- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- Memphis Mayor Paul Young tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Memphis Mayor Paul Young.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you for having me.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll start, we've got lots of things to talk about today, but let's start with the No Kings rally that happened last weekend.

A set of rallies across the country, and the one here, I think anybody watching the show knows, that ended with an incident with MPD pepper spray of some of the people there.

The police officers involved have been put on leave.

- Right.

- What is the status of that... How will that investigation operate?

Bill was there and I'll turn to him.

- Well, anytime there's a use of force incident, it's something that MPD does.

They do these internal investigations and we're doing that right now.

The officers are on administrative leave while it takes place, I do think it's important to look at the whole picture of what transpired during the day.

There was an event in the park that took place without a hitch.

It wasn't until the march that things started to go awry.

And you go back and you look at the actual permit that was filed.

It was filed for 250 people to be in the park.

It specifically said there was no march, but when the event took place, they decided to go march.

They went down Beale, which the officers allowed since Beale is already closed.

When they got down to Beale and 2nd, instead of turning around and going back to the park, they actually took a left on 2nd.

And that's when things got a little more dicey.

And it's because the officers had to deal with traffic.

And when you think about the safety of not just the officers, but of the protestors and the participants in the march, it's important for the officers to be able to get them out of the right of way.

It's for their safety.

I mean, we've seen instances across the country where someone that may have ill intent drives through the middle of a protest.

And so it was for their safety.

And I hate that it turned into what it turned into, but we'll certainly look at the use of force incident and come to a conclusion on what needs to happen on that front.

- And Bill, you were there.

- Yeah, Mayor, the fact that this happened, the pepper spray came out and was used as the march was ending, does that seem unusual to you?

- I mean, I honestly don't know the protocols for use of force and when you escalate.

And so that's the whole purpose of the investigation.

And so I'm gonna let the investigation unfold before I give any commentary on any of the actions.

- All right, is this a police internal investigation or is it broader?

- It is.

It is being conducted by Internal Affairs, which as you know, is a separate entity within MPD and a whole different building and things of that nature.

And so they will conduct the investigation and they will present the findings.

- Talk a little bit about the balance of, as you said, dealing with traffic and people expressing their views on something.

Because the rules for a march, as I understand it, if a march happens within a certain time span of some event that the march is a reaction to, then there doesn't have to be a permit for it.

- Yeah, I will just say the purpose of the permit is so that we can ensure that things for the event happened in a safe manner.

If the permit would've been filed and stated that they wanted to do a march going down those corridors, it would've given our team an opportunity to respond.

Look at the schedule of events and things that are taking place at the same time, they would've selected a different route, a different location, and ensured that things happened in a safe and orderly manner.

And so that's the whole purpose of getting a permit completed.

- How many officers are on administrative leave?

- There are four officers that are on administrative leave.

- Okay, are any of those officers the supervisors?

- I'm not sure of their specific roles, but I know that there are four officers that are on administrative leaves.

- Okay.

- Let's stay with police and crime.

We had President Donald Trump was in town, I guess, it was a week plus ago.

- Yep.

- And touting, you know, the successes of the Memphis Safe Task Force, the federal intervention, Chief Davis, I think you as well, have talked, you know, at City Council that through now the first two and a half months of the year violent crimes, part one crimes, but you know, what people think of as violent crimes are down dramatically year over year.

And that trend has been happening.

But then of course, there were shootings downtown involving teenagers.

And a couple things came out.

Chief Davis, Police Chief Davis talked about maybe a youth curfew and that being necessary.

And you made this statement about parents also need to show some responsibility for what's going on.

So talk about your... You know, you've talked here, other people have talked here.

Crime was going down before Memphis Safe Task Force got here.

It has continued to go down, but then we've got these terrible shootings.

- Yeah, crime is moving in the right direction, meaning it's trending down, but it's still too high.

Crime is not over.

It's something that we have to continue to be vigilant on.

We have to continue to work, and everybody plays a role and parents are the closest to the young people, specifically the ones that have been engaged in some of the negative activities that we don't want to see.

And so government's going to do our part.

We're going to do the things that we can to make sure that we are providing activities for young people, giving alternatives, summer jobs, all the things that we can do, we are going to do, but we don't want that onus of responsibility to stay just on government.

Everybody has to play a role.

And so we want our parents, we want our uncles, our aunts, and grandmothers, grandfathers, everybody who's in these young people's lives, let's be vigilant.

Let's see who they're hanging with.

Look at what they're wearing when they go outta the house.

Do they have backpacks when they're clearly not going to school?

Because oftentimes in those backpacks are weapons.

And so we just have to make sure that we share the responsibility when we have incidents that take place.

- There is an ordinance, if I'm not mistaken, that allows for a youth curfew.

Chief Davis talked about just needing to figure out if you detain a young person, where can they be detained safely and appropriately, before parents or a guardian come and get them.

Is that your stance as well, that if you can figure out a way to detain the kids, MPD and others would start doing that?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that has been the only thing that has prevented us from implementing the curfew is we have to have a place to transfer custody of the young person.

If they come into an encounter with the police and then they're taken into custody, that officer cannot release that young person until they're able to properly transfer custody.

And oftentimes the officer can't just stay in one place waiting on the parent to come, which may take longer than that officer has, longer than the time that that officer has.

And so we've been working to crack that nugget and I think we're getting close.

We are exploring how we can implement the curfew because I think it's something that would be a good thing for our community to ensure that we have young people out of some of these high trafficked areas during the time when they shouldn't be out.

- Yeah, and we're going into summer.

- And we're going into summer, yeah.

- Let me bring Bill back.

- Speaking of that, are the spring and summer really kind of the test of the Safe Task Force approach to this?

- Yeah, I don't know if I'd call it a test, but it's definitely something that every year as the temperatures heat up, you start to see more activity.

And when the task force started, it was during, you know, October and things were already trending down.

And so we start to see this uptick in activity when things heat up.

And this is not just a Memphis thing, this is all over the country.

I'm talking to mayors from all over the country that are having similar challenges.

And you know, we have to make sure that we are continuing to be vigilant.

I just left, even right before I came here, our weekly shooting review with MPD, where we have every precinct in the room talking about every fatal and non-fatal shooting that took place the week before.

And the teams are in there connecting the dots, figuring out which crews are beefing with each other and where the shootings might stem from.

And you know, it's that type of intentional strategy, which we've been doing for a while now.

That intentional strategy that has allowed us to drive crime down.

And we're gonna continue to use strategies like that to make sure that we are specific around who we need to be going after and making sure that we are minimizing the level of violence in our community.

- Right, and that's the Violence Intervention Program.

And we will have a piece coming up this weekend by Sam Hardiman about what's going on with Memphis.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's deeply tied to our violence prevention efforts.

- Right, right.

On the other hand, crime has been dropping in the city for the last two years.

So something was working last spring and summer, right?

- I mean, it's this strategy that I'm talking about.

Last summer... Last spring you may remember we had an initiative called Rolling Thunder.

And this is where within MPD, we identified a number of the groups that were the center of a lot of the shootings that we were seeing.

We saw the same kind of uptick last year once it warmed up.

And so, we did that Rolling Thunder initiative and tried to really, really penetrate some of those groups that were creating a lot of the violence in the community and it reaped benefits.

And so we're looking at doing the same thing right now.

- All right.

- We'll stay with crime for a bit and the Memphis Safe Task Force.

You know, it's interesting, I've been traveling some at conferences around news and a lot of news about how to cover the Trump administration and ICE interventions around the country.

I was with some folks from Minneapolis, which actually, you know, had really very aggressive intervention of CPB and ICE and folks from Chicago and so on.

And a lot of people, it's interesting, kind of... We've been off the map a little bit in Memphis in terms of that intervention.

And I tell people that most of the politicians I've talked to in Memphis locally, most of whom are Democrats, have supported this intervention and sometimes, it surprises people, except for the ICE part.

That has been the more controversial part.

And you've been in that camp, right?

You didn't really want this, you certainly welcomed, I think, the U.S.

Marshals, some of the other groups that MPD and the City have worked with for many years.

But ICE was gonna come.

It's still unclear to me and I had lots of people ask me about this and ask about our coverage of how much coordination there is or isn't between MPD and the police department and ICE.

- Right.

- What is your take on what you want to happen, but what is happening in terms of coordination or side by side work?

- I'll tell you exactly what is happening.

'Cause I've had this conversation numerous times and it continues to be misconstrued.

The way the Memphis Safe Task Force is structured, you have teams of four or five federal agents and they can be from any one of the five... any one federal agencies.

So you may have someone from HSI, Homeland Securities, FBI, ATF, U.S.

Marshals, DEA.

Those five individuals go out on a team with either an MPD officer or a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer.

When they are with Tennessee Highway Patrol, traditionally, they simply do traffic stops.

Traffic stops is where you've seen a lot of the ICE activity because that's when they identify someone that doesn't have proper documentation.

And that's when it happens.

When they're with MPD, they are responding to routine calls or focused on any one of our internal task forces.

So that's Organized Crime, Multi-Agency Gang Unit, our Fugitive Warrant Squad.

So the irony is that when they're with MPD, they are not focusing on immigration, they're focusing on the things that we need to address violent crime.

That's why you may see someone that has ICE on their chest that's with an MPD officer, but they're not focusing on immigration at that point in time.

That is what the collaboration or partnership has been.

And so when people have been misconstruing that and saying that, "Yes, MPD is partnering with ICE," it's on those task force teams where they are focused on things other than immigration.

- You've talked about how you've worked to... And I'm putting words in your mouth, worked to make sure that MPD, that, you know, you didn't want ICE rounding up undocumented immigrants and so on.

In what form does that take behind the scenes?

You said that publicly many, many times, but is that you getting on the phone with federal officials, with elected officials?

How does that... You can't stop them, right, as mayor, but will they listen?

- Yeah, nobody in America can stop 'em.

I mean, the president can stop 'em, but no mayor can stop them from doing their federal duty.

They have jurisdiction anywhere in the U.S.

of A. And so the way that I have worked to minimize it is to keep those teams focused on the things that are non-immigration related.

Instead of MPD focusing on traffic stops, which is where we've seen a lot of that happen, they focused on their routine responses to criminal acts and things of that nature and they focus on the warrants and those other special units that I just talked about.

- I'll go back to Bill, but I'll note we have Mike Dunnavant, the U.S.

Attorney for the West Tennessee coming on, I think, it's next week or the week after.

We'll talk about some of these things with him.

- And I just wanna also add, if you look at... I think, when it's all said and done, and you look at the level of immigration arrests that have taken place in Memphis compared to other cities in the U.S., that ours are going to be low... Other cities that have had operations- - Yeah.

- In their communities, ours have been lower because of the way that we've been able to redirect their focus towards the thing that truly is an issue for Memphians, which is violent crime.

Across the board, Memphians want to see violent crime reduced and that's what we try to put our focus on.

- But are there still... I'm sorry to Bill.

But are there still too many undocumented immigrants being rounded up and taken to- - Any one is too many in my opinion.

Because I don't think that's an issue in our community and I've made that very, very clear.

But I also understand that that is outside of the control of what I can directly ensure happens.

Someone else has that responsibility.

- Bill.

- It also seems like, you know, when we talk about where crime is overall and then we talk about the perception of crime.

Well, with the immigration, there's also a perception if there's one roundup in a community and someone is taken away, that has an effect on the rest of that community, right?

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you know, I did a forum at one of the churches and there was a large Hispanic community and it pained me to hear some of the issues that they were experiencing and the fear in the community.

And we know that the Hispanic population has been the fastest growing population in our city for the last 5 to 10 years.

That they now make up about 9 to 10% of the population.

And we need them to be able to flourish.

At a time when my focus is growing the population in our city and growing our tax base we need the fastest growing population in our city to continue to flourish and feel comfortable going out and patroning the restaurants and going to school and doing the things that, you know, occur in their daily activities.

- To that point about population growth or the lack of it, in the new fiscal year, there's a state law that kicks in where sales tax is basically a... Probably oversimplifying, but sales tax is distributed to local governments based on their population.

Not once a decade in the census.

- Right.

- But every year, there's a new count.

- Yeah, they use population estimates instead of the 10-year calculation from the census.

And it's something that we've proposed a bill that would hold that off until the next census in 2030.

Hold off the implementation of that, and we'll see how that fares.

I think that it's being received well because there's about 200 cities in the state of Tennessee whose calculations would lower the amount of revenues that they would receive annually as a result of that change.

And it's not just Memphis that would be impacted, but there are other cities as well.

And so I am very optimistic that we will get a bill passed that will allow us to keep things where they are for the next four or five years.

- Is this a matter of... A lot of times in legislation, it's a matter of, can you hold off on this for the major cities?

Is this across the board or-- - Yeah, I mean, what we're proposing is across the board.

Obviously the legislature will evaluate it when they hear it and they'll make the determination that they need.

But I think that it actually has greater ramifications for some of the smaller municipalities whose budgets are much smaller than ours.

And so those revenues that come from the state mean a lot more to their budget.

It still means a lot to us as well, but you know, in terms of the percentage of their budget.

So it's gonna apply across the board what we are proposing.

- Right, one of the ways that they're going to count population on an annual basis is by housing units.

- Mm-hmm.

- And of course, you have a goal of of 10,000 new or renovated housing units by the year 2030.

- Right.

- So that could provide some relief.

That wasn't your motivation- - Yeah, well, it is kind of our motivation.

I mean, I wanna make sure that our population is trending up and not down.

If you look at population estimates from 2000 and 2010, we were around 650,000 within the city of Memphis.

By the time we get to where we are today, we are at 615,000.

So that's a loss of 35,000 people.

And that's not the trend that we want see in our community.

But thankfully we have a lot of opportunity for growth.

We have vacant school buildings, we have housing units that are in a state of disrepair.

We have vacant lots, there are spaces in our community where housing can be built.

We just need to be intentional about doing the things that allow that housing to get built.

So that means looking at our incentives, looking at how we make land available to developers, looking at how we work across municipal jurisdictions.

Not just thinking about the city, but we're thinking about the city, county, schools, MLGW, the whole spectrum of where land exists and how we can turn that into tax-producing land, housing units for our community that desperately need them.

- We got about five minutes left in show.

We do have a show about... With some of the folks you're working with about expanding this house and we've done other shows in the past, that show's coming up next week or in next couple of weeks.

So be watching for that.

One area where there is some growth, pretty significant growth is xAI.

The assessment of the value of its two facilities here in Memphis, Shelby County, that'll mean about 25 to $27 million in new tax revenue to Memphis, about the same amount to the county.

So, you know, over $50 million.

You've met with a lot of support, especially from the business community, a lot of resistance and you know, some heated conversations and gatherings about the xAI facilities and the use of the gas turbines.

Do you feel like... This was your argument, right?

That this was the reason to do this because we as a city, I think you said, we need this new tax revenue, and it's come through.

- Yeah, you know, you have to be intentional about what you need as a city.

And I just talked about the population loss that we've seen.

Think about what that means for our tax base.

That means we've had a stagnant tax base as expenses have gone up, which creates bigger gaps in the budget.

And so when I go into communities and they're asking me about how I'm going to fill more potholes, how am I going to create more opportunities at our community centers and parks and create new programming for our young people and fix up vacant, dilapidated buildings and demolish structures, all of those things happen because of tax revenue.

And so when it comes to xAI, what we wanted to do was make sure that we were making strategic decisions.

Let's mitigate the bad, let's ensure that we are getting a facility that is not going to take up all of our water.

So now they're building a hundred million dollar gray water facility that's going to allow not even, not only their facility to not use the aquifer, but the TVA facility across the street that uses 6 million gallons a day, is now going to be off the aquifer and using gray water.

They're also able to help us capitalize a community benefit ordinance where we're gonna be able to take 25% of those revenues from the City and put them into the five-mile radius around both facilities and make the investments needed there.

And so my goal was to make sure it turns into a win.

And I believe that we have done that.

And you know, last year we had $25 million between the City and County and it was the second largest tax paying property in Shelby County.

This upcoming year it'll be $54 million.

- With just a couple minutes left, I'm gonna race to a few things.

One thing I should note, 'cause some people forget this, there's a lot of attention right now, understandably on the Memphis Shelby County Schools' audit and the potential takeover.

Although it's called Memphis Shelby County Schools, you have nothing to do.

The City of Memphis has nothing to do with the local school system as an organizational body- - Yeah, no, no, we don't have a direct responsibility for it, but certainly we are interested in making sure that our kids are well educated and that they are positioned for success.

And so my hope is that after this audit that there'll be more conversations with the state and that some form of partnership will be reached where the kids are at the center of whatever agreement comes about.

- I mean, to that end, I mean, you've observed these things from, again, you don't have a direct role, would you welcome some sort of more of a takeover or more involvement by the state or do you want the existing school board to stay in charge?

- I mean, I think certainly we wanna make sure that we respect individuals that have been duly elected, but we also want them to get some help and support to make sure that you have technical expertise to make sure that we are moving the needle in the right direction.

And I think that they can find a balance where you can do both.

- With apologies to Bill with just 30 seconds here, one thing you are very directly involved in is the negotiations with the Grizzlies and an extended lease on FedExForum.

Do you wanna make any news today on where that stands?

- No news.

I mean, just like I said this time last year, we are working hard, everybody's working in good faith.

I feel really good that we're gonna be able to get something done.

- The County Commission approved redirecting some hotel, motel tax.

Will the City have to do that as well?

- No, our part of the capital stack is already set.

But this is just something that helps to clarify to ensure that the county dollars can go towards the project.

- All right, we are outta time.

Thank you, Paul Young.

Apologies to Bill.

We'll get some more questions from Bill in the podcast version of the show, that also appears on radio, but that is all the time we have this week.

As I mentioned, we've got coming up soon, Mike Dunnavant, the U.S.

Attorney for West Tennessee, as well as the party leaders, Republican, Democrat next week.

It's a big election season, but that is all the time.

Special shout-out to help today from Chandler Van Gundy in the control room.

But that is all the time we have.

Thanks very much and we'll see you next week.

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