Residents overwhelmingly want more police in Memphis
A Blueprint Polling survey for The Daily Memphian showed 74.2% of Shelby County residents and 65.6% of city residents say Memphis needs “many more” police officers. Less than 2% of respondents living in the city and about 6% of polled Shelby County residents said MPD needed “fewer” or “a lot fewer police officers patrolling Memphis.” (George Walker IV/AP Photo file)
More in this series
An overview of The Daily Memphian’s public safety poll and what the community thinks about local crime.
Opinion: The lack of accountability, transparency and trust in the many different parts of the criminal justice system must be addressed, says Daily Memphian CEO Eric Barnes.
Coming this week
Friday: A large majority of Memphis-area residents support gun reform of some kind; a deeper dive shows men living outside of the city are essentially split on reform: dramatic, some or none.
Saturday: Speeding is a problem nationwide that Memphis drivers agree is at least as bad here as anywhere, according to those responding to a poll by The Daily Memphian.
Sunday: The Daily Memphian’s poll shows the effect of crime when it comes to how people feel about their city – victims of crime are more likely to want to leave.
Monday: Memphis candidates for mayor react to The Daily Memphian’s crime poll. Not surprisingly, all agree crime is a major issue.
Tuesday: The poll shows people’s perspectives on crime. How does that compare to actual crime data?
A lifelong Memphian, Ted Butler believes Memphis rapper Young Dolph could still be alive if one of the suspects had been in prison longer.
Four years before Young Dolph’s death, the suspect in the killing, Justin Johnson, carried out a shooting at Billy Hardwick’s All Star Lanes that resulted in three people being noncritically wounded.
“If you’re doing that, you’re gonna do it again,” Butler, whose family owns Billy Hardwick’s, told The Daily Memphian on a recent afternoon. “There’s only hope for some of those people.”
Johnson was arrested by Memphis Police officers after the shooting at Billy Hardwick’s in 2017. After six months of incarceration, Johnson got probation for good behavior. Months later, a federal weapons charge brought another arrest and more prison time. Six months after his release in May 2021, police arrested Johnson again, this time for allegedly shooting and killing Young Dolph at Makeda’s Cookies on Airways Boulevard in Orange Mound.
The Daily Memphian commissioned Blueprint Polling to conduct a scientific poll that gauges local residents’ perception of crime in the community. The poll’s margin of error is less than 2%, and the pool of respondents is separated into two groups, those living within the city of Memphis and those living outside the city limits but within Shelby County. Demographics from both groups match the demographics of the communities in which they live; the poll includes responses from 2,988 people who responded from May 10 to 25.
The full findings are here.
Ted Butler agrees with the 44% of Memphis residents polled — in addition to 61% of county residents living outside the city — who believe harsher sentences for violent and repeat offenders should be a top priority in curbing crime, according to a recent survey conducted by Blueprint Polling on behalf of The Daily Memphian.
Johnson’s multiple arrests before the Young Dolph shooting — as well as other examples of repeat offenders being arrested and released — highlight the difficulties the Memphis Police Department faces in dealing with repeat offenders.
Even on the heels of the Jan. 10 death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, who died after being beaten by Memphis Police officers, a majority of survey respondents in the city or elsewhere in Shelby County have a positive or neutral perception of Memphis Police Department’s leaders and officers. And a clear majority think more officers are needed.
According to the survey, 74.2% of county residents and 65.6% of city residents say Memphis needs “many more” police officers. Less than 2% of respondents living in the city said MPD needed “fewer” or “a lot fewer police officers patrolling Memphis.”
Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, said he does not believe there should be more — or fewer — officers. He pointed to the role of community organizations when it comes to the issue of crime.
“I want every time we talk about investing in Memphis police, the men and women that go out and do this dangerous job every day, we also talk about the Neighborhood Christian Centers of this community, the MIFAs of this community, the Memphis Athletic Ministries of this community, the Boys and Girls Clubs of this community,” Spickler said. “They are doing every bit as much to reduce crime, especially violent crime in this community, as the police are.”
Gerre Currie, a former City Councilwoman, said MPD Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis has done “a great job.”
“At some level, I feel that regardless of who’s in the driver’s seat, the community at large recognizes and realizes they either support who’s there, or you become an outlier, and you become an activist, and you say, ‘We’ve got to defund the police, and we’ve got to get rid of everybody,’ which nobody wants,” Currie said.
She added that Nichols’ death may have still happened regardless of who the leader was. The difference would have been in how things were handled after the fact.
While one in four city residents say Memphis Police Department leadership is doing a “poor” or “totally unacceptable” job, the majority agrees with Currie, giving “excellent,” “good” or “average” reviews to MPD leadership.
Toney Armstrong, former director of MPD, said he thinks the data shows people understand the difficulties police face.
“So the way that I would read that is that 74% of the people that were polled in this particular survey understand most of the complexities that MPD have, and they’re not going to judge the whole department based on those five or six officers,” Armstrong said.
Residents elsewhere in Shelby County view MPD leadership slightly less favorably than city residents do. In total, 68% of county residents approve of the leadership.
Officer performance sentiment is mixed, but generally, city and county residents’ opinions are similar. A combined 47.7% of county residents and 43.2% of city residents say officers are doing an “excellent” or “good” job.
In the first quarter of 2023, Memphis saw a 155% increase in city vehicle thefts and a 21% increase in thefts from vehicles from the same point in the year before, according to Memphis Shelby Crime Commission statistics.
Nearly 23% of survey respondents living in Memphis said they have been a victim of local crime within the last year, and 33% of those victims said their cars were broken into.
About 70% of respondents in the city limits said they knew a family member, friend or coworker who had been a crime victim in the past year. In total, 16.2% of Memphis survey respondents said they knew someone who had their car broken into, and 18.5% said they knew a friend, family member or coworker who had their car stolen.
Midtown Memphis resident Kristen Williams often sees and hears about an increasing number of car break-ins and car thefts in her neighborhood.
“It ruins it for people that live in the city limits,” Williams said.
‘They were there for the good, and we didn’t have as much bad’
In addition to harsher sentences, respondents believe community policing should be part of the solution: 30.9% from the city and 37.9% from the county said it should be the second priority, the most popular choice.
Memphis resident Candice Banks echoed those voices. When she was younger, Banks said police officers expressed more concern for the community.
“When we were in summer camp and stuff like that, they came,” she said. “They were a part of everything that was going on in the community. Not just when something happened. They were there for the good, and we didn’t have as much bad.”
Topics
Public Safety Poll crime Memphis crime Memphis Police DepartmentJulia Baker
A lifelong Memphian, Julia Baker graduated from the University of Memphis in 2021. Other publications and organizations she has written for include Chalkbeat, Memphis Flyer, Memphis Parent magazine and Memphis magazine.
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