Committee adopts ‘8 can’t wait’ limits
The Memphis City Council is moving quickly to adopt a wide range of new rules to limit police use of force and voted overwhelmingly in committee on Tuesday to adopt the limits known as “8 can’t wait.”
The phrase “8 can’t wait” refers to a set of proposals backed by the policy organization Campaign Zero, which grew out of the Black Lives Matter movement. Among the proposals: a requirement that officers warn people before firing gunshots and a requirement that police officers intervene to stop fellow officers from carrying out excessive force.
The city council also voted in committee to publish more data about complaints against police officers. This information would become readily available on the city’s website. Currently, complaint information is available only through a public records request process, which can be time-consuming and difficult.
“I think this is in line with what the people requested: transparency from us,” said council member JB Smiley Jr.
The measures approved in commit
tee won’t become final until the full city council votes. The next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, June 16.
Even if the full city council votes in favor of the items, the final form of the proposals will likely depend in part on consultation between the council and the police department. State law might also restrict implementation of certain rules in Memphis.
However, the proposals to increase police accountability and limit deadly force appeared to have strong support among the 13 city council members and some version of these measures seemed very likely to take effect in the near future.
The actions come in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in police custody and resulting protests across the United States and abroad, including multiple demonstrations in Memphis.
“Everybody’s mindful of the current conditions in which we find ourselves. There’s a whole lot more focus being made on disparate police treatment in communities of color,” said council member Martavius Jones. “And so, if there’s anything that we can do on the front end to address the situation from a legislative standpoint, I think my colleagues are in agreement that we should do so.”
Jones said he’s personally received hundreds of emails from constituents asking him to take action on these issues. He said that between noon and 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, he’d received 31 such messages.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tuesday’s executive committee meeting was carried out by video conference.
Sound quality issues made it difficult to confirm which council members had voted which way, though both the “8 can’t wait” proposal and the complaint data proposal appeared to have nearunanimous support among the 13 members on the call. Council member Worth Morgan voted “abstain” on the “8 can’t wait” item.
The video feed failed several times, making it impossible to follow all of the items that the council members discussed. Among those other items was a call for broader community input into the process to replace Memphis Police Department Director Mike Rallings, who is scheduled to retire next year.
During the discussion of the police complaint data, council member Cheyenne Johnson asked to amend the proposal to include complaints against the fire department as well, and Smiley accepted the proposal.
Rallings said uploading this complaint data to an online portal could prove difficult and cost a large sum of money. Others on the call raised questions about what information, exactly, would be posted online. Rallings suggested talking with the city of Chicago on how it had handled similar issues.
Smiley thanked Rallings for discussing the issue, but said constituents are demanding greater disclosure of police complaint data.
Rallings: MPD already bars chokeholds, follows other ‘8 can’t wait’ rules
Rallings said that the Memphis Police Department already has adopted many of the “8 can’t wait” use of force reduction policies.
“I think a lot of those are low-hanging fruit that we already pretty much do so,” he said on the video call, citing a ban on chokeholds, requirement of deescalation, warning before shooting, and exhausting all alternatives before shooting as examples.
He also mentioned a proposal to require police officers to intervene and stop excessive force by others.
“Duty to intervene — I think that’s a great one,” Rallings said. “We just issued a brand new policy just about an hour ago that addresses that.”
The text of the new policy wasn’t immediately available. Rallings only pushed back on one matter on the “8 can’t wait” list: a proposal to ban shooting at moving vehicles. He said that action might be required to save someone’s life.
City council attorney Allan Wade said these resolutions all involved administrative matters and couldn’t be implemented without the cooperation of the mayor’s administration.
The rest of Wade’s comments weren’t immediately available because the video feed cut out at that moment.
A staffer at the city council office said many people had called to complain about the video quality issues.
Tuesday was the second day in a row that Memphis-area officials considered a measure addressing society’s relationship with law enforcement. On Monday, Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer proposed measures to reduce the budget of the Shelby County Sheriff’s office, but the proposals failed to gain enough votes to pass.
Backers of the “8 can’t wait” proposals have argued that they’re more acceptable to the public than efforts to defund or disband police departments.