WKNO TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (HOST): The legal drama continues this week over whether or not Memphis can offer voters a referendum on gun control measures that don't jive with state law. With us to talk about that and other local issues is political analyst, Otis Sanford. Welcome back.
OTIS SANFORD: Thank you, Chris. Hope you're doing well.
BLANK: Otis, the city council has decided to push this issue despite Mayor Paul Young calling the referendum "futile" last Friday. Now the council is suing the Shelby County Election Commission in Chancery Court. They've got two main arguments: one, that our city charter lets us vote on things, even if they might be challenged later. They also say the election commission decided behind closed doors to leave their referendums off of the ballot. So the first question is: is this a worthy fight or just posturing by some city council members?
SANFORD: I don't think I would call it posturing, but I would call it pressuring. They are trying to pressure the legislature with a sizable vote in favor of these referendums in hopes -- and I think this is a futile hope here -- that the legislature would allow the city to pass this on gun control laws.
This is no different than the trigger law that the legislature passed on abortion years ago, waiting for a chance to use it. And if the laws ever changed in Nashville, it'll give Memphis the opportunity to to enact some reforms on guns.
BLANK: It bears repeating that Memphis is the number one city in the country for stolen gun crimes, with Nashville and Chattanooga in the top 15, and this is directly related to Republicans removing gun restrictions statewide. Now, even a majority of Republican voters want changes like red flag laws and safe storage laws, but Republican lawmakers won't even consider them. And this seems to raise a kind of troubling question, and I wonder if you see any truth to it: does high crime in Memphis help suburban Republicans run for office in Shelby County?
SANFORD: Well, I think it does. Now, to say that they are passing laws in hopes that they can run against the high crime in Memphis, that's making the Republicans even more devious than I'm willing to do. But I do think that they are capitalizing on crime in Memphis, and they run politically on that. Look at what [State Senator] Brent Taylor has been doing all along. I mean, his whole effort deals with the high crime in Memphis and now he's trying to spend it by saying that his campaign is to "Make Memphis Matter,." But I think the real campaign that he's waging is "Make Crime Matter to Me and my Political Ambitions." So yeah, I think there's a little bit of that going on. I would really hope that they wouldn't be that devious as to pass laws to create more crime so then they can run politically on it. I hope that's not happening.
BLANK: Well, related to crime: the Shelby County Jail, also known as 201 Poplar, is over 40 years old and in need of a lot of repairs. So does the entire Criminal Justice complex down there. Elevators are constantly breaking down. They need new locks on the jail cells. Building a new jail, according to Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, would cost somewhere around a billion dollars. Now, the Sheriff's Department runs the jail and lately Sheriff Floyd Bonner has been asking for more and more money to fix things and the County Commission keeps pushing back. Can you talk a little bit about these disputes and whether or not we're just delaying the inevitable here.
SANFORD: Well, I think the bigger dispute certainly came up this week was between the Harris Administration and the County Sheriff's Office of Floyd Bonner that they were sort of going at it in terms of getting the money for these repairs. I think in the neighborhood of 15 million dollars. This is a tough issue, Chris, and I don't know what the answers are. But we are delaying the inevitable, because we will need a new jail at some point. But that's way off in the future. They need to find a way to fix some of these problems. If it costs $15 million, it costs $15 million and they need to figure out where they're going to find the money.
BLANK: The jail situation is also part of a larger debate about criminals and the justice system. The flip side of bail reform is that if Shelby County starts keeping everyone in jail ahead of trials, which can take years to get to, we're gonna run out of jail cells. Sheriff Floyd Bonner has been sued several times recently for the deplorable jail conditions and staffing issues. It just seems that there is a potential here for Memphis to get, once again, tangled up In some thorny civil rights issues. Do you see that?
SANFORD: Oh, absolutely I see that, Chris. We have to find some kind of a happy medium here between holding the real bad guys accountable -- the violent criminals accountable -- and keeping them behind bars and not those who don't pose a threat to the community, so that we won't have that kind of civil rights violation hanging over our heads.
