Memphis: The Good, The Bad And The In-Between

As the cat-loving father of two wonderful daughters, I have always found dogs and boys mysterious in equal measure.

The dog illiteracy was solved with a lovable Airedale terrier named Brodnax, the company mascot and family pet of Carol Coletta and John Montgomery, and the ignorance of boys was resolved when my two perfect daughters Emily and Adrienne married two exceptional men Jeremy and Matt. Jeremy’s son Seth was the bonus.

Dogs and boys played in a weekend in which we saw Memphis – the good, the bad and the in-between.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

First, the good: Nonconnah Greenway on Forest Hill-Irene Road north of Bill Morris Parkway. I’ve driven past the 50-acre, $1.4 million project many times, but it was volunteering to walk my brother-in-law’s Australian blue heeler that took me into the green space.

It’s an unspoiled treat as the walking paths meander beside the creek and take visitors past all kinds of plants and wildflowers. There’s an attractive stone entrance, water feature, lake, a metal bridge, and a sidewalk that connects the Mike Rose Soccer complex to the Veterans Cemetery.

The Greenway opened about two years ago as a part of the Wharton Administration’s green space plan and was conceived by Shelby County Director of Public Works Ted Fox, former Army colonel heading up the Memphis Corps of Engineers Office. Mr. Fox has a vision for a series of interconnected greenways and made the convincing point that our county’s creeks should not be neglected as public discussion concentrated on greenway plans along Wolf River.

Nonconnah Greenway is one of those lesser known special places in Shelby County, and it’s made even more satisfying by the surprising natural setting preserved there.

Mud In Your Eye

Second, the in-between. With Seth spending the weekend with us, we gave him options for the afternoon, and after serious deliberation, he elected for a trip to Mud Island.

It’s been so long since we’ve visited the river park that we couldn’t remember the last time with any certainty. That alone bears testament to problems of access and animation that erode any sense of urgency for return visits to the isthmus (part of the reason we have so strongly endorsed a skate park for the tip of Mud Island).

It was clear from our visit that Mud Island is limping along as a result of a strapped budget and limited staff. In mid-afternoon on Saturday, the park had hundreds of visitors, but the line at the ticket window should have been a tip-off that Mud Island is essentially operating on a “no frills” budget. There was one clerk in the ticket office, leading to a 15-minute wait to buy tickets.

We’ve always loved Mud Island, and we were pleased to see that care is still given to the landscaping. It’s when you look close that it becomes obvious that maintenance is pretty basic and the physical condition of the place is tired and lacking.

Steep Climb

There is an obvious need for paint and polish, but a number of repairs are more than simple fix-ups. Joining the phalanx of tourists visiting Mud Island, we couldn’t help but see the park through their eyes – torn fabric and peeling paint for the monorail portion of the visit, cobwebs and ceiling problems along the escalators to the scale-model river, which needed more water to provide for more pleasant wading, alphabetical letters which needed to be replaced on some of the large displays showing river tributaries a disappointing Gulf of Mexico, desperately in need of maintenance and begging to be reinvented.

There’s so little to do that the most popular activity for adults and kids alike was to slide down the steep hill leading up to the amphitheater, and the food is marginal, especially considering that it’s a signature tourist attractions. But the biggest problem with Mud Island is that once you’re there, it’s essentially just a place to take a stroll.

Unfortunately, in city government’s haste to turn Mud Island over to Sidney Shlenker as part of his Rakapolis project, a bizarre development combining Egyptology and rock and roll and linking The Pyramid and Mud Island, it gave him carte blanch to do pretty well whatever he damn well-pleased.

And he did. He added eyesore after eyesore – adding a sandy beach, turning Gulf of Mexico into a swimming pool and most grievous of all, pushing an outstanding $1 million children’s playground over the side of the banks, removing a special place for young visitors who seemed on Saturday to be generally unsure about why their parents have brought them to the park.

Getting It Right

All of which makes it timely for Riverfront Development Corporation to think of how Mud Island can be reinvented to offer more uses and to create more revenues to get the park back into decent condition.

The visit to Mud Island was a cautionary tale for Beale Street Landing. Memphis is much better at building big projects than we are at maintaining them. We are encouraged that in addition to building the badly needed riverfront icon, the Riverfront Development Corporation is developing the program and activities that will keep the place alive.

That’s the thing about public realm. It’s about more than constructing it, but equally important, it’s about programming it. That’s why Memphis has no high-functioning public realm other than Overton Park that we can point to as an example of what it looks like when we do it well.

The Public Gets It

It’s a problem that’s not lost on the public. When the 130 people on the seven committees of Sustainable Shelby cast their votes and the opinions of the public were also weighed in, the #1 priority set by the process was creation of quality public realm.

In his presentation of 12 modest proposals for Memphis, former National Endowment for the Arts design director Jeff Speck said that Memphis has little public realm that works, and we do a dismal job of connecting the public realm to neighborhoods or to the fabric of the city.

That ultimately will be the test for Beale Street Landing. It’s not that it can just be architecturally striking. It must be characterized just as much by its connectivity, its vibrancy and its animated sense of place.

We have confidence that RDC “gets” it when it comes to the various elements that must be present for a quality public realm. After all, many of the people at the organization remember the big promises for the expansion of Tom Lee Park – the food vendors, performers and a beehive of activity.

Once the park was doubled, there was little mention – much less attention – to these issues, and today, Tom Lee Park continues to remain a place of unrealized potential.

Breaking News

One last word about a visit to Mud Island. Many of our fellow guests walked over from the Tennessee Visitors Center in downtown Memphis. You should try it sometime. From the front door of the center, it’s about a two football fields walk to Mud Island, except it’s impossible to walk it directly because of the ugly fences on the perimeter of the parking lots.

Finally, the bad. When I returned to my car, which was parked one block from Mud Island on Jefferson, the passenger window had been broken out and my XM radio stolen. In 38 years of working downtown, it marked the second time I’ve lost a window, so I guess I’ve been lucky (not counting the time my car was stolen).

Strangely, Saturday, I didn’t so much feel that I had been victimized by a criminal as that my ticket as a lover of this city had been punched for another year.

Memphis Neighborhoods Among Most Dangerous

Memphis made a top 25 list, but unfortunately, it wasn’t one we wanted to be on.

We had two neighborhoods in the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the U.S. - #11 (Bellevue Boulevard/Lamar Avenue) and # 7 (Warford St/Mount Olive Road.

The rankings were compiled by WalletPop based on the exclusive neighborhood crime information from NeighborhoodScout.com. NeighborhoodScout.com said it collects data from all 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S.

Based on that data, the two Memphis neighborhoods cracked the top 25 most dangerous neighborhoods. Dallas and Kansas City also had two neighborhoods on the list and Chicago had four.

The most dangerous neighborhood, according to the listing, is in a Cincinnati where people have a 1 in 4 chance of being a victim of crime.

In Memphis, the Bellevue area has a 1 in 8 chance of becoming a victim of crime, and in the Warford area, it is 1 in 7.

That compares with a 1 in 64 chance in our entire city. According to NeighborhoodScout, Memphis is safer than 2% of the cities in the U.S. (with more than 25,000 population). In the city rankings, Memphis is #41 behind cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Orlando, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Tampa and Salt Lake City with 218 crimes per square mile, compared to 323 per square mile in Atlanta. The U.S. average is 49.6.

Nashville was not in the top 100 most dangerous cities.

Closer to home, West Memphis is the 74th most dangerous city in the U.S. where there is a 1 in 57 chance of becoming a crime victim.

While there has been some marginally good news on the crime-fighting front lately, it’s unlikely to get significantly better any time soon. The unemployment rate for Shelby County is 9.6%, but in Memphis, 1 out of 3 people in the labor force is either unemployed or not looking for work any longer.

Problems Respect No Borders

Things are just too scary outside Memphis.

In Bartlett, another missing person ended up being murder. It comes at the same time that many residents of the town wring their hands because they think a proposed government merger is sure to bring in more crime.

For the record, no citizen of Memphis was involved in any of the Bartlett murders.

Mapped Out

How often have all of us heard some person outside Memphis tell the media that they don’t want to be annexed by Memphis and they don’t want to unify the governments because they don’t want the increase in crime?

Apparently, a large part of these folks believe that criminals are issued maps of Memphis and until an area is annexed, criminals aren’t authorized to go into outside Memphis.

As for Bartlett, the truth is that the three recent murders shouldn’t really create any deep concern in the city because they were personal crimes and put no one except the victim at risk.

Life Support

Meanwhile, Collierville was the site of our region’s first swine flu case. That too had its element of irony since it was one of the towns arguing that there’s no reason that its citizens shouldn’t help fund the Memphis and Shelby County Health Department. After all, it’s Memphis that has the health issues, they say.

Of course, ignored in the rhetoric was the simple fact that the Health Department does more than operate health clinics. It also protects our water and our air, it registers vital statistics, and contrary to myth, citizens of these towns – especially Collierville and Bartlett – do in fact use the health services of the department.

As part of the Memphis City Council’s crusade for fair taxes for Memphians, city funding for the Health Department has been threatened and is likely to be eliminated over time. Shelby County Government’s plan was to meet with the town mayors to request financial help with the operations of the department so that Memphis taxpayers aren’t the only ones paying twice of health services.

E Pluribus Unum

So, we wonder if Collierville’s attitude toward the health department has changed in light of the crucial role that its professionals played in the wake of the swine flu case.

For us, it just underscores the reason that all of us should reject parochial, “us versus them” thinking. The high-profile crimes may have happened in Bartlett (once again reminding us how much media attention white victims get) and the swine flu may have shown up in Collierville, but all of us should care about our neighbors in the ‘burbs.

We are totally willing to help Bartlett and Collierville whenever we can, and maybe, just maybe, they see that they really aren’t all that different than the rest of us. Our strength is in working together and nothing less should be tolerated.

No Question About #1

Finally, what is it with private schools? None of the swine flu cases in Tennessee have been found in public schools, contrary to the conventional wisdom of the news media. All three were in private schools.

As for crime, there’s no question it remains the #1 problem for our region. Everyone from FexEx founder Fred Smith to the owner of the corner grocery knows it.

About a century ago, Memphis was named “Murder Capital” of the U.S., and somehow, we’ve never shaken that culture of violence. Recently, Memphis was named America’s second most dangerous city.

The Alarm Is Sounding

It’s not like we need a wake-up call, because we’ve already had dozens. But here’s what gets our attention. Most of the problems ascribed to Memphis are actually regional in nature. It’s not just Memphis heading up the city lists of troubling civic indicators. It’s the entire region.

So, it’s not only short-sighted, divisiveness is actually self-defeating because we’re at the point where it’s going to take all of us working together to say enough is enough and it’s going to take all of our law enforcement agencies coordinating their work to have maximum impact on crime.

Our city’s second place ranking did almost as much damage to our reputation as it did to Attorney General Bill Gibbons’ law-and-order gubernatorial bid. There are some encouraging signs that our crime rate has topped out and that we are finally making a dent in the number of crimes in the key categories.

A few law officers have suggested that the statistics showing major reductions in crime are a generous look at trends, so we’re certainly hoping that the numbers are the numbers. All of us want to know exactly how we’re doing. The only thing worse than our crime numbers is spinning them.

Job Opening: City Hall Statesman

OK, now that we’ve all vented, what can we do to solve the divisive problem of police recruiting?

Our problem has been that the vote was like many taken in legislative bodies from Memphis to Washington, D.C. It was cast with tunnel vision and without an understanding of its symbolic importance or its actual importance within the context of what is making cities successful.

Another problem is the deep-rooted suspicions about racially-biased hiring of police officers. While Memphis Police Department officials point proudly to the fact that 51% of the force is African-American, it is valid to remember that Memphis is 64% African-American so there is still a 25% disparity gap that the police force has to close to be totally representative of the city that it serves.

Problems Abound

There’s the problem that loosening the requirements is seem as another example of greasing the skids for the people who are abandoning our city, but if that were the ultimate motivation, it would seem that the recruiting limits for policemen shouldn’t even be extended to the Shelby County line (after all, most of the people who left Memphis did stay inside the county). But in the end, the crux of this concern is that most people are incredulous that Memphis cannot find 200 of its own citizens to hire.

The problem for some is racial. There are white people who think that a majority black city is somehow inherently more dangerous, and there are black people who think that whites complaining about property crime in their neighborhoods are whiners since they weren’t concerned for years that African-American neighborhoods are the scene of most violent crime.

The problem for others is that they think the real purpose of broadening the recruiting area is to take in all those lily-white suburban counties, although Fayette County is 36% African American, Hardeman County 41%, Tipton County 20%, Haywood County 51% and DeSoto County 25% (twice the percentage of 2000). However, the underlying sentiment is that people should not be rewarded for moving outside of Memphis, and that if people are going to get a paycheck from Memphis, they should at least live in Shelby County (and in truth, it’s hard to see that as unreasonable).

Wanted: Empathy

The problem for a smaller group is that they fear that non-Memphians will have less personal investment in our city, and as a result, they might be more inclined toward abuse and brutality, but the same could be said for police officers living in Shelby County outside Memphis. However, the reality is that for a large segment of our city, the police are as menacing as crime.

The problem for a growing number of people is that if Memphis isn’t capable of finding 200 people who can quality to be a police officer – even with the dumbed down requirements calling only for a high school diploma – how are we ever expected to compete in today’s economy for jobs that require a more highly trained workforce?

The problem for major employers is that perception is reality, and their employees see Memphis as crime-ridden and dysfunctional, hampering their success in recruiting workers to our city, particularly 25-34 year-old college-educated talent. Whether they are right or not hardly matters; they think they are right and that makes it a problem for all of us.

The Memphis Messiah

In other words, we have good people on all sides of this issue and their positions are rational from their perspective. It’s like the truth: it all depends on personal perspective. What is the truth to you may be anything but true to me, not because of anything other than the fact that we see the truth from substantially different angles.

There are times when it seems like we need a Memphis Messiah if we are to find unity, a unifying vision for the future and a mutual commitment to rolling up our sleeves and making this the best city that we can.

But it’s not a Messiah that we seek right now. It’s simply a statesman.

That should be dramatically easier to find than 200 police officers. We only need one.

Two Prospects

Truth be told, this statesman probably needs to emerge from the African-American City Council members who voted against the recruiting expansion. They have the majority vote, but they also care about living in a city where the division is lessened and divisiveness is eliminated.

There’s Council Chair Myron Lowery, the most experienced member of the city legislative body, and his ability to reach across the racial chasm has been demonstrated before and his ability to find the middle ground has been displayed before. Perhaps he will step forward.

There’s Council member Harold Collins, whose college degree is in criminal justice and who every day deals with the results of crime, particularly violent juvenile crime, in his job with the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office. Perhaps he will step forward.

While they are the most likely statesmen to emerge, there could be others. In the words of the old Southern Baptist evangelist, “it just takes one step, but the first step is the hardest, but Lord, oh, Lord, the rewards…”

Stronger Policy, Stronger City

Whoever is willing to step forward is someone who remembers that compromise is the currency of the best legislative decisions. It now takes someone to prove that we have moved beyond the days when we divided into race if we were talking about the weather. The voters in Memphis have placed a great deal of good will and confidence in this Council, and if it could find a way to come together on this issue, it would be a profound signal that our city has entered a new era.

While 7-6 votes can be politically satisfying to the winning side because they are usually the most hard-fought, they are ultimately like one-vote majority decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court. They are in the end hollow victories. They are less satisfying, they ensure opposition by about half the people and they create weaker policy.

We don’t need to tell the winning Council members this. They know it, and we suspect they are weighing these issues right now in hopes of finding common ground that unites a Council that had inspired so much hope for a different tone.
So, what could be done?

Finding The Middle Ground

For one thing, the hiring of police officers should be treated like the hiring of all city employees. It should be conducted and directed by City of Memphis Human Resources Division like all other divisions. To do otherwise and continue to allow MPD to handle its own hiring inspires doubts and suspicions about insider dealing, special agendas and preferential hiring. There’s one sure way to change it, and that’s by changing the way hiring is done.

Then, perhaps, there should be a temporary, limited use of a wider recruiting area to see if it really does produce results. Once upon a time, Shelby County Government had a policy – and it may still – that it could go outside of the county borders if it become obvious that it could not attract qualified applicants for key jobs. While the impetus for the policy was to recruit qualified physicians to work at the Health Department clinics, it would seem to be practical for police officers. For example, if county government were unable to find physicians in Shelby County, it would open the process to people in other counties. It was not a blanket policy (and perhaps in city government, it should be triggered with a resolution by Council). It was limited to the needs at hand. More to the point, there had to be a clear, proven and documented case for expanding the area for recruitment.

At this point, there seems to be a lot more opinions and fewer facts about police recruiting even after the months of discussing it. Skepticism and mistrust run deep, and Council members need better statistics and data that paint an accurate portrait about the seriousness of the problem. Perhaps, it’s time to appoint a special committee on law enforcement to delve into all aspects of this issue, including repeated general accusations about unfair practices and discriminatory hiring.

New Ways

While some may dismiss them as political posturing, the fact remains that these are extremely serious charges and the public deserves to be reassured that there has been a thorough airing of the issue and a equally thorough investigation of the charges. This too is an issue that should transcend the day-to-day politics of City Hall and should be resolved once and for all.

In other words, there is nothing so important right now as to find some safety valve actions that bring everybody back to the table and into the conversation, that strip the discussion down to its facts and that proves that there is a new way of doing business on City Council.

In the end, the most damaging aspect of the 7-6 vote was that it became yet the latest symbol of a city divided against itself. Lincoln was right: a house divided against itself cannot stand. Somehow, we’ve managed to stand divided for decades, but the foundation is finally crumbling.

Without sounding too Pollyannish, perhaps this is the issue that proves that the times have changed. If America can be said to be entering a post-racial era, it would sure be worth the try for Memphis to be part of it.

Voting To Make Memphis A City Of Choice

Memphis is not a city that is retaining and attracting young people with choices.

That’s a critical problem, because if there is a mantra for cities today, it’s this: It’s the talent, stupid.

Because there are several million fewer 25-34 year-olds – the fuel for the knowledge economy – these highly coveted workers have never been more selective. It’s a buyer’s market, and city after city is courting them, and the competitive edge for the winners in this contest is a high quality of life.

It Shouldn’t Be This Hard

Today, talented, college-educated, young people are looking for cities that are clean, green, safe and is a place where they can live the life they want to live. In other words, these young professionals have clear expectations for a city where they decide to live and work, and most fundamental of all is that they expect the city governments where they live to get the basics right.

We mention all this because of the emotional emails and calls – on both sides of the debate - that we received following yesterday’s post about the refusal of the Memphis City Council to expand the area for the recruitment of city police officers.

We want to make sure there’s no misunderstanding about our point of view. We were disturbed by the vote by Memphis City Council because it’s fighting the wrong battle in the wrong war, and the vote suggests to young college-educated talent that we are incapable of getting the priorities right – safety first, politics second.

Choice Opportunity

Today, 25-34 year-old college-educated professionals are voting with their feet, and Memphis is the destination of way too few of them.

There’s really no secret why we are not attracting these talented workers to Memphis or keeping those that are born here. These young professionals have choices – all kinds of them – choices about where they can live and choices about their style of living.

If Memphis is to improve its lagging economic position among the 50 largest U.S. metros, it has to do everything it can to become a magnet for them. We are not now.

Real Big League Cities

That’s because these talented, young professionals are looking for the “markers” for big-league cities. Some of them are recreational, some are retail and others are social.

For example, they expect “real” cities to have a variety of retail experiences, they expect to have a highly efficient public transit system, they expect miles and miles of bike paths and running trails, they expect a green ethos, they expect a beautiful public realm, they expect effective public services, they expect high-quality universities, they expect a vibrant downtown, they expect walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and many of them, and they expect a culture that inspires creativity.

So, what precisely is Memphis selling these talented workers?

The Wrong Message

Our city is in effect telling them that while our crime rate is year after year one of the highest in the country, we are unprepared to take the kind of bold actions that addresses first things first – and the first thing is public safety.

Then, when we get public safety restored, then we can debate the lengths and to which we should go and the limitations that we should add to recruit new police officers.

To us, the vote by the Memphis City Council was tantamount to spraying water on the driveway while the house is on fire. It’s doing nothing to deal with the real problem.

That Sucking Sound

Most of all, Memphis frequently acts on a brand of parochialism that threatens our city’s economic future. It is emblematic of our fatal inward-looking attitude that seems to think we are the center of the universe and immune to the realities of the global economy.

The world has changed. Memphis, as a product, is not competitive.

If Memphis should be one thing, it is that we should be a magnet for young, college-educated African-American talent. But we’re not. Instead, that giant sucking sound we hear is the movement of these talented workers to places like Atlanta, Washington and Chicago. Too often, they leave Memphis first to be educated, and they never come back.

When we read an obituary or a biography of a prominent African-American professional in Memphis, we inevitably read the last couple of paragraphs that list the names of their children and where they are living. Memphis is a frequent omission from the list.

A City Of Choice

Failing to take strong action against the malignant crime rate makes us even less competitive. Ironically, the reason cited by some of those who voted down the resolution to extend the recruiting area outside of Shelby County was that they wanted to prevent flight from Memphis.

Besides being 20 years too late, the real fight is about building the kind of city that people want to stay in and the kind that people want to move back into. We won’t turn Memphis around by force and wishful thinking. We will turn it around by making it the kind of place where families, particularly young families, want to live because it has a high quality of life, good public services and a creative ethos that sparks new thinking and new ideas.

In some ways, we are too often like the Big Three automakers. We think we are not affected by world trends. We think we really don’t have to change our product. We think people will just continue to seek out our product because they once did. But things have changed, and we cling to narrow political agendas at our own peril.

City Council Vote Is About More Than Police Recruiting

What a difference 24 hours can make.

We were actually planning to write today about the positive impact and leadership that the new, improved version of the Memphis City Council is providing. Traditionally, the elected officials with the lowest public approval rating, we have been impressed by the new sense of purpose and fresh thinking in Council meetings.

Unfortunately, the vote by Memphis City Council against broadening Memphis Police Department’s recruiting territory undercuts everything good we had planned on saying.

It wasn’t just that it split strictly down racial lines, although that’s always a glimpse into the debilitating and different world views that make Memphis a tale of two cities. More to the point, it was the complete lack of civility shown to people who dared have a different opinion and the racial overtones that characterized so many of the comments aimed at business leaders in particular.

Civic Involvement Is A Good Thing

In a city where civic participation in the public process is about as scarce as Elvis impersonators in December, the City Council meeting last night featured an outpouring of business leaders and average citizens united by the idea that more must be done to reduce a crime rate that remains the Memphis public’s #1 issue – #1 across all racial, income, and age lines – and to send an unmistakable message that our city leaders “get it,” understanding fully the risk that Memphis has for being forever branded as a city out of control.

Ironically, just a couple of days ago, we wrote this:

“But, the problem in Memphis is intensified by the fact that our city is more and more being defined (in national media) as a place that’s out of control, and the most frequent evidence for that conclusion is crime. It’s a rare city actually that finds itself in a position where it is so defined by crime that it affects all that it does, particularly economic development.

“After all, for years, Atlanta has enjoyed an economic boom, while all the while, its crime rate was one of the highest in the nation. Closer to home, Nashville – with a crime rate comparable to ours and sometimes higher – never had its economy jolted by a national perception of a crime-ridden city. Conversely, there was Detroit or Newark, cities that ultimately were written off in large measure because their crime problems became the symbol for a city that was failing.

“Memphis now runs the same risk…”

Risky Business

That risk went up with last night’s 7-6 vote against a resolution to allow police applicants to come from within 20 miles of the Shelby County line, rather than requiring them to live in the county borders.

Crime was already on our minds last night before the Council vote. We were catching up on a couple of days of unread New York Times, and we read the article about the murder of a transgendered citizen of our city, the same person previously beaten up in the Shelby County Jail by an alleged law officer, a fact also mentioned in the coverage.

The article made us reflect on the newspaper’s coverage of our city. We are hard-pressed to remember a hard news story in the past 18 months that has dealt with anything other than crime and investigations. Like it or not, Memphis is more and more being defined and identified nationally by its inability to curb its crisis level crime rates. More to the point, more and more, the lack of progress on this front means that the future of our city is being defined as well.

The Council’s vote was a wake-up call for greater citizen activism. It’s no longer enough for us to say that every big city has crime. It’s no longer acceptable for us to justify or explain it away. It’s no longer palatable that our elected leaders won’t do everything within their realm of authority to do something – anything.

Killing The Messengers

With their votes against the resolution, seven Council members told the Memphis public that politics trumps safety, political advantage is more important than public service. More frightening is that they sent the message to a crowded room of influential Memphians – leaders of our largest employers and victims of crime who want to stay in the city they love so much – that they simply don’t matter.

Even given the promise of an immediate investigation of the hiring practices of Memphis Police Department – and some concerns by Council members are not without merit – it was not enough to broker an agreement that gives our city the police officers that it needs.

Perhaps, Councilman Jim Strickland’s comment was best: “If you don’t want officers in your district who live outside Memphis, send them to my district.” That’s a sentiment felt by most Memphians, and we hope that someone will forward poll results to the entire Council that spells out just how upset citizens are about crime.

Besides being the #1 thing on the minds of Memphians, it is also the top reason that Memphians become former Memphians. Nothing has more impact in convincing families to abandon our city than crime, and the peril of that movement is seen in overtaxed citizens and overtaxed public services as Memphis hollows out even more (we’re already in the top 10).

Moving On Out

And let’s make this clear. If you look at the numbers of people moving out of Memphis, this isn’t about white flight. It’s about flight, period. The middle class – regardless of race – is moving out of the city limits. The largest influx of new residents to DeSoto County is African-Americans and a troubling percentage of those who remain in Memphis say they are thinking about leaving.

Most disturbingly, this vote was the hot topic today for young professionals in Memphis – the people that we need most if we are to succeed in today’s economy. Unfortunately, many of them were talking today about leaving Memphis. As one young father told us - with his voice breaking because he felt like he is abandoning the city he loves most - he could no longer convince his wife – who was from the Northeast – that Memphis was worth the fight. More to the point, he could no longer convince himself that his wife and infant daughter were safe in their Memphis neighborhood, and they began today to take steps to move.

That’s why the City Council’s vote is so suicidal. This isn’t just about police applicants. It’s about the future of the city and proving that our leaders are dead serious about changing things. Otherwise, the only people left in Memphis – a schizophrenic demographic profile already materializing – are the poor who can’t afford to move and the rich who can live anywhere, complete with security systems and neighborhood patrols.

If you think that opposing coaches use newspaper coverage as bulletin board motivation, they’re nothing compared to Chamber and economic development executives. If you don’t believe that the cities we compete against aren’t sending around stories portraying Memphis as akin to the “Old West,” you don’t understand the highly competitive nature of economic development.

Some Council members said that they opposed the resolution because of its negative economic impact. Then, they cast no votes that fundamentally did more damage to Memphis’ competitive position than any negative impacts that they were citing in connection with the recruiting policy change.

The Consensus

The vote by the Council raised these questions by some of the people who attended the Council meeting: “What’s the equation: how many murders are acceptable in return for political power? What’s the number of people who can be shot so politicians and feed their egos? How many people are to be wounded because we don’t have adequate policemen in Memphis?”

Their cynicism is forgivable. After all, they attended a meeting in which the Memphis mayor, the Shelby County mayor, the Shelby County district attorney, the sheriff, the director of the Memphis Police Department, Memphis Police Association, the Crime Commission, representatives of Memphis Tomorrow and Memphis’ largest employers and a special task force endorsed the change in policy. And yet, this rare unanimity of opinion by the people closest to the crime problem and unbiased in their analysis was dismissed (along with some tactless comments made to several speakers).

Perhaps, it’s possible that all of these people are wrong. But faced with our top ranking in the U.S. for our crime rates, it would just seem logical that if there’s ever been a time when it’s worth a gamble to do something different, surely this would be it. Doing the same and expecting different results is not only the definition of insanity; it’s the definition of insane public policy.

We are not saying that the Council members who voted against the change in recruiting policy are bad people. They are not. Their opinions are sincere and deeply felt. The wrongs of this city run deep and the fruits of institutional racism are obvious. They hear about it frequently from their constituents. That said, this is not the issue to use as a way to stick their fingers in the eyes of the power structure.

On A Bubble

While there does at time seem to be more emotion invested in victims of crime who are white or outrage in crimes in “white neighborhoods,” it’s worth remembering that the ultimate victims of crime are African-Americans, particularly those who feel like captives in their own homes and who feel at constant risk.

Here’s the thing, and none of us should make a mistake about this: It will take all of us to reverse the current trends and turn around our city. We have no margin for error.

Memphis is on a bubble. We just hope that we’re not the ones who puncture it and send our city down a road from which it cannot return.

Hopefully, in the coming weeks, the City Council will revisit this issue and that our Council members place their emphasis more on statesmanship than politic. If they do, Memphis City Council will deserve all the accolades that we had intended to write about it today.

Worrying About Source Of Blog Instead Of Source Of Crime

It’s not just that Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin wasted $88,000 in scarce city money pursuing an obsession worthy of Moby Dick.

It’s that with looming layoffs in City Hall, that money could have kept two rank-and-file city employees on the job and of the unemployment rolls in some tough economic times.

We’ve been giving Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin the benefit of a doubt with his preoccupation about an anonymous blogger who bedeviled him with critiques of his management style and decisions.

Perhaps, we thought, Director Godwin was concerned that investigations were being derailed by the unauthorized release of investigative files. Perhaps, we thought, Director Godwin could articulate in the trial on his lawsuit about risks created by the commentary of MPD Enforcer 2.0.

The White Whale

And yet, all we have at this point is an $88,000 legal bill for what now seems to be an inane, ill-considered lawsuit only aimed at ferreting out the identity of the blogger who torments him.

All of this was going on at the time the FBI was telling the nation that Memphis is the second most violent city in the U.S., challenging Detroit for the top spot. In other words, more than the money, it took MPD’s eyes off the ball and fed the department’s grapevine with even more rumors about who was feeding information to the blog.

It seems at times that the director’s own actions have done more to fuel the charges against him than the critics themselves. At a time when he needed to demonstrate the kind of mature, thoughtful leadership that would undercut the criticisms of arrogance and egoism, his actions only provided more ammunition for the charges lobbed against him.

Cultural Revolution

Somehow, the culture of Memphis Police Department has always been insular and inward-looking and a succession of police directors has done little to improve its operations or its reputation. It has been involved, sometimes grudgingly, in anti-crime plans like Operation Safe Community, and while there are high expectations for Blue C.R.U.S.H., and while it’s data-driven approach to attacking crime hotspots is meeting growing community approval, according to the Memphis Poll, the verdict is still out on whether it will reduce the overall crime rate in a meaningful way

Speaking of Operation Safe Community, it’s encouraging that a variety of agencies and organizations – whether through coercion or conscience – are now cooperating in executing a plan of action to attack Memphis’ crime rate, routinely the most serious problem identified by citizens of Shelby County.

But, the problem in Memphis is intensified by the fact that our city is more and more being defined as a place that’s out of control, and the most frequent evidence for that conclusion is crime. It’s a rare city actually that finds itself in a position where it is so defined by crime that it affects all that it does, particularly economic development.

Pay Now Or Pay Later

After all, for years, Atlanta has enjoyed an economic boom, and all the while, its crime rate was one of the highest in the nation. Closer to home, Nashville – with a crime rate comparable to ours and sometimes higher – never had its economy jolted by a national perception of a crime-ridden city.

Conversely, there was Detroit, or Newark, cities that ultimately were written off in large measure because their crime problems became the symbol for a city that was failing.

Memphis now runs the same risk, and while Operation Safe Community is a noble effort, there’s really no way to add enough jail cells to build our way out of the crime epidemic. It’s disturbing – albeit fiscally suicidal – that politicians, reflecting the will of the people, are always willing to pay $25,000 a year to keep someone in jail, but generally oppose spending a few thousand dollars to pay for interventions that can turn their lives around.

Getting To Root Causes

That’s why strategies that suggest that the magic answers lie in more prosecutors (always the DA’s default recommendation), “do the crime, do the time” marketing campaigns and more and more mandatory sentencing laws are not merely short-sighted, but in the long run, they do nothing to deal with the seedbeds for crime in the first place.

As long as an African-American boy in Memphis City Schools has a greater likelihood of standing in line in prison than standing in line to get a diploma at University of Memphis and as long as 80-100 children are delivered to Shelby County Juvenile Court every month by parents who say they cannot manage them, the indicators for progress are troublesome and the prospects for the future are dire.

In other words, if there’s a city in the United States that should be dealing with the root causes of crime, it’s ours. With our current demographics, Memphis is destined to be gripped with crime problems for decades. When we refer to demographics, we refer to the present link between race and poverty that exists in Memphis. The only serious hope for breaking that link is a historic, citywide program to once and for all deal with the causes of poverty, rather than the symptoms of it.

Paying Attention

Today, the cost of our crime problem is more than $500 million a year. In other words, just as the inattention to sprawl in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s led to the near financial collapse of Shelby County Government, lack of attention now to the web of problems that connect directly to our intractable poverty will lead to the collapse of our entire city and its economy.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Today, Memphis is in the midst of a crisis and so is the nation. The truth is, however, that Memphis has been in crisis for years, and the impact of the meltdown of our national economy could push us over a cliff.

It’s a grim prospect, but it is not our destiny. That ultimately lies in our own hands.