Authoritarian politicians hate nothing more than when their rhetoric is factchecked.

The recent local proof are the insults and name-calling by Tennessee Senator Brent Taylor in the wake of reporting by MLK50’s Katherine Burgess who factchecked his misinformation that has “stoked fear and distorted how the justice system works.” 

All of the lies and misinformation are in service of Mr. Taylor’s campaign to remove Attorney General Steve Mulroy from office despite the prosecutor’s resounding victory endorsing his plan of action by Memphis and Shelby County voters.

Apparently, Mr. Taylor’s misinformation extends to how journalism works too.  He demands that his opinion column should be as long as the news story. 

The Commercial Appeal reprinted Ms. Burgess’s fine reporting and Mr. Taylor demanded that Commercial Appeal editor Mark Russell give him whatever space he desires to reply to her reporting.  Guest columns in The Commercial Appeal have a limit of 700 words, but because of his carping, he was eventually given 1,200 words which still didn’t satisfy him.

He said “leftist” MLK50 – which just happens to have won numerous national journalism awards – has a “complete lack of credibility as a serious news organization,” and in turn called The Commercial Appeal a “failing paper” although it has the largest circulation and the most online visits times three of the other daily.   Mr. Taylor also urged his acolytes to write a Nashville Gannett official although decisions about local reporting and columns  are made locally by Mr. Russell, who called it a ‘fiction that Nashville is making decisions about your local newspaper.”

To paraphrase the Bard, methinks he protests too much.  And if The Commercial Appeal is such a poor newspaper, why is he complaining so much to get his column printed there? 

Descent into Hysteria

More to the point, this is what the once-proud Republican Party has become.  It isn’t about stimulating actual discussion.  It’s about the theater of the absurd that emphasizes talking over anyone else who does not agree and in Mr. Taylor’s case, smearing anyone or any organization that would have the audacity to disagree with him, particularly if they make the common sense suggestion that innovating the definition and execution of public safety is proving effective in attacking the crime rates in other cities.

At this point, Mr. Taylor, mortician and funeral home owner, contends that he’s the only person who is right, damn the facts and the data. 

Here’s my post from June 17 – State Legislators Undermine Better Ways to Fight Crime:

The United States is in the grip of far right politicians with no respect for the will of voters.  More and more, they put their thumbs on the scales to prevent fair elections and they attempt to reverse election outcomes by removing the victors or reducing their powers.

Despite all of the meddling that the Tennessee Legislature has engaged in when it comes to undermining the self-determination of City of Memphis, the current campaign by its right wing supermajority to remove Shelby County Attorney General Steve Mulroy from office is the most blatant and scurrilous.

Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton said he is talking to Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti about removing Mr. Mulroy from office.  It’s a case of the blind leading the blind – or more accurately, the blindly ambitious leading the blindly ambitious.

Mr. Sexton can depend on Mr. Skrmetti telling him what he wants to hear.   After all, the state attorney general is the most blatantly politically motivated person in that office in the history of Tennessee.

Both men have been mentioned as potential candidates for governor when Bill Lee’s term ends in 31 months so burnishing their hyper-right wing images are top of mind. 

Also top of mind is the political advantage that comes from their base when two White men tell a majority Black city and county what it can do. 

It is Jim Crow 2024. 

White Doesn’t Make Right

And there is one more person with special self-aggrandizing aspirations for greatness. The addition of Senator Brent Taylor, representing a 70% White suburban district, has intensified the level of antagonism toward our community and increased the delusions that all wisdom flows from the supermajority in the Legislature.

There are dozens of examples of State of Tennessee preempting local decision-making in Memphis, but now we are confronted with a blizzard of magic answers to the crime problem that are rooted in the MAGA approach that treats urban centers as ungovernable and uncontrollable, particularly if they have Black leadership. 

Acting on that plantation mentality, Tennessee legislators step in to reverse policies and programs that a majority of voters in Memphis and Shelby County have overwhelmingly voted for.

It’s not like Attorney General Mulroy took office and then commandeered the office with an alien agenda.  To the contrary, he laid out proposals in his campaign that could be filed largely under the “reform” heading and 59% of voters supported him.  They are the same ones considered mainstream ideas in most cities.

And yet, right wingers in the Legislature put a target on Mr. Mulroy’s back when he said early on that the criminal justice system is not the place to “handle reproductive choice matters” and abortion prosecutions would be an “extremely low priority.”

Meanwhile, some of the principles in his plans have reduced crime in other cities, but the White supermajority in the Legislature, most of whom come from small town with small town thinking, can only imagine an approach that is about “arrest more and more and sentence them longer and longer” ideas.

Meanwhile, they have amnesia, blithely overlooking the fact that Memphis operated on their exact philosophy for 10 years and the result was that violent crime skyrocketed.  For them, Mr. Mulroy is the problem although it was with Attorney General Amy Weirich in office and with Mayor Jim Strickland pushing for more and more police that the crime rate made historic increases.

But facts be damned.  This is a political power grab.

Legislators are adept in advancing simplistic ideas while ignoring the mote in their eyes.

It’s The Guns, Stupid

After all, it is inarguable that the Legislature’s decision to make guns ubiquitous is a clear driver of crime.  Here’s the cause and effect, keeping in mind that permitless carry went into effect 2021:

Number and percentage of reported violent incidents involving guns in Memphis:
5,215 – 2016
7,402 – 2021
7,266 – 2022
8,110 – 2023

Guns reported stolen from motor vehicles in Memphis:

  816 – 2016
2,043 – 2021
2,478 – 2022
2,125 – 2023

State legislators are intent on its “my way or the highway magic answer” approach so we are never presented with a binary choice or debate.  They act as if we have to make a choice  between reform or enforcement. 

That precludes the option to do both. 

The City of Memphis’ own Five-Year Strategic Fiscal Plan even says that there is no correlation between the number of police and the crime rate; however, city government continues to pursue relentlessly a larger police force and that commitment appears to be unshakeable.

But that should not rule out that criminal justice reform could not be executed at the same time.  After all, it is a major trend in U.S. cities to create a public safety agenda within a public health context, with credible messenger interventions, and with restorative youth justice programs which target investments and interventions in high-crime locations. 

New Ways To Reduce Crime

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said in her Platform for Public Safety: “The city must reject the false choice between being ‘tough’ on crime and addressing the root causes of violence.  We must address the small groups responsible for the large percentage of violent crimes.  Officers are spending too much time responding to routine calls instead of addressing violent crime.  We must invest in resources that will actually make us safer, such as treatment for substance abuse and mental health disorders, programs that lift people out of poverty, and meaningful criminal justice reforms.” 

She began by declaring that gun violence is a public health crisis and emulated the national model of Focused Deterrence and the Community-First Approach to Public Safety in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Her plan to reduce downtown crime relied heavily on a greater police presence, high visibility cameras installed throughout downtown, license plate readers that read more than 10,000 vehicles a day entering downtown, increased lighting throughout downtown, and a smartphone app so the public can report crimes and request city help.

Last October, Nashville received a $2 million grant from the Department of Justice to develop a “Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative” to be overseen by the Metro Public Health Department. Four persons have been hired for the program – a case manager and three “credible messengers” – and Nashville is considering hiring a “community safety liaison” who would either work in the mayor’s office or Metro Public Health focusing on gun violence.

Nashville is home to a nationally known credible messenger organization, Raphah Institute.

It’s Not Necessarily Binary

Because of the dominance of police funding in city government budgets, many cities are recognizing that a prevention-first approach is the smarter investment for taxpayers.  “Just as the level of spending on police was a poor substitute for measuring a community’s commitment to crime reduction, it will also fail if it is the primary measure of a commitment to justice and safety,” said David Eichenthal, an expert on justice and safety finance and primary author of the City of Memphis Five-Year Plan.

Changing public safety from an emphasis on suppression to a campaign for justice and safety calls for ways to disaggregate police responsibilities so that health and social service officials and communities can help reimagine the public safety function so police trained in using force to enforce laws are not deployed to address social problems like homelessness, substance abuse, and mental illness.

This approach is producing encouraging results elsewhere at the same time that the Tennessee Legislature is pushing city and county policies away from smarter, more innovative ways to reimagine criminal justice.  For example, this different approach would address gun violence as a public health issue within a prevention and intervention framework in order to shift city responses from enforcement alone to an overall wellness approach and with a wider range of stakeholders who define and monitor the problem, identify risk and protective factors, and develop and test prevention strategies.

The extreme right supermajority of the Tennessee Legislature would have us chasing old models of public safety that have not worked at a time when other approaches are proving that they work.  Because of the Legislature, we’re having an “either-or” discussion when “both-and” has much more promise.

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