Lee to increase TBI crime lab staff, state troopers on Memphis roads
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said the number of additional state troopers assigned to Shelby County will be more than originally promised. During the visit to Memphis on Thursday, Sept. 29, he also said state funding for the TBI crime lab will increase. (Bill Dries/The Daily Memphian)
The state will add and fill 25 new positions at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation crime lab and is increasing the number of Tennessee Highway Patrol officers to be based in Memphis, Gov. Bill Lee said Thursday, Sept. 29, during a visit to the city.
The new TBI staffing and funding for the positions comes after criticism of the lab for a backlog in testing of rape kits for law enforcement agencies including the Memphis Police Department.
“We are providing additional supports so that they will have additional resources in order for their process to speed that rape kit evaluation,” Lee said. “It’s important to this community. … It’s one step in a number of steps that we will continue to make to support the process.”
The 25 lab positions are scientists, technicians and administrative support to be added in the current fiscal year.
Lee, with Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and state House speaker Cameron Sexton, announced the TBI will use existing funding to staff the positions as soon as possible with ongoing funding proposed in the next state budget.
The 25 positions include eight more for the Jackson TBI lab that processes rape kits for MPD and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. Eleven more will go to the Nashville TBI lab and an additional six to the Knoxville lab.
The backlog and staffing shortage got new exposure after the suspect in the Sept. 2 abduction and kidnapping of Eliza Fletcher was linked to a rape 11 months earlier through DNA testing by the TBI crime lab that came back with results days after Fletcher’s murder.
Lee was in Memphis Thursday to speak at the Tennessee Tourism Conference at the Renasant Convention Center.
Talking with reporters afterward, Lee also said the city will see even more new state troopers than the 16 total Lee and THP brass originally promised to Mayor Jim Strickland — not counting four more troopers assigned to Shelby County earlier this year out of 100 new troopers for the state this year.
“There will be more than that when we finish our training for these troopers,” Lee said. “The numbers are not certain, but certainly more than 20.”
Strickland said the increase in Highway Patrol officers on the interstate system is now becoming more noticeable.
The Memphis City Council, in a resolution approved earlier this month, called for at least 50 extra Highway Patrol officers to be assigned to the city to work with Memphis Police for at least a six-week period.
Meanwhile, Strickland met Thursday with Memphis-Shelby County Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon for the first time since Sugarmon was elected judge in the Aug. 4 county general election.
Strickland said the result of the meeting will be a unified application with MPD, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office and Memphis-Shelby County Schools for a share of $100 million in state funding toward quicker intervention with juveniles who are stopped for school truancy and other issues that fall short of requiring juvenile court detention.
“We are all going to try to team together for more intervention with these younger kids who are 11, 12, 13, 14 years old,” he said. “We really need high-volume interaction with them and their families to get them on the right path.”
Lee committed to some kind of grant for a local effort from the statewide fund that was included in the current fiscal year’s state budget. And he said Thursday he wants to fast track the grant funding to be in use by early next year.
“Those are to invest in proven crime prevention strategies. Those go to police departments and sheriff’s departments across the state,” Lee said. “They will be deployed here.”
Strickland said meetings with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office are still ahead for the coordinated plan he refers to as “high-impact intervention.”
“I’m talking like if a child is truant and not in school or if they’ve been arrested and they are 13 years old and they’ve been breaking into cars,” he said. “Somebody needs to be at the family’s home two or three times a week, saying, ‘What’s going on with the child? What can we do to help? What can we do to help Mom and Dad?’ ”
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rape kit testing Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Bill Lee Jim StricklandBill Dries on demand
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Bill Dries
Bill Dries covers city and county government and politics. He is a native Memphian and has been a reporter for almost 50 years covering a wide variety of stories from the 1977 death of Elvis Presley and the 1978 police and fire strikes to numerous political campaigns, every county mayor and every Memphis Mayor starting with Wyeth Chandler.
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