WKNO TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (HOST): With a memorandum signed by Donald Trump on Monday, Gov. Bill Lee now has 13 federal agencies on a crime fighting mission in Memphis. Only one of them has stirred a mountain of controversy and that is the proposed deployment of the Tennessee National Guard. Can local leaders make this unwanted show of force work for the city? With us again is political analyst Otis Sanford. Welcome back.
OTIS SANFORD: Thank you, Chris. Good to be with you.
BLANK: Hearing how President Trump talks about the National Guard in Washington versus how Gov. Lee talks about it here, there are some subtle political differences. And a few things stood out to me in the governor's interview this week in the Daily Memphian. He seemed to say he wanted a transparent process. And here's a quote, "The more we tell Memphis, the better off it's going to be." he said.
He also called this a "magnifying" force that would essentially be working on behalf of the Memphis Police Department. Otis, starting with transparency, what do we know so far and what questions still need answers?
SANFORD: Well, what we know so far is that Gov. Lee is intent on making this a cooperative effort, or at least he said so after the White House gathering. We also know that there is going to be no more than 150 or so National Guard troops here, which is far less than what was in Washington DC. What we don't know is who's going to really be in charge of them.
BLANK: Does it make a difference really that Gov. Lee says that the guard is working in league with local police? And here's the quote, "When a military police officer is available to fill a slot for the Memphis Police Department, that would free up an officer to be on the street." You know, this sounds like a crucial distinction from tanks on Beale Street.
SANFORD: Yeah, it does. And if that's the case then I think we should have less angst about it. Bill Lee didn't want this to happen, but he was sort of browbeaten into doing this, primarily by the president and the two senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty. He had no choice. He had to toe that line. But he is trying to make the best of the situation right now, and if he can achieve the cooperation, we will be less concerned about it.
BLANK: Local leaders, it seems, are sort of at sea here with how to respond to this. Shelby County commissioners floated a couple of resolutions this week. One opposes the guard entirely. The other from commissioner Charlie Caswell is asking for local government input. And then a few city council members also proposed a resolution opposing the National Guard presence completely. Are these resolutions going to have any influence at all?
SANFORD: Most of them probably will not. If you're talking about getting the governor to backtrack, that's not going to happen. In terms of asking for more cooperation -- I think that's what the governor has in mind. The best we can do right now is try to work together. Collaboration is better than confrontation and certainly better than partisanship, and so it's important that everybody works together now. There's been a lot of talk in the media about history here. The National Guard has been to Memphis before. They came for pandemic support. And then in 1978, there was a violent police and firefighters strike. I know you were a young reporter covering that at the time.
SANFORD: I was.
BLANK: And of course in 1968, they were here during the sanitation workers strike. All three of those instances brought kind of a different use and a different perception about the guard by the people who lived here. How will future historians be characterizing this visit, maybe in light of the past.
SANFORD: We're going to look back on this years from now and see that this was all political and all a show — really, a distraction from some other things. And the local historians are going to say that this was another attempt by this president to be authoritarian and dictatorial, and it would be nothing more than that.
BLANK: I had a chance to talk to one of your old friends, Buddy Chapman, the former police director of the Memphis Police Department. As an expert in law enforcement, he says that bringing the National Guard here really won't have much impact on crime. And his rationale for that is: if you put National Guard on a street corner, there certainly won't be any crime on that street corner. But as soon as the National Guard leaves, the crime will return. That's how crime works. Do you think that is the overall consensus of local leaders, and why doesn't that stick with our conservative leaders as they're planning this task force?
SANFORD: Buddy Chapman is right on the money with that. Criminals are opportunists, if nothing else. I do think, though, that Gov. Lee, especially since the White House meeting, has tried to forge that this is going to be a cooperative effort, that is not just a hit-and- miss thing, a short-term thing, but something that will really continue to make a difference in fighting crime in this community.
