Memphis City Council members gave final approval Tuesday, April 11, to the last in a series of police reform ordinances and put on hold an effort to consolidate that and three other previously approved measures into a consolidated ordinance.

The council voted 11-0 to approve the “Driver Equality Act” on third and final reading.

Council members Ford Canale and Worth Morgan were absent.

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The set of ordinances – six in all, including two giving more power to the city’s Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board -- were in response to the January death of Tyre Nichols.

Nichols died Jan. 10, three days after he was beaten twice by Memphis police during a traffic stop. Five of the Memphis Police Department officers have been charged with second degree murder in the beatings and are awaiting trial.

The measure by council member Michalyn Easter-Thomas approved Tuesday “asks and directs” MPD to not make traffic stops for the following offenses individually:

• Temporary tags or license plates not properly affixed
• A single taillight, headlight or running light not working
• No bumper or a damaged bumper
• Car registration that has lapsed for less than two months

“These are things that may be seen in the light of poverty stops,” Easter-Thomas said before the vote. “It is diverting our resources to where we need it most. What this ordinance does is it helps move us toward that. It helps to limit the possible negative interactions with the community.”

Easter-Thomas offered several versions of the basic ordinance to ensure police would comply with the final version endorsed by MPD chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis.

“We still have state laws that will allow us to provide public safety,” Davis told the council during committee sessions. “However, our primary responsibility is not to be a heavy hand in the community, not to create problems for people who already have problems.”

“We can still enforce the law and address those issues,” she said.

The council vote was hurried and chaotic after one of numerous citizens speaking in support of the measure called for chairman Martavius Jones to rescind a ban on several activists from attending and speaking at the council session because they had used profanity in remarks at earlier council sessions.

Other speakers Tuesday had compared those banned from being at the council session to the Tennessee House of Representatives’ expulsion of Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin J. Pearson of Memphis.

The crowd in council chambers followed with chants of “let them in” that continued just outside council chambers even as the council reconsidered the ordinance to amend it to add Tyre Nichols’ name to the title of the measure.

“I can’t even hear,” Smiley said as the reconsideration began moving.

Easter-Thomas called Nichols’ family during the vote to get their approval for the renaming.

Smiley tabled his consolidated police reform resolution ahead of Tuesday’s meeting.

His original idea was for the consolidated ordinance to join the individual ordinances approved earlier by the council in the city’s code.

“We still have state laws that will allow us to provide public safety. However, our primary responsibility is not to be a heavy hand in the community, not to create problems for people who already have problems. We can still enforce the law and address those issues.”

Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis
Memphis Police Department chief

But in Tuesday committee discussions, several council members said they didn’t understand repeating the earlier ordinances twice in the city code.

The consolidated ordinance also would have put various existing police policies in one place in the city code and require more police data to be compiled in a public police dashboard.

Davis said she questioned how much work that would require.

She also said even asking those stopped by police to voluntarily disclose their religion and ethnicity – one of the provisions – could cause problems for the sake of gathering the information.

“It could present some confrontation and adversarial kind of encounters,” she said. “That would incite a different kind of problem on a traffic stop.”

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Easter-Thomas said duplicating the four individual ordinances, including hers, on traffic stops would create confusion and could put conflicting ordinances on the books.

“I’m just trying to understand, so we know what is going on later,” she said. “If they all stand alone, what is this?”

Smiley, an attorney, said the coexistence of the ordinances would not create confusion but would allow judges hearing any challenge of them to understand the council’s intent.

But later Smiley said he would table the consolidated ordinance “in the interest of clarity.”

After the vote on the Driver Equality Act, Smiley said the council did what it said it would do in the wake of Nichols’ death three months ago.

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“We’ve implemented what we believe and what you believe to be serious changes as related to criminal justice reform,” Smiley said later to activists and protesters in the audience. “With our vote today, we have set the standard of what it looks like to create change in the wake of a terrible incident.”

In other action Tuesday, council members delayed the first of three votes to April 25 on a new set of district lines for the body in the October city elections.

The proposal, from an ad hoc redistricting group, would create a Cordova council district as well as put all of Downtown in a district with North Memphis and Frayser.

The April 25 vote would move third and final reading of the ordinance to the May 16 council session.

Candidates in the 13 council races on the October ballot can begin pulling and filing qualifying petitions May 22 to get their names on the ballot.

The council also approved Tuesday a 10-year ground lease with Carpenter Art Garden for city land at Tillman Street and Princeton Avenue in Binghampton.