- (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.

- Memphis Police Chief CJ Davis, tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I am Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by CJ Davis, Police Chief, Memphis Police Department.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll talk as much as we can, all kinds of things to talk to you about.

I appreciate having you back.

You'll be four years in the job appointed by Mayor Strickland in June of this year, I believe.

- That is correct.

- Crime spiked nationally in COVID and after COVID, it really spiked here as well.

But we've been down, down last year in the key categories.

What do you, looking into this next year, what do you look to do to keep that crime in the direction that all the citizens and all the people, I mean, vast majority of people want to see happen?

- Well, I think one thing that we have to do is really appreciate the men and women of the department and their engagement in the work.

And it's really important that everybody in their respective roles in the department really understand how important they are to keeping crime down.

Our commanders, our supervisors, our detectives, we have really put a lot of attention into a holistic approach as it relates to crime fighting.

And when I say holistic, you may have heard about our Code Zero operations.

Code Zero operations really address not just enforcement, but they also address other, you know, community concerns like blight and nuisance properties.

We've been working with our DA's Office because just corner stores sometimes become breeding grounds for all kinds of, you know, illicit activity.

And we are really focusing on how do we change the whole narrative about communities and neighborhoods and how people feel about their environment, their personal environment, the places that they have to drive by or walk by every day.

So when I say crime is down 24% or 20%, that means nothing to a person who continues to see, you know, problems or hear gunfire at night.

So we are really trying to help the perception of crime by making sure that everybody in the police department knows how important their role is.

- When you take that holistic approach, I mean the criminal justice system, the public safety effort, there are many parts and pieces.

The judge is separate from the DA, separate from the Sheriff's Department, separate from the federal government and U.S.

Marshals.

And we could go on and on, you know better.

And we've had lots and lots of different people here.

You can only control what you can control, which is MPD.

- That's right.

- Do you feel like though, if you all do one of these Code Zero, I'm saying that right, Code Zero operations, and you are arresting people or you are citing businesses, or you are identifying blight, are the other parts of government on the same page that you all are on?

- I think we're getting there.

I think the processes, you know, in other areas of government are starting to realize that community members are paying attention too.

If I arrest a person that lives on a particular street for, you know, breaking in a car or whatever the case might be, and that person is breaking in another car in the next three days, you know, the people in that neighborhood, they know what's happening.

And we're starting to get more engagement from our community members because not just the police department and my officers are frustrated, community members are frustrated, not to mention violent crime.

When you have an individual that commits a violent crime, it is very concerning, it's frustrating.

And for me, it's unacceptable for that individual to be let out because of a low bond or whatever the case might be, and commit another crime.

So for me, I stay victim focused, who's the next victim?

How do we prevent our community members from being victims of crime?

- How do you do that within the constraints of the job?

I mean, you don't go to every judge, you don't go to every district attorney or assistant district attorney.

How do you convey what you just said to them and try to get them to see things your way?

- Well, and I try to be fair about it, you know?

I've had meetings with many of our partners, you know, whether it's the DA's Office, the Sheriff's Department, you know, other chiefs in the area.

We have had meetings about how do we make the system work, not just for the Memphis Police Department, 'cause what's happening in Collierville is happening in Memphis, what's happening in Millington and all of the other surrounding jurisdictions impact us as well.

And so we have come together and really meet on a regular basis and now with our DA so that we can really talk about what our frustrations are.

We have some very, very closed door type meetings about what we need as police departments in order to keep our community safe.

- Well, I was gonna go to Bill, but the DA you mentioned who has been under a lot of pressure.

He is been on the show, he was on the show eight weeks ago, something like that.

Is is the DA receptive-- - Yeah.

- To what you're saying?

- Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

And I think sometimes it's just a matter of having those conversations.

You know, and really reminding people, I know what my responsibility is as a police chief, but everybody needs to be concerned about why our citizens expect us to perform in a certain way.

And I think we've seen that level of frustration in the community, and we are seeing some responsiveness now.

- Bill Dries.

- Chief, I believe there is also, you've also started tracking victims and perpetrator differently so that you have more of a feel and these incidents are not in isolation when what's really happening is part of an ongoing series of events.

- Absolutely.

And tracking is important because, you know, it's not just that we wanna be alarmed or we feel like the information is important to us so that we can act appropriately.

We want the community to know.

So that's why we have started tracking repeat offenders and domestic violence perpetrators who sometimes, you know, are under the radar.

A domestic violence incident is just another aggravated assault that adds to the total numbers of where we are as a city.

And so focusing on those individuals that might be out, you know, and wanted, we're apprehending them because, you know, they're committing crimes over and over again.

We talk about repeat offenders, it's a multitude of individuals that, you know, my saying is, you know, twenty percent of people commit eighty percent of the crime.

Of course the numbers are, but just to give some context to, it's not a large group of individuals in our community that's committing crimes.

And so we're starting to be more laser focused on who those individuals are and what is the appropriate track in the criminal justice system.

Either get them help and intervention through our group violence intervention or prosecute them to the fullest letter of the law so that we can keep them from continuing to commit crimes in our city.

- The neighborhoods where these folks who are going through the system over and over again, I would imagine the people in the neighborhood know this story very well.

- Yes.

- Before the first patrol car ever rolls up.

- Oh, absolutely.

They know about the plight of that particular neighborhood.

And we have some neighborhoods for decades that have been, you know, sort of under the cloud of various types of issues, whether it's drug activity, gun violence, gang violence, you know, just community violence in general.

And so sort of triaging those communities and letting them know that we are here and we're not going away.

And there's certain communities that we continue to be present and go back to and talk to those community members so that they know, we understand, you know, what you're going through.

And we're doing everything in our power to try to deal with those individuals in a way that's sustainable.

We don't want to just do a one and done operation.

We want sustainable results.

We want to follow individuals who have long, lengthy criminal histories.

We want to put an end to that level of violence with that individual.

And that's what we've been doing, sort of cherry picking folks that we know are repeat offenders.

- Right, the Code Zero operations also involve City Code Enforcement.

- Yes.

- How important is getting the geography right?

Finding the abandoned or burned out house that people may be using to sell drugs out of?

- Oh, it's really important.

It's sort of like the root of the causes of some of the other problems.

Anytime you have, you know, communities that have vacant properties where there's homelessness and people who need help in getting appropriate housing or whether the houses are used for drug transactions or even drug use or other types of nefarious types of activity, it's important for us to work with code enforcement, not just to deal with the property owner or cite the property owner, that does nothing.

Most property owners that own these abandoned properties, they don't live here in Memphis and they don't really have the level of concern that those community members have who continue to experience.

So what has worked for me in the past, I did a lot of work in code enforcement in the city of Atlanta.

I spent a year with the code enforcement operation as a police commander to sort of overhaul that process and begin taking properties.

And we implemented a program that was a judicial interim, really meaning take the property.

If the owner does not correct the problem, or if it's a nuisance property, the city takes the property and put it in the land bank.

And it had been very successful.

And I think Memphis, you know, and we're looking at that through this administration, Mayor Young is really looking at how do we have more sustainable results with blighted properties in the city.

- For the Code Zero, these kind of saturation of neighborhoods, and Aaron Fleming on our staff, I think you all had, he was went on a ride along and spent some hours of the night with an officer.

That brings up things that are controversial for some, you know, that are debated at City Council, that are debated nationally around pretextual stops.

We can point to incidents where that's gone haywire here and elsewhere.

Pretextual stops is, I will define it and you can correct me.

You know, things like expired tags or the smell of marijuana or broken taillights or, you know, a car that's not up to code or.

- Right.

- And then arrest coming from that, or a gun is found in that, but also things can go wrong.

How do you all view and have discipline and control over these kinds of stops of small offenses, temporary tags, for instance, not turning into something more.

- Well, first of all, we're focused on the violent crime.

And temporary tags is, you know, sometimes an avenue for a criminal, quite frankly, especially, and not necessarily an expired tag, but sometimes temporary tags or something that, a tag that was run off on a Xerox machine, it's obvious to a police officer this is not a legitimate tag.

And what we have found is a lot of our, you know, undesirable folks who are committing crimes in our city are utilizing vehicles that are stolen and placing temporary tags and counterfeit tags on those vehicles.

And so we are not focused on a person whose tag has been expired for 30 or 60 days.

We know we got tag office issues.

You know, we know people can't get a tag sometimes, you know, in a timely manner.

That is not the violent person that we're looking for.

So when we talk about pretextual stops, stopping a vehicle for something minor in order to investigate, to go on sort of a witch hunt or an expedition to find something else.

We train our officers that's not the business of the Memphis Police Department.

The business of the Memphis Police Department is to intercept violent criminals and make our roads safer and try to stop those people who are involved in property crimes.

- Midway through the show, we're talking about driving, I think this is maybe more anecdotal than science, it's definitely more, but this is what I hear and comments on Daily Memphian and so on.

One of the two places where most Memphians intersect with some kind of criminal behavior is broken windows, cars broken into, which I think is down and I want ask you one, how did that happen?

Let's just start there.

That was the one where people would say, "Yeah, I was at a Grizzlies game.

Yeah, I was in a parking lot.

Twenty cars got broken into."

It was rampant.

- Yeah.

- The numbers have come down.

- Yeah.

- How did you, was that the police?

Was that the DA's Office?

Was that everyone, or did people just get bored of breaking into cars?

- I think it was everyone, but I will give my officers and my team credit for being focused on those areas and us putting together plans that ensured that we had more visibility in certain places at the right time.

When we analyze our data, we do it weekly.

We have comstat meetings, and we really narrow down what time of day is this crime occurring?

What days of the week is this crime occurring?

And that helps us to deploy the resources in the right place.

So different precincts have different strategies.

Appling Farm strategy is highly focused on property crimes, parking lots, various retail stores, so that we can address those specific crimes.

Not as much violent crime at Appling Farms.

However, in South Memphis we have different types of crime.

We have open air drug sales, we have gang violence.

And so the plan for Appling, excuse me, for, you know, say Rain Station or Airway Station, it was really just customizing and dealing with the problems that exist and making sure that we were smart in our deployments.

- Was it also, some people have said it was a small number of people doing many, many of these car break-ins?

- Yes, yes.

And having a heavy handed approach on those individuals and walking them through the criminal justice system.

- The other place in which people intersect, I think a lot with crime or a sense of things being out of control is driving.

So if people are driving with temporary tags, cars that are missing bumpers, the lights are out.

People driving very fast, whether that's on the, you know, a main artery like Poplar, or on the highways, you know, coming up to a red light and just going, you know, all that kind of stuff makes people, it's illegal, and it also makes people feel a lack of safety, especially when crime, violent crime was so high.

- Absolutely.

- How have you tried to address that kind of reckless speeding, dangerous driving?

- Well, we have really tried to ensure that we have our office mobilized in a way where they are doing traffic enforcement.

Traffic enforcement is important.

And also working with our Tennessee Highway Patrol.

Since I've been here, since 2021, I have been working hard to get THP to help us with our state roads, especially our interstates.

Memphis police had predominantly had taken on the load of dealing with interstate accidents and also reckless driving, and at the same time responding to calls for service.

So being focused and making sure, when I talked about every person taking on their responsibility, our traffic enforcement, you can't just sit on the interstate.

You have to work the interstate.

And so making sure that our officers are active, they're engaged, and they're starting to see the results too.

Our traffic accidents are down.

We're not where we wanna be as far as traffic fatalities in our city because we have some reckless drivers.

Everybody talks about, and say you're from Atlanta, you have volume, you know, the traffic is terrible.

Traffic in Atlanta is terrible.

But we have mean drivers in Memphis.

And when I say mean drivers, we have people sometimes that will run you off the road.

And calming traffic means we have to do traffic enforcement.

- Is that pulling people over and citing them, or is it, I mean, in mass or what?

- Well, it's pulling people over and citing them not just, you know, during a Code Zero operation, but as a daily activity.

You know, daily activity.

And it's not your muscle cars all the time.

Your Challengers, your Camaros and your Corvettes.

It's average, everyday citizens are going to work at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning who are driving crazy, driving in the emergency lanes and weaving in and outta traffic.

All of it has to be dealt with and comped.

- Bill.

- Chief, let's talk about something you've put a priority on, and that is more civilians in the police department.

It's not something we normally think about if we don't work for the police department, but what's the mix you're trying to get at with civilians versus commissioned officers and is this an expanded role for civilians?

- Well, what we really would like to do is identify places and roles in the police department that a civilian absolutely could do and support the role of our sworn staff.

We created positions for homicide analysts.

We have college students and other individuals that are good with stats that could very well help pull the pieces together on various types of homicides to free up the investigator to do investigative type of work.

And they help connect the dots.

So we've created positions for homicide analysts and those analyst positions are not new to, you know, law enforcement.

It's new to Memphis and that's a culture shift.

But in other agencies, officers and, you know, commanders have found that analysts, whether they're crime statisticians, homicide analysts, intelligence analysts have been a very, very critical role to support investigations and the clearance rate, you know, and to be able to work on various leads in a timely fashion.

So the investigator, while he's out on the street or interviewing different individuals, you have analysts in the office that's actually doing all of the investigative type of, you know, gathering information, making phone calls, helping with victim witness types of connections.

And it really works for police departments to get out of the mode of the only person who can do this kind of work is a sworn officer.

Yeah.

- As that's happening, there's also a really pronounced emphasis on intervention programs.

And the ones that I think most people see are not inside the department, but they certainly work with the department on this.

How successful has intervention been in the short time we've had?

- I think we've had to reassess and, you know, tweak and visit other cities.

I sent, you know, some of my team to Detroit.

Matter of fact, we've sent teams twice to Detroit as we try to find that sweet spot with group violence intervention.

I think it's effective, but we have to make sure that we have buy-in from our officers.

Because there's this thought sometimes that those individuals that are on the street, they're committing crimes and we need to deal with them the way police deal with criminals.

But there are individuals that deserve a second chance that may not have committed something so serious where there is a different avenue of resources, expungements for records, help with getting a job.

And it's sort of a, you know, the intervention itself is sort of a track to keep that person from continuing to be in groups.

And sometimes it's not the person that we're actually looking to prosecute.

Sometimes it's those individuals that are would-be criminals that are associated with that individual that we're targeting.

We are in a better place now.

We're not where we need to be.

And I think that's what some of the work that we've done with Dr. Mohammed and Dr. Thomas Ab I think is definitely gonna help us.

- In the fall, with just a few minutes left here, and we can do a whole show on this, but in the fall, the prior presidential administration, the Department of Justice came forward with a report that was, you know, in many ways kind of scathing and critical of MPD and some practices, series of anecdotes that they pulled of what seemed like really, you know, bad situations, bad behavior on the part of MPD officers.

What have you learned, if anything, or taken from, I know you don't want to enter into consent decree.

It's a whole new administration, it's unlikely that would happen, but do you look at that report and learn anything and change anything within MPD?

- Yeah, we're not gonna ever just ignore, you know, the work that some other entity has presented.

But at the same time, we want to look at it with a very critical eye and really identify, are these situations where it was a one-time incident and the employee was dealt with, or is this a systemic problem?

And we as a police department, and I as a police chief have always put a lot of emphasis on making sure that we're department of high standards.

We are a department that is transparent and that when we identify problems with our department, we quickly work to address them.

- Well, let me ask you, I mentioned the change in administration.

Do you feel or see any difference at this local level with the change in the federal government?

- Not yet.

But you know, we're all, you know, on pins and needles waiting to see what type of impact we'll have, you know, as law enforcement.

We will continue to do the work here that needs to be done in Memphis, you know, aside of what happens, you know, in D.C.

But, you know, we're optimistic that we will continue to get support from the federal government as it relates to the grants and things that are very much needed in our department.

- Last we talked about change in behavior.

And you may be limited in what you can say on it, but we're a little bit over two years since the killing of Tyre Nichols.

What do you, without specifically talking about that, I mean, there's a lawsuit pending against the city.

I get those limitations, but again, do you look at what happened?

The video was there, I remember asking Jim Strickland, your former boss, and it made him physically ill, you know, he talked about seeing those videos.

What do you, is there anything you can say you take from that and that has changed within MPD as a result of what happened there?

- I think the biggest change was that, you know, the department was forthcoming in putting it out.

That was a change in itself and how we deal with, you know, egregious situations.

I think it wasn't just a change for the Memphis Police Department.

That was a change nationally on how we quickly address the bad things that happened.

And it was very unfortunate.

And as said, we are currently, you know, in a litigation-type process, but we will always use those types of instances to better our department.

- You're a lifelong police officer, worked with all these police officers, when things of any bad behavior happens, do you hear from other officers who are angry about it?

I mean what are the emotions that the other people around go through, and they don't speak to the press and the public frequently?

- Right, right.

Well, for one thing, we're not a club.

You know, and I think, you know, the thought is that police agencies, it's a club of individuals that have, you know, this the thin blue line type of mentality.

That is not who I've ever been as a police chief.

And there are so many officers that when they get up in the morning, they don't wear this uniform.

We don't wake up as police officers, we wake up as citizens too.

And the same level of vitriol and anger and concern and hurt that others in the community felt or feel about those types of incidents, we feel too, yeah.

- Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Appreciate, it's great to have you on.

We hope to have you on you again.

I think people love hearing from you and knowing what's going on within the department.

Thank you, Bill.

Thank you all for joining us.

If you missed any of the episodes, you can get the full episode at wkno.org or download the podcast or go to YouTube, Daily Memphian, wherever you get your video.

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

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