WKNO TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (Host): The death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Memphis police officers brought federal civil rights investigators to the city. Officials found that local police were using excessive force and discriminating against Black residents. But that was during the Biden administration. This week, the Trump administration took a new direction. With us again is political analyst Otis Sanford. Welcome back.
OTIS SANFORD: Thank you, Chris. My pleasure.
BLANK: In its statement, the DOJ said, quote, "We are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division's failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees." And Otis, I see two questions from this. The first is the political one: What is the Trump administration signaling by pulling these investigations, not just from Memphis, but from other cities connected to over-policing like Minneapolis and Louisville?
SANFORD: This is pure politics. And the the fact that they use terms like the "Biden Civil Rights Division" and "failed experiments" and "handcuffing local leaders," that told me that this is based entirely on politics and not equal justice under the law.
BLANK: So, the second question is: even Memphis leaders like [Mayor] Paul Young did not want another consent decree and the costs associated with this. They and police chief C.J. Davis would say that since Tyre Nichols, they've made enough reforms to not warrant federal oversight. Do you see a good case for that?
SANFORD: Well, no, I don't because if they have made enough reforms, Chris, they haven't explained it or shown it to the community yet. They are trying to come up and change the narrative here to some degree by attacking the crime problem. You know, there was a big sting that was going on, and multiple arrests being made, and they are addressing the issue over Memphis being a crime-ridden city. But if we're talking about police reform, they have yet to fully explain all of that in the community.
BLANK: Well, all of that, as you mentioned, comes on the heels of FBI Director Kash Patel calling Memphis the "homicide capital of America." And that was followed by a parade of Tennessee Republicans like senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty and Representatives like David Kustoff saying that they are now very interested in Memphis's crime problem. Otis, why are they chiming in now and what is their plan?
SANFORD: Well, I don't know what their plan is. They don't have a plan. They are jumping on a bandwagon right now because the Trump administration is trying to signal that they are all in favor of tough policing. And really that's a political move because they're trying to counter the argument that it was the Trump supporters who even attacked police on January 6th. The comment came out of left field on Fox News because they were talking about immigrant gangs committing crimes and human trafficking and using the interstates as a conduit for human trafficking. And then just out of the blue, Memphis is the crime capital of America. And I don't know -- he didn't cite any evidence for that. The facts are that the murder rate has actually gone down. It's still higher than it was before COVID, but it has gone down. And there is no emperical evidence that I've seen that Memphis is the crime capital. So again, this is all politics. The local elected leaders, Kustoff, Hagerty, Blackburn, they are all jumping on board because this is the new shiny object attacking Memphis and its crime.
BLANK: Well, finally Otis, last week we talked about budgets and how both the city and county governments were planning for some belt tightening. This week, the Memphis City Council had a surprise vote for pay raises for a host of city workers. Now this could leave Mayor Young trying to come up with an extra $39 million and cutting a number of other programs. What's happening here?
SANFORD: Obviously, one of the things that's happening is that the city council is not really talking that much to the administration. This caught the mayor by complete surprise. And it just doesn't seem like there was a workable plan here on the city council's part. These are exorbitant raises. And the way to finance that would be to cut programs, to do some layoffs somewhere, to hurt areas of the city government that will be drastically impacted by this. I just don't think that the city council is giving this the thought that it needs and I hope there's some more discussion that's going to be had about this before it is finalized.
BLANK: And there's another option, it's raising taxes. Do you think we would go for that?
SANFORD: I don't think that the community is going to go for that at all. The mayor, who is already sort of teetering here with some other issues that's going on in the city--we just talked about some of them with crime and punishment and policing in the city--if he has to be responsible for another tax increase, it's going to bode not well for him as he goes into his second and third years and look toward a re-election campaign.
