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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The authorities in Memphis are moving quickly after the killing of Tyree Nichols earlier this month, maybe even more quickly than was initially assumed.
--:-- Noel King: So the day after Nichols was beaten, we now know seven officers were suspended from the Memphis Police Department. Six are identified, one is not, five have been charged with crimes, and the department implies that more charges are coming. It says it's looking into the officers' actions and inactions, a reference to the fact that people are seen milling around while Tyree Nichols is clearly hurt.
--:-- Noel King: Meanwhile, the Memphis Fire Department says it fired two EMTs and a lieutenant after an internal investigation, also citing both their actions and inaction.
--:-- Noel King: Memphis was ready for an eruption of protest after that footage was released on Friday. And it didn't happen. The protests were peaceful and contained. And a lot of people outside of Memphis were surprised.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up, a Memphis-based journalist tells us what she attributes the response to.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Wendy Thomas is a journalist and a longtime resident of Memphis, 43 years.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: This is my home. So things that happen here are deeply, deeply personal.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I went to public schools here. My sister's a teacher and my mom worked at the big public hospital. My dad was a university professor at what was then Memphis State.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Yeah, this is this is my city. This is where I've chosen to do journalism.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The journalism she's chosen to do focuses on power and policy and poverty. She's the founding editor and publisher of MLK 50 Justice Through Journalism.
--:-- Noel King: I asked Wendy what she knew about Tyree Nichols.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: So, you know, we know, I think, a lot about Tyree, of course, a lot more since his death than we knew about him in life.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: You know, this is a 29-year-old young man who came here fairly recently from Sacramento, California. He's got a four-year-old son. He loved to skateboard.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Way more agile than you might expect someone his height to be. I believe he was 6'2 or 6'3, a lanky guy.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Some of the photographs that he's taken and that I've seen since his death are just amazing. These sunshot views of Memphis down by the river with the bridge in the background. They'll take your breath away.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: He loved his mother's cooking. He loved his son. That's why he came to Memphis in the first place.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Tyree Nichols died in the hospital on January 10th. But I have to think that his death did not begin the day he was beaten by police, in the sense that there is always a history to these things.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And in a place like Memphis, there's often a very specific history.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I wonder if we can walk back in time and if you can tell me when you think the events of that day really began.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I would go back, you know, really to 2015 and when then city council member, now mayor, Jim Strickland, when he ran for office, when he announced his campaign.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: We all want a cleaner, safer and better Memphis. And that's why Jim Strickland will make crime his number one priority.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: His campaign announcement followed not long after a violent incident at a Kroger store, actually here in Memphis, where some teens attacked people in the parking lot.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: You know, kind of random crime, but also a one-off thing. It wasn't like it was part of a pattern.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Tonight, three people, two of them teens, are recovering after being brutally attacked by a mob of teenagers in a busy shopping center at Poplar and Highland.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Witnesses say the attackers were playing a violent game. They followed hitting him with a pumpkin and he was already unconscious.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: So really all you could see was like blood and pumpkin.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: But the mayor really used that incident as a jumping point for his campaign with a tough on crime approach and positioning himself as the answer to crime in Memphis.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And the mayor has demanded just about every opportunity he gets that Memphis needs more police officers, hundreds of more officers on the streets, even though there is no proven correlation between the number of officers on the streets and crime rates.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: But as these high-profile incidents occurred, people wanted to feel safe, and they just didn't ask a lot of questions about what that safety would look like.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: What neighborhoods were already being over-policed, and would they even be further over-policed during these calls for more cops? More and smart policing.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: We need more police officers. Everyone knows that. Stronger sentences for violent crimes.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I think another important element to keep in mind is that the police have really had a lot of recruiting problems over the years.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: It's been difficult for them to find people who want to join the force. But the police department has actually lowered its standards over the years to get more officers on the force.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The officers that were involved and had been charged with murder in connection with Tyree's death, none of them had been on the force for more than five years.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And two of them were hired like in the last two to three years.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so you just have to wonder what those lowering of standards, what impact that has on people's experience with the police.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I mean, I think all of us who have done our job for a while can remember how horrible we were at it in the first year, second year third year and how much we grown in the decades since.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Take us up to the present day What happens with crime when there are more police officers Does crime go down
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Well violent crime actually has gone down even though the mayor would tell you he still doesn't have the complement of officers.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: But property crimes have gone up, particularly car thefts.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I think that does contribute to a feeling that people are less safe.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: It's hard for me to determine what percentage of those feelings of a loss of safety are fueled by crime news, which is steady and consistent, and what share is generated by real risk.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I mean, I've had to confront this myself. You know, if you watch enough TV news, you'll be convinced that there's somebody just around the corner waiting to grab you up.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: But I had to say, okay, Wendy, are you really less safe? is there crime going on in your neighborhood? Are you frequenting places where car thefts have been occurring?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And the answer was no.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The danger of what can feel like fear-mongering sometimes is that it can lead a community to stop asking questions.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And as I like to say, when you don't ask the right questions, you end up celebrating the wrong things.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so you have these additional officers coming in, so-called elite units being formed.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: In this case, it was the Scorpion unit, where the officers who have been charged with Tyree's murder, they were all a part of this elite unit called the Scorpion unit.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: When they were announced a few weeks after they had been in action, the mayor bragged that they had made like hundreds of arrests, but we didn't ask at what cost those arrests were coming.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: We didn't ask if these officers were being heavy-handed. We didn't ask if use of force complaints had increased.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: We didn't ask any of those questions because it seemed as if the only thing that matters is being tough on crime and making sure the rights are falling by any means necessary.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I was reading a statistic this morning. In 2021, Memphis set a record for murders. 346 people in the city were murdered.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The previous record was set the year before with 332 murders.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Now, I hear you saying violent crime has gone down, there's this difficult thing to tease out here, right?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Which is, that's a really scary thing to hear, even if muggings have gone down, for example, or rapes have gone down. Right.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: So we did set records in Memphis for homicide in 2020 and 2021, but that went down in 2022.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: You know, I think the increase you saw in Memphis in 2020 and 2021 is mirrored in large cities around the country, right?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: So we weren't immune to that and whatever the dynamics were that were happening during the pandemic, whether it's the social isolation or the closing of schools or what have you, that definitely was, you saw that reflected in rising homicide rates across the country.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: But those have come down, as have, you know, rapes and aggravated assaults, that sort of thing, in Memphis, with the number of police that the city has, even though the mayor will let you know that he thinks we still need hundreds more.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so I think that is a reality and something that I think can somewhat complicate the narrative.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: In 2020, as I understand it, the Memphis Police Department says that it needs some reforms.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: What led them to that conclusion?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: So I think these calls for reform really came out of George Floyd's killing.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And the then police chief, Mike Rawlings, actually asked to be a part of this federal initiative called COPS, Collaborative Policing, and to invite outside consultants in to examine the police department and see what could be improved.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Jeff Sessions decided that that was something that needed to end, that he wanted to end the COPS program and the DOJ.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: He thought it was better for police departments to investigate themselves.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so I think there have been those attempts at reform.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The mayor, following George Floyd's killing and demonstrations here in Memphis around that, announced a reimagining policing initiative.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: and convened a panel of people, had meetings and what have you, to try to see what could be done.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: How does the current police chief, C.J. Davis, a black woman, who has been very present in the media over the course of the past couple days, how does she fit into attempts at reform?
--:-- C.J. Davis: I have to say, I feel like when I've seen her on TV or press conferences, she comes across as sincere.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Words can be empty sometimes.
--:-- C.J. Davis: That's why it was important for me not just to deliver condolences or apologies or I'm sorry.
--:-- C.J. Davis: You know, what I wanted to deliver for this family at least was that first step of justice for them to to quickly deal with these officers within the scope of my power and to help facilitate this movement to the DA's office as well.
--:-- C.J. Davis: It was obvious to me that what I saw was beyond the scope of what is condoned in this police department and any department I've ever worked in before.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I sometimes wonder what kind of blowback she might be getting from her officers because she has been so very clear that what happened in that video was unconscionable.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And the police tend to close ranks and back each other.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so it'll be interesting to see how she's being received internally as a result of her very clear stance for reform.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: That said, she's in an institution that has not shown itself, doesn't have the best track record of reform.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so her efforts may be limited.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I mean, I guess time will tell.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: You know, what I haven't seen is kind of a dialing back by the mayor.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And he's the one who hired Davis, right?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so you have to believe that he hired someone who believed what he believes about being tough on crime.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And even after Tyree Nichols was killed initially, Davis was still proud of the Scorpion unit and what they had done.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: It was only later that the department announced that they were going to suspend it and then permanently disband that unit.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Tell me what you know about the unit that these police officers who've been charged were a part of.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Well, the Scorpion unit allegedly was supposed to be about violent crimes, the worst of the worst.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so I think it came as a surprise to a lot of us that Tyree Nichols initial encounter with police was over a traffic stop.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I certainly didn't understand that you had elite units you know out in this part of town where the crime rates aren't any higher than any other parts of town and certainly are lower in a lot of instances.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: What about their running traffic, right? That's not how you would expect the bandwidth of an elite unit to be deployed.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: You know, again, these officers were all relatively inexperienced.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so when I think elite, I think experience, you know, I don't think people who I mean, one officer, for example, two years before he joined the police force, he was working at a fast food restaurant.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: That's an honorable job. We need fast food employees.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: But that trend trajectory from fast food to elite police unit in the course of three years just seems a little quick.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Where does the Scorpion unit fit into the efforts at reform, at police reform?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I don't think it does.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I don't think it fits into efforts for any substantive reform.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I think it's a response to rising crime rates, people's desire to feel safe, and their reluctance to question how police will be used to make us safe.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: You know, I think one thing that's also important to note, you know, police in cities across the country, it's not unique to Memphis, will say they need a residence to cooperate more in the course of investigation.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Like if you see something, say something.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: When you have this kind of police brutality, it makes Memphis less safe.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: People are not going to cooperate with officers that they're terrified of, right?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: They're not going to voluntarily call police to say, hey, I want to tell you something that's going on after the video that they've seen.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And there are other incidents that are emerging that people are talking about where they've had these kind of encounters, not fatal, of course, with the police, but others in which they believe excessive force was used.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so this kind of incident is exactly the opposite of what the mayor and the police chief would say that they want.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up after all of this, why did Memphis not erupt over the weekend?
--:-- Noel King: Wendy Thomas is going to tell us what she thinks.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noel King: Wendy Thomas, the publisher of MLK50, a non-profit newsroom in Memphis, was telling us earlier that decisions made by the city's mayor, Jim Strickland, and the police chief, C.J. Davis, are inextricably linked to the events of this week.
--:-- Noel King: There was the hiring of additional officers after a violent incident a few years back.
--:-- Noel King: There were the attempts at reform after George Floyd was murdered.
--:-- Noel King: But there is another Memphis leader who has moved with surprising swiftness in the past few days, and that is the district attorney, a man named Steve Mulroy.
--:-- Noel King: Earlier today, the grand jury returned indictments against five former Memphis Police Department officers regarding the death of Tyree Nichols.
--:-- Noel King: These are the same five officers who were previously or recently terminated by the Memphis Police Department.
--:-- Noel King: Wendy, tell me about this DA.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: In August, voters elected Steve Mulroy, who had a background as a law professor here, used to serve on the county commission, was also a part of the DOJ and the Civil Rights Division at one point.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I think the main thing that I would point to that has earned more credit in this case is the transparency and the frequent updates and the letting the public know that he hears them, he's trying, he's working, they're investigating, be patient, show us just a little bit of grace while we put this case together.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And people were inclined to give him an opportunity to do that.
--:-- Noel King: Here are the charges. Second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping resulting in bodily injury, aggravated kidnapping involving the possession of a weapon, official misconduct through unauthorized exercise of power, official misconduct through failure to act when there is a duty imposed by law, and official oppression.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: You know, for my team, at least, we were like, official oppression? You know, you can kind of guess what that is, but we were not familiar with that charge.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: We haven't heard of anybody being charged with that specifically.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And that just speaks to the abuse of power that Mo Roy felt like he saw in that video and through that investigation.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: So I think it feels like a deliberate effort to hold the system accountable That I think is of some comfort to residents during a very very trying time
--:-- Noel King: The officers are charged The DA gets a lot of credit The public finds out about this. And then we start to hear about the video of Tyree Nichols killing.
--:-- Noel King: And the language that the city officials in Memphis were using was really striking. It was the language of an absolute catastrophe.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: What did you hear about that video?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The descriptions of the video before the public even got an opportunity to see it just really let you know how bad it was going to be.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: You know, you're hearing horrific, inhumane, savage, reckless.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And that just really stands in stark contrast, I think, to the kind of tempered language that we're used to hearing police or city officials use.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: There was no cause to wait, to pass judgment on these officers, or to let the investigation run its course.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: It was like, no, up front, we're going to tell you this is horrible. You're going to be horrified by what you see. I'm horrified by what you see.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And I think it almost set the tone, gave the community permission to feel the rage they were going to feel.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And the shared solidarity doesn't feel like quite the right word, but this understanding that emotionally we were going to feel similar things.
--:-- Noel King: After the video was released on Friday, there was an expectation or a real fear that Memphis might explode in protests.
--:-- Noel King: I did not share those fears. Tell me why.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I didn't share those fears because I know my people.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I know this city.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I know the organizers, activists, the protesters, the folks who show up, the ministers, the lawyers, the teachers, the people who work in nonprofits.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I know these people.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And they love the city just like I do.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And they want to hold it accountable because they love it.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And they have no desire to destroy the city.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And they have a history, a track record of behaving appropriately, right, of marching and being loud and getting in the police's face, but doing so without violence.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The demonstrations that my team at MLK 50 and I have covered, you know, in the last five and a half years that we've been in existence, Where the violence has occurred is when police have come in with the tear gas and the mounted police and the riot shields.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: That's where things have turned into a chaotic environment.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: It has not been because of the people holding the signs.
--:-- Noel King: And so if you know that and you know that about your community, you're really kind of put off by what felt like disrespect and the fear mongering.
--:-- Noel King: You know, you had city schools clear. They canceled after school activities on Friday.
--:-- Noel King: The University of Memphis closed a little early.
--:-- Noel King: So did a mall that's about 15 miles from downtown, which is kind of ridiculous.
--:-- Noel King: No demonstrations really go on out there.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: And so I did not share these fears. I'm not surprised that Memphis was calm because we're not the ones bringing the drama, bringing the smoke.
--:-- Noel King: Wendy, we know now that some lawmakers are calling for the federal government to look into this.
--:-- Noel King: Are there expectations that people in Memphis have now in terms of either what the federal government might do or what this police chief might do or what the mayor might do?
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Oh, absolutely.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I think that there have been lots of calls for investigation into all the other special units within the Memphis Police Department.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: That would include the OCU, MGU, task force that involved federal agents as well.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: There's also been calls for the Citizen Law Enforcement Review Board, which we know is CLERB here, for them to get subpoena powers, for them to have more teeth.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: They've largely been neutered.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The recommendation that they'll make to the police department around use of force incidents or what have you are almost always disregarded.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: So this might be an opportunity for them to get some of the support that they might want, which is something that the mayor could put in place or the city council could put in place.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: The city council next week is posed to consider an ordinance that would require more reporting around traffic stops.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: So that's something we may see come from that.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I think we just have to do what we don't like to do in these instances, which is be patient.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: Continue to press for organizers and activists. They're going to continue to press for reforms in a systemic way as the DA and these federal agencies do their role, do their part.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: I'm hoping that this causes us to think about public safety more broadly as a community.
--:-- Wendy Thomas: It's an opportunity, and we just have to see if we take it.
--:-- Noel King: That was Wendy Thomas. She's a journalist and she runs a nonprofit newsroom called MLK 50 in Memphis.
--:-- Noel King: Our thanks today also to Lucas Finton. He's a breaking news reporter at the Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis.
--:-- Noel King: Today's show was produced by Siona Petros and Victoria Chamberlain.
--:-- Noel King: It was edited by Matthew Collette and fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Hadi Muagdi.
--:-- Noel King: It was engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and Afim Shapiro.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. I'll see you next time.
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