The leaders of two local nonprofits who work in education and community building say a recent call by the Greater Memphis Chamber’s Chairman’s Circle for $50 million in state funding and changes to the judicial system to combat crime won’t solve the city’s crime problem.

“It was disingenuous and irresponsible to send a letter like this without data, period,” Whole Child Strategies CEO Natalie McKinney said on the WKNO-TV program “Behind The Headlines.”

The conversation about crime is the latest in a series on BTH featuring different and opposing views on the issue.

The Chairman’s Circle letter to state elected leaders was sent Jan. 10 and signed by 170 executives from the city’s largest businesses.

Business leaders push for state help with Memphis crime

The executives asked for changes to state sentencing laws, the possible appointment of outside judges to try criminal cases in Shelby County, aid for the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office, $50 million for “Tourist zone” safety, stiffening prison sentences, making possession of a stolen firearm a felony and exposing cars caught drag-racing to civil forfeiture. 

The letter also asks the Tennessee General Assembly to pass State Sen. Brent Taylor’s “bail reform measures,” legislation aimed at raising cash bail and who sets it and removing considerations for the person’s economic status. 

The bail changes have been proposed as amendments to the Tennessee Constitution — a process that would take several years and was kicked off in Memphis by state House Speaker Cameron Sexton.

“It’s designed to inflame and, particularly with the fact that I don’t know that the legislation was filed at the time,” McKinney said. “So you’re basically saying, ‘Whatever he says, we want him to do it because we know it’s going to be right.’”

Taylor included with the list of bills he’s filed in the current session of the Tennessee General Assembly a proposal this week that would ban local governments from telling police not to pull motorists over for low-level traffic offenses.

The Memphis City Council passed a nonbinding ordinance to that effect following last year’s death of Tyre Nichols, who was beaten by Memphis Police in January 2023 and died from his injuries three days later.

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis agreed to ban such stops, but Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland did not sign the ordinance.

Strickland also said, as he left office in December, that Memphis Police have not been enforcing the ban on such stops.

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Cardell Orrin of Tennessee Stand for Children said he’s sent his own letter to the group of business leaders expressing his opposition to their call.

“I think that most of the things that they asked for in that letter are not going to actually reduce crime,” he said. “What we believe that you could do is if you ask them for $50 million … you take $20 million to $30 million of that and put it into inner-city violence intervention in communities.”

Orrin says the business leaders and others are relying on anecdotal evidence instead of data to make claims about a “revolving door” problem of accused criminals being released to commit more crimes.

“We don’t have data. And sometimes we want data. Sometimes we don’t want data. And then we don’t have context,” he said. “What’s the context in the state scope — in the national scope— so that we get a sense of what is working, what is not working, what is just going along with national trends and what are things that are actually happening here in our community?”

Data this past September on decisions for pretrial release made in the local bail court that began operation in February 2023 shows that 7% of accused individuals released by bail court decisions pending trial were rearrested in the first five and a half months of the court’s operation.

Slate of bills by state Sen. Brent Taylor target bail, juvenile crime

That compares to 11% rearrested after being released on bail under the old conditions across the six months before the bail court’s changes.

Asked about the figures on BTH last year, Strickland said he didn’t believe the numbers were correct based on anecdotal information.

Strickland also complained that it was difficult to get figures for re-offenders.

McKinney said changes to the criminal justice system, like those being used and explored by Shelby County District Attorney General Steve Mulroy and Memphis-Shelby County Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon, are needed to get at the root causes of crime.

Sugarmon and Mulroy both campaigned on platforms to reforming the system in 2022 — each upset incumbents seeking reelection.

“What’s missing in the conversation is, what’s our responsibility as local government officials, state government officials, national officials to make sure these systems are working the way they should be working,” McKinney said. “Not the way they were intended, which is why we are getting the results of that now.”

To McKinney, that means more discussions with those accused of committing crimes. She believes that would point to the need for a “living wage” and social programs.

“We have laws on the books, people break them. That’s supposed to be deterrence,” she said. “I think that the greatest deterrence is actually meeting people’s needs because I don’t think people are basically evil and want to do these things. I think this is because people don’t have what they need.”

Critics argue that’s a long-term approach that ignores the immediate impact of crime and the impact of people feeling unsafe.

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A Daily Memphian-commissioned “Community Conversations” series using focus groups conducted by Truth Marketing & Communications found the groups across the city believe crime has reached a “crisis” level in Memphis and has its roots in poverty, parenting and personal responsibility.

Those in the focus group also believed the local criminal justice system is “broken.”

Orrin says city government’s goal, the mayor and City Council, to combat crime with an increase in police ranks from the current level of just under 2,000 to 2,500 has become a long-term approach.

“There’s a magic number of police that will then make us safe from crime,” he said of the approach. “We’ve just spent the last eight years chasing a number. We are still at the same number that we were at eight years ago. So, when we talk about long-term and short-term, let’s really start to think about what is long-term and short-term.”

“There is not an immediate fix and anybody who’s telling you that there is an immediate fix is not telling you the truth,” Orrin said. “An immediate fix is not mass incarceration... . More police officers are not the immediate fix.”