- (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.

- New Shelby County Sheriff Anthony Buckner, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Anthony Buckner.

He is the newly elected sheriff for Shelby County.

Thanks for being here again.

- Happy to be here.

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

Before we get started with a conversation with Anthony Buckner, I should, one, say that we tape this a week before it airs.

So if there are things we don't get to with him, it's just because there's a tape delay before we air it.

But that's in part because we're doing a lot of shows focused on the federal and state elections.

We last week did Chaz Molder, one of the Democratic candidates for one of the three districts, US House districts that now divide Memphis.

We had Brent Taylor on.

We have Justin Pearson coming up.

We've got Heidi Kuhn coming up.

We've reached out to David Kustoff's office and Charlie Hatcher's office to try to get all those candidates on before election day, November 3rd and early voting starting October 14th.

We also had Jerri Green on, the Democratic candidate for governor, and we're hoping to get Marsha Blackburn on before election day.

But we're very happy to have you here.

I should say congratulations on your win.

You're here in suit, as we saw in the intro there when you were campaigning.

- Absolutely.

- But 25 years at the Sheriff's Office in various capacities, now at the top.

It seems, this last week, I guess, yesterday as we record this, but last week you did let media into the jail to do a tour and talk about some of the repairs that are going on, the physical space and the challenges.

That clearly, I mean, that you did that on what?

Your second day or first day?

That physical space is clearly one of your priorities to deal with.

- Absolutely.

Not only is it my priority, but it's been the priority of the community.

When I was running for office, I think there were three things that the voters were really highly interested in.

And the jail always topped the list of things of importance.

And so it was on my first day that I brought the media in because I did want them to see some of the challenges that we continue to face, but then also some of the progress that we've made, some of the repairs, the investment that the County Commission has made particularly in the jail.

I wanted them to see how we were tracking in terms of replacing the doors inside of the jail, working escalators.

We have 10 escalators that have been in disrepair for many years, but now, as of today, we have all 10 working.

So wanted to make sure that we were able to highlight some of those successes.

- Short of a, I mean, even if the money were magically there tomorrow to build a jail, it would be many years before it was built, the whole decision about where it would go, all of those things.

So you're- - Absolutely.

- The county, the community is stuck with that jail, that building for a while.

What are other spending priorities?

Let's just stay with the physical plant for a second and then we'll begin to segue into the people and the processes and so on.

But other repairs or improvements that need to be done and money being spent upon?

- So as we've talked about many of times, the 201 Poplar, in particular, is a 40-year-old facility.

So there's going to always be something that's breaking or needing repairs.

And so I'm focused right now to take a look at what is it that we need to really prioritize right now?

What can we hold off to the next budget cycle?

One thing that I have really been concerned about is from a maintenance perspective, we've been responding to emergency after emergency after emergency.

And so what I'm looking to do as a sheriff is to get ahead of these.

So if there are things that we can prevent, let's try to prevent it.

One of the conversations I look forward to having with Mayor Lowery is looking at the physical plant, as you just talked about, and doing a comprehensive study on, hey, how much life is really left in this building?

I think the last jail study focused more on the need for a new jail, but actually looking at our electrical systems, our plumbing apparatuses, and just really seeing what is it that we need to do, how aggressive do we need to be?

Because we are going to be in that building for the next two, three, four years, maybe even longer than that.

So we definitely got to have a strong maintenance plan.

- One thing you talked about when you were on the show, and I think it was after the show, we didn't get to this.

So it was real wonky, but that's this show.

So I'm going to go there with you.

And you talked about the need that you all, or a desire, to have your own staff plumber, welder, people on staff, because, as I remember you telling me, if you have a toilet go out or a plumbing issue, you then have to start moving inmates.

And moving inmates isn't like moving somebody to a different hotel, not to be flippant, but a hotel room.

And I had never thought about that, that you have people, you might have gang related people, people on two sides of an accusation of violent crime.

So you've got to move, it's not simple.

You've got to move people, violent people, less violent.

All of that is delayed if you can't immediately fix that toilet, that sink, that plumbing issue, the electrical issue, the welders.

Is that something, and really I think you, what you talked about with me was, we kind of just need our own, to employ our own people, not contract people.

Is that something, as wonky and seemingly small as that is, is that something you'll think you'll be able to prioritize?

- So we do have allocated positions for welders, plumbers, and electricians.

The problem that we face is we don't pay competitive wages.

And so we got to get those wages increased so they can be competitive.

Because what I don't want the jail to be is a training ground for plumbers, electricians, and welders, and they go off somewhere else.

And so that's what we've dealt with.

And so we're in a position now where we have to bring in vendors to do the welding, to do the plumbing, to do the electrical work.

And that's costly.

And that takes us back to the County Commission to ask for more dollars.

- And to pay more, and then we will move on, but it is interesting to me, these kind of detailed ways in which government works or doesn't work well.

Do you as now a sheriff have the capacity to pay somebody more to be a plumber?

Or do you have to go back to the County Commission and say, "We're going to pay X to the electricians that we're going to hire."

I mean, is, or do they just say, "Here's your budget, spend it as you see fit."

- So we can, we're getting to the technicalities of it.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- So based upon their grade or their position, there's a cap on how much you can pay.

So I would have to work with compensation to elevate the grade, to give them more money.

But those are things that we're looking at now, but we'll certainly be trying to figure out how do we work with the Shelby County Government's Human Resources to make these adjustments.

And some of these things are going to take time.

And I will say this, you talked about separating people from within, inside the facility.

So when you look at the state penitentiary, the state prisons, they generally do not want to go over 80% capacity.

And the reason being, when you go over 80% capacity, you start facing challenges separating people who will be enemies within the facilities or rival gang members or even people who are charged with the same crime.

- Right, right.

Bill?

- Also during the campaign, I think you talked about seeing the jail in Columbus, Ohio.

Is that the right town?

- Yes.

- And you liked what you saw there.

- Absolutely.

- Because their approach to a new jail was to build it in segments, I think.

- Yes.

Yes.

- Talk more about that.

- Yeah.

So let me say this.

There is no doubt in my mind, the need for a new jail, but there's also no doubt in my mind that we will face a challenge as a county to pay for a new jail if we approached it from let's build it all at one time.

And as I was sitting in Columbus, Ohio, particularly Franklin County Jail, to hear them talk about building their jail over the last four or five years in three phases, that really was fascinating to me.

It sparked my attention.

So I began to to consider bringing that conversation back to Memphis and Shelby County, which I have done, because I do believe that's a smart approach.

And for us, you know, maybe it would take five or six years to build a new jail rather than the three years or four years that it's taken Franklin County.

And so I think if we take that approach, then it would be financially more feasible, because while I get a chance to sit here as a sheriff of Shelby County, I'm also a taxpayer.

I live in this community.

I want to make sure that smart decisions are being made.

And if we were able to do it in phases, I know that my team at the Sheriff's Office, we could figure out who to prioritize to move to a phase one or phase two or phase three.

So I think that should be the conversation now is trying to figure out how much it would cost to build it in phases so we can build smartly.

- Mm-hmm, so one phase might be a certain kind of detainee- - Right.

- Right?

Or a certain, detainees with a certain need, right?

- Right.

So with Franklin County, they took their most violent offenders first and moved them into phase one.

That could be the same approach for us at the Sheriff's Office, Shelby County Sheriff's Office, or we may choose to go a different route.

We understand, at least I understand, that at any given time, we could have 60 or 70 detainees who are under some type of detoxification program or protocol.

And so maybe for phase one for us, put, taking these detainees, placing them in phase one where we can monitor them more closely, put a nurse in there, could be a smarter approach for us.

I would just have to look at our population at the time, what's the pressing issue inside of the facility at that moment, and then make the smartest decision on which detainees to move first.

- And it's not like you don't have programs now in the current environment.

You have a group, I think, called Inner Circle?

- Inside Circle.

- That's Inside, yes.

That's already working with detainees there, right?

- Right, right.

And that program is focused on trauma-informed, trying to.

One thing we know is healed people heal people, hurt people hurt people.

So this program is designed to heal some of our high-offending detainees from the trauma that they may have faced outside of the facility in hopes that they would take that training back to the housing unit that they're assigned and begin to heal their neighbor that is also another detainee.

But yes, we do have a ton of programs in our facility.

But one thing that I've talked about on the campaign trail and off the campaign trail is that the physical plants, the structure and the makeup of the building, makes it very difficult, one, to manage detainees from a security standpoint, but then also rehabilitate detainees as well.

I had an opportunity to sit inside that or attend that program that you just mentioned, Inside Circle, and the room that we were in was not designed for curriculum or classroom lesson.

And so there were a number of environmental distractions that made it very challenging for even me to pay attention to the curriculum that was being placed in front of us.

And so I began to just sit and think if we did have a facility where classroom space was actually considered, and it's designed for that, then maybe our programs could be far more successful than they are today.

And so there are just a number of benefits that would come from a new facility.

We're thinking totally differently today about corrections than we were in late '70s when 201 Poplar was built.

- Right.

Is the County Commission going to continue to see the stream of emergency funding needs or is that something that you're in the process of moving past?

- So my hope is we can identify a facility administrator, who literally, their job is to design a plan to make sure that we are addressing issues before they become emergencies.

Now, there are some components of 201 Poplar that's out of our maintenance purview, such, you know, we talked just a couple of months ago about the HVAC systems being broken.

That remains a responsibility of the county.

Some of our boiler systems and things like that.

And so I think my job as a sheriff, and certainly the job of my team, is to make sure we are in constant communication with whomever will run the maintenance side for the county, making sure that we are in constant communication with the County Commission as well as the mayor's administration, because no one wants to continue to respond to emergencies.

And so I think collectively, us working together, we'll be able to prevent crises or emergencies from happening, or at least reduce the frequency of them.

- And the facilities administrator would be different from the chief of the jail, right?

- Absolutely.

This person, literally, and my conversation with them will be about, "I want you to walk this building every day "and understand and know every light bulb that's not working, every electrical socket that's not working."

So again, we are being aggressive on the preventive side than just constantly responding to the emergency.

- Speaking of emergencies, I mean, there have been deaths in the jail over the last year.

It's various reasons.

I think we talked about when you were on, in the campaign, you know, sometimes it's someone, you mentioned drugs or detox or people who are just not healthy.

Do you have a plan to, is there a way to reduce the number of people dying in the jail?

- So I think today as I sit here, we're seeing that reduction happen in real time.

I think last year we ended the year with 13 deaths.

And I do want to say this, any death is one too many.

So far this year, I think we've had two or three that happened outside of our facility, but they were within the custody of the Sheriff's Office.

So we're seeing a reduction as I sit here today.

One of the things that I know feeds into that is increasing our staffing, increasing the amount of eyes that are monitoring and managing inmate movement.

And so we have been extremely aggressive in hiring more correctional officers to work inside of our facility.

So right now, we have a class that we're slated to start October the 16th.

Today, we have 77 candidates that are still in the pool.

I'm hoping that all 77 will still be with us on October the 16th.

But I think if we're able to hire all 77, it would probably be the largest class of corrections deputies that we've seen in the Sheriff's Office.

And if not, it would certainly be the largest in modern day history.

So I'm excited about that.

That's going to be way more eyes inside of our facility, and we'll continue to chip away at that 350 shortage that we're experiencing today.

- Let's shift a bit.

Bill may come back to some of the jail questions, but let's talk a bit about ICE and immigration.

That's been a big issue obviously with the Memphis Safe Task Force, with the Trump administration.

It's been, they are moving towards a 2,000-a-day nationally, you know, deportation goal, and they've hit that apparently at some level.

And as we taped this a few days ago, but it'll, as people watch, it's more than a week ago, a hundred and twenty-two people were arrested at a bar and through an ICE-type raid or an immigration-related raid.

What is the Sheriff's Office, because the sheriff is the jail, but also you do police, what I think of, and they're policing and patrolling, and you, you yourself were part of undercover units back in the day and there's the Sheriff's Office has often been part of task force focused on various things in the city and county.

What level of coordination do you have with let's just say ICE or the federal government around immigration issues?

- So the Sheriff's Office doesn't have any involvement or any coordination with ICE, Immigrations and Customs.

Sheriff's deputies go out all throughout the week throughout many parts of Memphis and Shelby County looking for people who are wanted or who have committed crimes.

Our focus has not been focusing on the immigration status of anyone.

We were not made aware of any kind of raid that was going to happen over the weekend.

I checked and none of those detained came to our jail.

I'm not exactly sure where they were taken, but they were not brought to our jail.

So right now there is no coordination between the Sheriff's Office and Immigration and Customs.

Our focus is literally doing the job that we did last week and last month.

- Do you get requests from ICE or the federal government that say, "Hey, is this person in the jail?

We think they're an illegal immigrant."

And do you, is part of intake to the jail checking someone's immigration status?

- To the extent that we follow the ICE or immigration rules, any person who is arrested and they're brought to jail, the question is asked, "Are you a United States citizen?"

And if they answer the question other than, any way other than yes, then we inform Immigration and Customs.

It doesn't matter which country they come from, we make that notification.

And from there, Immigration and Customs would tell us if they want to interview that individual.

Most of the time they don't, but some of the times they do.

- So that number of requests to interview hasn't increased in the last year, year and a half?

- No, because it's based off the number.

I think our average daily arrests sits somewhere around 60.

We saw it actually spike after the task force first started.

But I think it's kind of leveled out for the most part.

So the numbers really haven't changed much this year as opposed to when the task force first started.

- Okay.

Back to Bill, about 10 minutes left in the show.

- And the feds have a 48-hour period to come in and say, "We want to take custody of that person," if they do, right?

- Right.

So they have 48 hours.

If they notify us that they are interested in the person who has declared that they're not from or were not born in the United States, they have 48 hours to come interview or pick this person up.

Anytime after that, any minute past 48, we release them, and from there they, you know, I don't know what their protocols are, but they're released from our custody.

- You and Mayor Lowery have been talking to each other, even during the campaign.

- Right.

- Kind of putting your heads together.

But also part of it was to, I think, let people know that, "Hey, we're talking.

We're going to work together."

- Right.

- How important has that been?

- Well, that was one of the things that I think voters were deciding on during the campaign season.

They wanted to elect people that they believe could work together.

And so I've had the opportunity to get to know now Mayor Lowery over the past eight years when he was Commissioner Lowery.

And so I think this is just a natural approach to our relationship is to, for me to sit at the sheriff and he sit at the mayor and we continue our conversation that we've had probably over the last eight years or so.

- Right.

Will we see more collaboration with county corrections?

Which for folks who don't know, corrections is folks who are already convicted, have got their sentence, and it's a division of the county administration different from the jail.

- Absolutely.

One of the things that we definitely want to collaborate on.

Right now, the same medical vendor that treats our detainees at 201 Poplar and Jail East, they also treat the detainees at the Shelby County Penal Farm.

And so we are in constant communication with the Penal Farm because, again, we have a shared contract.

And one of the things that we've been in conversations about over the last couple of months is developing a, what we would call, a step-down unit for detainees that are not well enough to, well, not sick enough to stay in the hospital, but not really well enough to be in what's called general population with everyone else.

So we see the need at 201 Poplar and Jail East.

They see the need at Shelby County Penal Farm.

So we've been in conversation about having a joint unit where both our detainees could go and receive medical treatment if they require, you know, a higher level of care than what can be provided in general population.

So they're our friends.

In fact, we have several detainees, I think maybe a couple of hundred detainees out at the Penal Farm.

They've given us a building so we could manage our detainees.

And so that partnership is critical for us maintaining our population at 201 Poplar.

And so it's a great working relationship and we look forward to continuing it.

- The federal facility at Millington, are you still using that?

- So we, we're not using it.

We cited a number of repairs that were needed at that facility.

And obviously we understood that the County Commission could not foot that bill, but even if they could, we did not want to spend Shelby County tax dollars repairing a building that we would have to turn over probably in a couple of years or so.

And so the federal government decided that, "Hey, you know what?

We'll go ahead and make the repairs."

And I'm hoping that the repairs will be done over the next, say, two or three months, and then we could start moving some, probably some low-offending detainees to that facility.

- It's interesting because what it starts to look like is a more dispersed population.

- It is.

- Smaller groups of detainees, as well as those already convicted.

- It is.

I mean, ideally, I would love to have all of our detainees inside of the building, whether it's 201 Poplar or Jail East.

However, it would not be smart to do that because it would take us way over our population.

And so if we have to put 100 or 200 here, 100 or 200 there, a hundred here to create a safer environment for all of our detainees that we have responsibility for, as a sheriff, that's exactly what I'll do.

- You mentioned Memphis, the task force, I think we mentioned, or the immigration.

So and we're coming up on about a year since the Memphis Safe Task Force was announced and arrived.

Crime was coming down before then.

It has continued to come down.

Are the lower crime rates we have right now sustainable?

And what is your role as sheriff, both on the patrol or policing side and then the jail side, in keeping those rates down?

- Well, I certainly think they are sustainable.

And I think we have learned smarter ways to police in terms of identifying the people who are committing the majority of the crime and making sure that we're focusing our attention on those individuals, but also making sure that we are in great partnership with nonprofit organizations who can provide wraparound services that law enforcement just can't do.

And so I think the two things working together will help us sustain a reduction in crime.

As far as my role, it's continue to make sure that I support all of the municipalities and their police agencies and their mayors with a crime strategy and making sure that sheriff's deputies are all throughout Memphis and Shelby County, wherever the problem is, sheriff's deputies should be.

And so we have a narcotics unit, we have fugitive unit that spend a lot of time inside, particularly the city of Memphis.

I hear people say, "Well, we don't really see the Sheriff's Office inside the city of Memphis."

We're there.

They may not know it.

But I'm working on a strategy to put in more visibility from the Sheriff's Office inside the city of Memphis.

So I certainly think we can sustain the reduction in crime, but we got to continue to make sure that we're focusing our attention on the most violent offenders and also making sure that we are supporting the nonprofit organizations.

- Give an example of some, a couple minutes left here, of those wraparound services that the nonprofits are providing.

- Yeah, so when we talk to our detainees inside of the facility and we just really learn what put them on the pathway to be inside of the facility, many of them cite the lack of education.

We have a lot of people inside of our facility who cannot read or have learning disabilities.

So making sure that we connect them with the services to help them earn degrees.

A lot of them have substance abuse issues.

Some of them have mental health issues.

Some unemployment or they're underhoused or unhoused.

All of these things, at some point, the Sheriff's Office or law enforcement hit a stopping point because we don't really go past this point.

But nonprofit organizations come in and say, "Okay, you don't have housing.

"Let's try to connect you with housing.

"You don't have a high school diploma.

Let's try to get you a diploma."

These are wraparound services to help rehabilitate the entire person so that they can make smarter decisions.

- Again, just a minute left.

For those who didn't follow the campaign, or maybe the first time they've seen you, your background, 25 years at the sheriff's department.

You started out of high school, you were in a high school program, right?

Where you were.

Talk about that program real quick and your journey through law enforcement.

- Yeah, so when I was 15 years old, I decided to join the Memphis Police Department Explorer Program, which is a program where young kids who were interested in law enforcement could join, and police officers would begin to share with them, share with you what the occupation was all about.

I eventually transferred over to the Sheriff's Office when I was 16.

Had no clue what the Sheriff's Office was.

I had to find that in the Yellow Pages.

You too young to know about that.

[all laughing] - No, we all did.

It was very important.

- But it was something about the Sheriff's Office when I arrived here at 16 years old that just really, you know, kept me intrigued.

It was a family setting.

Many of the people who began to mentor me when I was 16, they still call me today to congratulate me or offer their support.

And I just could not leave, and I've been here ever since.

I've enjoyed every minute.

I love this job so much.

I even did it for free for six months as a reserve deputy.

[all laughing] - Okay.

That is all the time we have.

We appreciate you being on.

We hope to have you back as you go through and make the changes you're talking about.

But again, that is all the time.

Thank you, Bill.

Thank you, Sheriff.

As I mentioned, we recorded this about a week before it aired, so if we didn't get to certain things that came in that time, that's just because of the timing in my schedule.

Again, we've had candidates for the key races at the state and federal level.

Those are available at wkno.org, The Daily Memphian, or YouTube, and then future ones coming up will be available in the same place, as will this episode.

It's also available as a podcast that you can download wherever you get your podcasts.

But thanks very much.

That's all the time we have, and we'll see you next week.

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