Journalist Roundtable

- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- Residency, bail reform, and much more tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined this week by a roundtable of journalists to talk about some of the biggest stories of recent weeks, including Toby Sells from the Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- Julia Baker from The Daily Memphian, thanks you for being here.

- Yeah, thank you.

- And Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll start, Bill, with you and residency.

So, and I was outta town at a graduation, and I got an alert from The Daily Memphian on my phone that said Floyd Bonner, Van Turner, Willie Herenton, can all run, right?

There is essentially no residency requirement in the city of Memphis for the City Mayor's Office.

- The way things stand now.

This is the lawsuit that was filed by Floyd Bonner and Van Turner in the race to basically say, what is the status of this?

How long do you have to live in the city if you have to live in the city at all?

And Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins ruled that as things stand now, there is no residency requirement for mayor.

And so the field stands pretty much as it is.

- So is there going to be an appeal?

We don't know.

Does it seem unlikely anyone's gonna appeal?

- The city's Chief Legal Officer, Jennifer Sink, who would be the person who would make that appeal or potentially make that appeal, would not say one way or the other after the hearing was over, but just practically speaking, hard on the heels of that ruling, the Election Commission began issuing qualifying petitions for folks to get on the October ballot to run for mayor and City Council and city court clerk.

But that's another story.

- A whole other story, we have a dedicated series of shows on that.

- But in terms of time, it's a lot more difficult to envision and appeal of this in some way.

- And then the Council is moving forward, or is already passed, right?

That in 2024, there will be a referendum as part of the election that fall for a two year requirement.

- A two year residency requirement is what is going to be proposed as a charter amendment in that referendum for the mayor and for the Council.

- And the last part of this, and we were talking a little bit before the show, and I didn't realize this about now that qualifying petitions have been pulled, and that means that the candidates have to go out and get a certain number of signatures and turn them in, and they have to be valid signatures.

Those valid signatures, there are qualifications on who can sign a petition.

- Yes.

In order for your signature to count toward the total of at least 25 signatures, you have to be a registered voter who lives in the city of Memphis if you're signing for a mayoral candidate, which means in order to sign that qualifying petition and have your signature count, you have to be a resident of the city.

But the person, the candidate whose petition you're signing does not necessarily have to be a citizen of the city of Memphis.

- Also 25 signatures.

But I mean, we can do another show on that.

But I know, Toby, anything more to add?

- No, that's just a wild qualification, right?

That, you know, you can run for mayor, not live here, but you know, if you wanna sign a petition that you have to, it's one of those weird Memphis things.

I hope we get it cleared up, because that just doesn't make any sense.

Can I ask a clarifying question?

- Yeah, please.

- So, on residency here, you have to live in the city of Memphis, though, the day of the election, is that right?

Or is there nothing?

- Yeah, the requirement is that you have to be a resident of the city of Memphis if and when you win the election.

Now, there are some questions about technically do you win the election on election night?

Probably not.

Do you win the election when the Election Commission certifies the vote from that election and then issues you a certificate.

- Right.

- I mean, we could, we could go, it seems very clear.

I mean, there's a lot more questions, but this is seems to be the way it is.

And it is very, very, very odd.

Jeff Calkins wrote a very kind of funny column for us about now anyone really can run, but let's move on.

And since that is, best we can tell settled, unless there is an appeal by the city, which as you said, there's a lot of complications with that, but I wanna move on bigger and, I don't know if it's more serious, but that's certainly not a funny issue, which is around the youth curfew, Julia, which you've been covering, and the back and forth and total lack of clarity about what is going on with the enforcement of a youth curfew that's been on the books in Memphis since what, 1996?

The police have come out and said, "Oh, we're gonna enforce this."

Then they said, "We're studying."

We had, Bill and I had Mayor Jim Strickland on two weeks ago, in the last few weeks.

He was just very clear that there is a million unanswered questions, possibly a hundred unanswered questions.

What have we learned since then?

Because it's still very confusing about the curfew and where kids who are, young people who are picked up, where are they gonna go?

- Right, so, you know, this started off as, you know, early on in April, the police department announced that they were gonna do a juvenile crime abatement program, you know, which was very controversial because, you know, people were concerned about, you know, the police profiling youth in the downtown area.

And that's where it was supposed to be launched is downtown.

So then stakeholders, including Paul Young from the Downtown Memphis Commission, Juvenile Court Judge Sugarman, DA Steve Mulroy, they met with the police and what they came up with was a revised curfew enforcement program.

And then during a City Council meeting, a little bit later on in April, MPD Chief Davis, you know, said that we're gonna do, we're gonna take these kids to Greenlaw Community Center, and it'll also operate as a community center during the day, and then at night it would be a curfew program.

But then, you know, Chief Davis and Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas hosted a town meeting just the other day where Chief Davis said, "No, we never planned "on doing any kind of curfew enforcement here.

"We're only going to be running "our community engagement programs from here, "and we're, you know, the Memphis Parks Department will also be running programming from here."

You know, there's no word on, you know, how they will be enforcing curfew.

It's just kind of up in the air.

You know, the city has said, we changed our mind on, you know, taking kids here up who are out past curfew.

Whereas Chief Davis said, no, we never planned on doing that.

So it's just kind of unclear at this point.

- And there were great concerns, and we've talked about it on the show, with people, and certainly you have talked to them and written about 'em.

And I think all publications here have that people concerned about targeting, people concerned about profiling, concerned about where will the kids go, also, people very, very concerned about crime right now.

And since you wrote a really great series on juvenile crime and jumps in juvenile crime, in terms of auto thefts and other types of crime, there's a big spotlight on crime.

And so the lack of certainty, and I don't know if you wanna chime in, Toby, I mean, it's not helping anyone, Bill, right?

I mean, it's just not.

The people who are worried about this going disastrously wrong or the people who do want to see a tougher on crime youth curfew.

- Well, making like you didn't say something that you said in a public meeting in front of a group of cameras is yet another part, I mean, that does not help to bring clarity to this.

- Yes.

I mean, Julia had a great sentence in one of your stories, "on April 25th, Chief Davis told the Memphis City Council, "the facility would be used for kids out after curfew.

"But on this last Tuesday, she said the city never planned to use a facility to hold kids violating curfew."

I mean, it was all in the public record.

So I don't know what could have been mistaken about that.

- It's an important issue and it's too important for games like that.

- And Strickland said on the show, I mean, that they were looking at Greenlaw, that they weren't, you know, there were a lot of unanswered questions, which was both confusing and you had to give him credit that he was not making things up.

But the lack of clarity is really, particularly at this time when it's so on people's minds.

- And I'll just say the lack of transparency.

This is a so, you know, an ax I've ground on this show before, but that, you know, when you ask questions of the MPD, more often than not you get nothing, you get crickets.

Not even a, "I'm not gonna fulfill your request."

It's absolutely nothing.

A reporter of ours did a cover story about, he wanted one simple answer about the clearance rate here in town, got absolutely nothing back from them.

- Describe what clearance rate is.

It's important, what is clearance rate?

- The clearance rate is basically, how often do we solve a crime in Memphis and it's shockingly low.

Go read our story memphisflyer.com over there.

It's called "What's Wrong with MPD?"

Very well done.

But I was telling them before the show that I filed a FOIA for something really simple and silly from them.

I didn't get word back from two months that I had been denied this silly thing that was outta date by the time.

So, you know, if there's lack of clarity, there's also this immense lack of transparency that's coming from the police department.

- Again, you know, sometimes I'll get people who are saying, well you guys, you know, it's just 'cause you want clicks or you just, you know.

It's really not.

We might get clicks from something like that.

You all might get clicks from something like that.

But really this is public information.

And I don't think any of us, I mean, it's rare that a news organization is asking for some, pushing to get something that could hurt an investigation that could, I don't know, expose personal information.

That's not what we're asking for.

It takes forever.

We're trying to get tickets written by the Tennessee, and it's not just MPD, we're trying to get, for instance, information on the number of tickets written so far by Tennessee Highway Patrol.

It will be a week's worth of tickets will cost $200.

So we wanna get a month.

So we'll spend about $800 to request and receive the tickets that have been written by people who work for the state.

And the other one that I'll go on my rant about is Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

I mean, Joris Ray, there was a big investigation.

He resigned, tens of thousands of dollars were spent on the investigation, he was paid out a year, which was some hundreds of thousands of dollars, we've asked for even, and there's some salacious stuff going on, or accusations of salacious stuff, but we've asked for even basic information about that investigation and nine months later, I think it is, we still haven't gotten it.

And it really is, it should be for people who pay taxes and live in the city and the county and the state because the state's just as bad.

It should be unacceptable.

And it's not about us self-aggrandizing our journalism or something like that.

- It's our government and that is our information.

You know, we understand the rules.

Like you said, we're not gonna try to, you know, bust open an investigation or anything like that.

And then, you know, bringing it back to MPD, there was a meeting just this week of local journalists with the PIO, the public information officer, with the MPD.

Basically everybody's saying, "Hey, you know, we're having a real problem engaging with your office," and laid out all the different ways why.

I don't think anything's gonna change over there.

It might take the next mayor to get things changed over there, but it's been a problem for a long time.

- Yeah.

Let's go back to you here.

Let's say on crime and criminal justice, public safety issues, Julia.

And bail reform is very much on people's minds.

We've at Daily Memphian have written a, you've written a number of stories.

We've talked here, we had DA Mulroy.

We've had numerous people involved with this.

A big change in how bail is administered, I think it was in February or March, that I will grossly simplify as, in part, taking into consideration people's ability to pay and what bail will be set, the level it'll be set at.

There was a lawsuit, and this was a satisfaction, I'm looking at Bill, it was of a consent decree or we were, the county was out of line with basically with state law.

- With state law.

- But now there's a bunch of, you know, there are these stories of people who get out, who get out multiple times.

We're gonna talk about one specific incident here.

Where do things stand with bail reform?

How much from your reporting is this because of the change in February, but is by my memory, there have always been instances, sometimes high profile instances where people were let out on bail and re-offended.

That is not new as of February of this year.

- Yeah, the new bail program, it launched February 15th.

And you know, part of that is, you know, judges or judicial commissioners can have bail hearings.

And we've seen that, you know, the shooters, the alleged shooters of Live Lounge and Prive you know, a few months ago, they had bail hearings and the Live Lounge suspects, they had their bonds lowered to $25,000 from several hundred thousand.

So that's an example of, you know, the new bail hearing process at work.

We've also seen, you know, we've had a few stories about Chase Harris, who was allegedly the person who shot at an off-duty officer at Huey's in April.

He's been out on bail like three or four times.

But that is actually not really part of the new bail reform because he posted bail within a day of arrest.

And part of the new bail hearing process is you have your bail hearing within 48 to 72 hours.

He never got to that point.

So, you know, we are seeing, you know, his bond increase incrementally.

He was first arrested in December where he was released without bail and that was before the bail reform hit.

And then he's, you know, been in jail a few times for thefts and car thefts and, you know, the highest bail that we've seen is $50,000, and that was May 13th, and he posted bond on that.

- And in general, when you see a bond at $50,000 or $25,000, people get out paying, putting up basically 10% of that.

So if it's a $50,000 bond, you've gotta put up about 5,000.

- I mean, they can post a cash bill if they want, but I think typically they do post with a bail bonding company that is up to 10%.

- And I think we reached out, we're gonna reach out and try to get Steve Mulroy, excuse me, District Attorney Steve Mulroy on to talk again about this.

He does not set all these rules.

He's definitely a part of it.

They're judicial commissioners who are picked by Shelby County Commission.

Yeah, there's just a lot of, back to the transparency question, it's like maybe less a judgment on whether this is right or wrong, we've had opinion pieces on all sides of this about frustrations with it or why it is the appropriate system, but boy, there's not a lot of clarity on how it works and what's going on.

- Well, and also the Tennessee legislature is getting involved in this because there are calls and there is draft legislation that says that in certain violent crimes where someone is accused of a violent crime, that the decision on release pending trial can only be made by an elected judge, which would be a general sessions criminal court judge and not judicial commissioners.

And there's some argument about right now those judicial commissioners work under general sessions criminal court and the general sessions judges right now could theoretically take a case from a judicial commissioner and make a decision on that.

- Yeah.

So DA Mulroy, he, you know, to kind of backtrack a little bit on Chase Harris specifically- - The man accused in the shooting at Huey's?

- Yes.

So, you know, the DA's office has filed a motion on, I mentioned that December charge, that he was released on his own recognizance.

The DA has filed a motion to, you know, either in increase or revoke that bail.

And also just yesterday, the DA's office obtained an indictment on Chase Harris.

So currently he is back in jail, so he's got a $210,000 bond.

So we will see what happens with that.

- Bill mentioned the legislature.

We've got a special session of the legislature coming up on guns.

That's in August, I believe.

Ostensibly there was, after the Coventry School shooting in Nashville, a lot of talk about at least a red flag law being passed in Tennessee.

The legislature adjourned before that was done, but they are coming back for a special session.

Toby, where does that stand?

And they can talk about more in a special session.

It doesn't just have to be the proposal for a red flag law.

- That's right.

And August is when the special session is set.

Really, Bill Lee didn't get what he wanted done in this session.

He asked lawmakers, Republican lawmakers, to take up his gun legislation.

They outright refused.

They got in there, they passed the budget really quickly, and they got the heck outta dodge.

I mean, they left Nashville so fast, they didn't wanna take this legislation up.

He said, let's call for a special session just on this gun safety stuff.

And then just earlier this week, there were three Tennessee GOP lawmakers that had an open letter to other lawmakers that said, Look, Bill Lee, you need to abandon this special session.

It is going to be, what did they say was it was gonna be?

A circus up there worse than the Tennessee 3 stuff, you know, all the national media and the national woke mob is gonna show up and protest in Nashville, really put them under the microscope.

They said we're gonna need extra security to keep these angry people away from us as we try to go about our duties.

And to Bill Lee said that this whole special session is nothing but a publicity stunt and it's gonna be awful, asked him to cancel it, I doubt he will, especially after, you know, you've gone to all the trouble and made it public that you're going to, but to me, it just seems like these Republicans, number one, they're not gonna back down from their position on guns, I don't think, and number two, I mean, you know, it's another chance to go face the public.

And boy, they just do not wanna do this on this issue.

They know that something ought to be done, but then they also, you know, have their second amendment principles and all that.

So it could be interesting.

- Let me just mention a couple things and we'll move on from guns.

But the City Council is moving towards a charter amendment.

We had City Council folks on a couple weeks ago, Bill, and they talked about going to, it would basically, this charter amendment in the city would reinstate open carry and conceal carry rules and require safe storage of guns.

It would ban assault rifles, both the sale and the open kind of carry, you could still take them, you could have 'em at home, you could take them to a gun range or that sort of thing, and put in red flag rules.

It is gonna be, if they pass it, it'll go on the August 2024 ballot.

- Right, the August 2024 ballot.

And you actually have three separate questions on there.

So voters will, if it goes on the ballot, voters would actually kind of mix and match.

They could pass one of the three provisions or they could pass some combination of them, or they could pass all three.

- I think when Mayor Strickland was on, I will paraphrase him loosely, he certainly supported that direction, but thought this legally is gonna have no binding.

I mean, it seems very unlikely.

But again, other people, people who want to have more gun control feel like it's at least a symbolic thing and you take it to the courts and you lose, but at least you've sort of put it out there, but it really in the end is not gonna be decided by the City Council.

- Right.

And also Jeff Warren, who talked about it on this show, who is the prime sponsor of this has said, yeah, it probably will go to court.

But I think he's looking that this might be fodder for discussion at the special session in August.

That there might actually be some Republican state legislators and certainly some Democratic state legislators who think that the way forward here is some kind of option for urban areas of the state versus what happens in rural counties in the state.

- Well, we at least saw that play out in the cannabis situation.

Remember we were gonna try to decriminalize that here locally and all that, and the state came in and just squashed it like a bug.

We know that the state doesn't love to give up its power to the cities at all.

So I don't have high hopes for it, but I like the idea.

- One more on guns and we'll move on.

And you correct me if I get any of this wrong, Julia, the local assistant district attorneys have been told not to prosecute adults under 21 for having a gun without a permit, given a ruling by a federal judge in Knoxville.

So basically extends Tennessee's 2021 permitless carry law, which was limited, which said people 21 and older could carry guns.

The lawsuit from an advocacy group out of California says, "No, that's discrimination against adults 18 to 21."

And so now you can open carry if you're 18 years old in Tennessee.

- Right, exactly.

The DA's office is, you know, enforcing that lawsuit.

You know, one of the Deputy DAs, he emailed, you know, all the assistant district attorneys and told them, "Hey, if an adult is 18 through 21, they are legally, we're not gonna prosecute them for carrying guns," so.

- We will move on from there to, and we'll do more shows on all this and probably try to do a preview of the special session before it happens again in August.

I wanna go on to TCAP scores.

This is the first year that TCAP scores on reading at a statewide level are being used on whether third graders can move forward or will be held back.

And the first round of testing was last week, or was recently, sorry about that.

But the testing, the results came out this week and we'll go through the state.

Statewide, about 60% of third graders, that's, you know, they're about 50,000 third graders statewide.

Sixty percent were found to be not proficient.

Locally, within Memphis Shelby County Schools, seventy-six percent were found to not be proficient.

Within the suburban schools, Germantown did best where it was 20% were not proficient, Arlington 22%, Bartlett 50%, Collierville 22%, Lakeland 30%, and Millington 65%.

There's another round of testing that will happen, and then there were changes of the state law this last year.

Is that right, bill?

That allows some, before we sort of, if you missed, if you didn't hit it on this test, you didn't have a lot of options.

Now there's some other options if maybe you can help describe.

- There are some appeals that parents can make and say, the score does not accurately reflect my child's ability level on this.

The other option is what those of us who are of some age used to call summer school, where you go to try to boost your thing and actually retest again on this particular thing.

- And there's some amount of if you commit to tutoring next year as part of that.

Ad the school system, I think all the local school systems, I certainly know that Memphis-Shelby County Schools does have a lot more money right now.

It's kind of a post-COVID thing and a state thing for tutors and for afterschool programming.

So we will see what happened.

We also did, last fall, I don't always do this, but on this, if you're at all interested, if you go to Daily Memphian and search for David Waters, David Waters wrote a five, six part, really, really extensive series on other states that have done these third grade retention rules where it has maybe worked well, where it has had unintended consequences, an incredibly complicated issue that's gonna affect a lot of kids and a lot of families.

I should also say that 76% of third graders, they're about 8,500 third graders in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, so that's about 6,500 kids who are at this point on the verge of being held back if some of these other things don't come together.

- There were also some interesting statistics from the Achievement School District, which is in the midst of a lot of change and the numbers for the Achievement School District, most of those schools being in Memphis, but not part of Memphis Shelby County Schools, those schools collectively showed about 11% of the third graders were reading at grade level.

- Yeah, that was not good.

Thank you for, yeah, I skipped over that number.

Let's go with just a couple minutes left.

A couple things, again, back to the state.

You had mentioned some movement on cannabis maybe at the state level, and you also mentioned rail there.

A couple proposals.

- Very quickly on cannabis this year, the governor just signed a new law in to bring regulation to what's really a wild west situation with the Tennessee cannabis market.

I mean, walk into a MAPCO or a truck stop and you can find these products easily reachable.

You know, kids can get 'em.

They look like candy.

You don't have to be 21 and over.

There's very few regulations on how this product gets to market.

A lot of these facilities are unlicensed.

If you wanna make a hemp gummy, you just have to be registered as a food processor in the state.

Lots of flexibility.

It's really loose in there.

This new law brings to it a lot of licensing and registration, permits, all those things.

And so what that's gonna mean for consumers when this, you know, is kind of finally established within a year, is all those products will now have to be back behind the counter.

You have to be 21 and over to get it, and when you see a, you know, a gummy that says it's 25 milligrams THC in there, that's what it is.

It's been tested.

All those things are not tested right now.

A real wild west situation.

And it's been bad for, you know, they've seen overdose cases.

Tennessee Poison Control Center saw more than a hundred cases go through there.

Vanderbilt said that, you know, they saw 35 cases of children under 5 coming into their emergency rooms with kind of cannabis related things.

And then moving on to the other thing, there's a group called the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, TACIR, rolls right off the tongue.

They've been studying for about a year, a new rail system that could go, that could connect Tennessee's big four cities.

And it's really exciting for rail experts, you know, mass transit folks, it could be a great thing there.

Report is due in July and then we'll see, you know, how the legislature takes it from there.

A lot of federal money out there to plan this stuff though.

- All right, that's lot.

We had a few more things we're gonna get to, but we ran out of time.

Thank you all.

Thank you, Toby, thank you Julia, thank you Bill.

Thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show, you can get the full show online at wkno.org or you can go to YouTube and search for Behind the Headlines.

You can also get the full audio podcast of the show at iTunes, Spotify, Daily Memphian, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much and we'll see you next week.

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