WKNO TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (Host): On Wednesday, the Department of Justice dropped a scathing report about policing in the City of Memphis. It finds that MPD discriminates against Black residents and also people who have behavioral health issues. With us to talk about the fallout is political analyst Otis Sanford. Welcome back.
OTIS SANFORD: Thank you, Chris. Good to be back with you.
BLANK: Otis, you know, we could spend a number of weeks dissecting the 70-page document, but the main conclusion is that MPD's tactics are too aggressive, there's not enough supervision or training, and Black citizens have disproportionately higher police encounters than white citizens. When Mayor Paul Young made his statement on Thursday, he seemed pretty cool to the findings, saying that changes are already being made. So, what kind of immediate impact do you think this report will have on the mayor and the city council?
SANFORD: Where the mayor is concerned, he should make good on what he said at that press conference, which is to continue to provide his own oversight of the police operation to make sure that they are doing what they say they are doing, which is: to improve training, weed out those who would commit these kinds of rights violations and make sure the supervision is adequate. He has to do that, because if he does nothing and there's no indication that he does anything, he could wind up being a one-term mayor. As far as the city council is concerned, I think this will give them more ammunition to say, "See I told you so. We tried to do something about this, with the ending the pretextual stops. And then, of course, coming up with the the referendums to get fewer guns on the street -- which if you got fewer guns on the street, you would have less incentive of the police officers to be heavy-handed. So, I think the city council is going to take an I-told-you-so approach to this.
BLANK: The mayor has already said that, at least if he can help it, the city won't enter into a consent decree with the DOJ, which could mean years of costly federal oversight. When he was asked who holds the city accountable then, he says HE does. So, do you think Memphians have faith that this still-relatively new mayor can really change the climate of policing here?
SANFORD: I think they're willing to give him some time to do so. Mayor Young inherited this whole issue. He just took office in January of this year and this investigation was going on for 17 months following the Tyre Nichols murder. I think he spent too much time, though, talking about the cost of reforms. While it may be costly, you can't put a price on public safety like that, or the community safety.
BLANK: A big focus of this report was traffic stops and MPD using those stops not just for citations, but to fight crime. Police have even touted this strategy, and they say there is some overlap between people driving around with fake tags and people driving stolen cars. But this is also a constitutional gray area, which makes it very political. And you mentioned the city council tried to prevent these pretextual stops. State Republicans passed a law empowering police to do just that. Considering this report comes at the tail end of the Biden Administration, I wonder if in just a couple of months, there may be a very different federal position on this kind of policing.
SANFORD: Oh, I think it will be. I think that's one of the reasons, the Justice Department wanted to get this report out right now. The incoming Trump Administration, they will put this on the back burner. The consent decree that we talked about earlier, there's really no need for it right now. That would have to come within a federal court jurisdiction, and it may not even get to court now because of the change in the administration. But that still does not keep the city from responding to this, and addressing these issues that are many in this report.
BLANK: Many of the things that are laid out in this report, talk about systemic racism, which is really unusual, I think, because we live in a majority Black city. Many of our city's top leaders are Black. A majority of the city's police officers are black. 90 percent of homicide victims in Memphis are Black. What do you think is the biggest challenge going forward as a Black community dealing with some of these issues?
SANFORD: Wow, that's a tough question. It wasn't lost on me that everybody who talked about this at the press conferences on Thursday -- they were Black. So this issue, while race is at the center of it, the people who are addressing it are Black as well. I think, though, Chris, the biggest challenge that we have right now is still to try to make sure that we are reducing the kind of lawlessness that we see in this community that makes people believe -- whether it's true or not -- that crime is out of control. The mayor said crime is down. The statistics say crime is down. But the perception is it's still out of control and we have to to do a better job of addressing that kind of lawlessness that puts people ill at ease. That's still the number one challenge, despite this report. But then the second biggest challenge is for the police department to take this seriously and to seek to change the culture within the department. That is the second biggest challenge that I see.
