young people, is there an alternative?

Is there, it may be that they don't go back home, but they don't just go to jail for the rest of their lives.

And everyone talks about that, but really, it seems like no one has the money to do it.

And so I'll put it on you as state senator.

Is there a willingness among your colleagues to spend more money on rehabilitation?

That may be within a jail, or that may be a Memphis Allies, or that may be more Boys & Girls, maybe, but is there that willingness to spend the state's money on, in Memphis, in Nashville, in the cities, to help rehabilitate these people?

And I'm giving you 10 seconds to respond.

I'm sorry.

- The short answer is yes, there is a willingness.

One of the things I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived in the Senate was the willingness of other senators in the Senate to give Memphis what they needed.

- Okay, so, we coulda spent much more time on that, but I appreciate both your time.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you, Bill.

And thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show today, you can get the full episode online at wkno.org, or you can get the audio podcast version of the show wherever we get your podcasts.

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

[intense orchestral music] [acoustic guitar chords]