Tenn. mayor creates crime coalition
Black city leaders will meet in Memphis to share ideas, concerns
When Paul Young was sworn in as the mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, more than two months ago, he vowed to find ways to improve public safety in the city.
It’s a tough task. The city is still recovering, a year after the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx worker, by five Memphis police officers. That was one out of a record-breaking 398 homicides Memphis suffered in 2023 – among the highest in America and nearly a 40% increase from 2022. This year’s homicide total continues a similar trajectory with more than two dozen killings in the city so far.
Young decided to seek help from his mayoral peers nationwide. Facing similar concerns, many responded.
A group of Black mayors and officials from two dozen of the nation’s biggest cities will meet in Memphis this week to share their most effective crime strategies, USA TODAY has exclusively learned.
Although homicides and violent crimes fell across the country last year, they are still higher than pre-pandemic levels – major concerns the newly launched Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime will address starting Wednesday.
“All of our cities are looking for solutions,” Young, who’s spearheading the initiative, told USA TODAY.
Numbers don’t capture full story
The coalition’s meeting comes as crime dropped nationally in several key categories last year.
There was a 13% decline in murders in 2023 from 2022, as well as a 6% reduction in reported violent crime and a 4% decrease in reported property crime, recent FBI data shows.
Those figures mean the U.S. in 2023 experienced one of the largest singleyear reductions in crime since modern record-keeping began around 1960, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think-tank that will present the latest crime trends during the coalition’s closed-door sessions.
But the numbers alone don’t capture the full story, said Adam Gelb, the council’s CEO. Even with the lower crime stats, most Americans, “don’t want to have a false sense of security, as there’s a big battle going on right now between perception and tolerance,” Gelb said.
A Gallup poll released in November said 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in the country than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a “very” or “extremely” serious crime problem, the highest in the poll’s history dating to 2000.
“It’s the brazenness, the randomness of crimes that just hits people differently,” Gelb said.
Gelb said the CCJ plans to share with the mayors statistics that may strike chords, including that Black males in America were eight times more likely – and Black females, four times more likely – to die by homicide in 2020 and 2021 than their white counterparts.
“I think it is always important to look at issues that impact our community and disproportionately impact African Americans,” said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who is dispatching deputy mayors Karren Lane and Brian Williams to Memphis.
The nation’s second-largest city by population, Los Angeles saw a 17% drop in homicides and a 3.2% decrease in violent crime last year, Bass said. However, city officials say they need to improve in other categories such as property crime, which last year climbed by 3.5%, and retail theft, which spiked by 16%.
In New York City, where overall crime continues to decline, hundreds of National Guard members are now patrolling and searching passengers’ bags for weapons at busy subway stations. “It’s not just about keeping people safe, it’s also making sure they feel safe,” Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, said in a statement to USA TODAY.
Both New York City and Memphis had roughly the same number of homicides last year even though New York, America’s largest city by population, has 13 times more people.
Adams commended Young for convening the Black Mayors Coalition on Crime in Memphis, the country’s largest majority Black city, “to have an honest conversation around protecting our cities and delivering peace of mind at a time when our communities need it most.”
‘Still a ways to go’
Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Karren Lane said she is interested in sharing with peers how her city has managed a 26% reduction in gang-related homicides that many cities, such as Memphis, might be interested in replicating.
Lane also wants to talk with representatives from Newark, New Jersey; Chicago; and Baltimore about their emerging community violence intervention programs and ask them what they are doing to prevent retail theft, property and quality of life crimes.
“We’re really looking forward to participating in ongoing work of the coalition as we’re hopeful it will create progressive changes across the nation,” Lane said.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, also attending this week’s event, agrees.
“We don’t have all of the solutions and when we see or hear that something is working well in another municipality, we would like to know more about it,” Jones said. “And if we want to adopt it, we’ll maybe tweak it to our specific needs and let it roll.”
One example is the city’s Office of Violence Prevention and its crisis response unit, which Jones calls the “Cops and Clinicians” initiative – a strategy she borrowed from similar programs in Denver and Houston where a clinical social worker goes with a police officer to offer immediate mental health services on some calls, reducing the need for police and emergency responses.
Efforts like that led St. Louis to the biggest overall drop in crime in about a decade, the mayor said, including a 21% reduction in homicides last year, a 24% decrease in shooting incidents and a 23% decline in shooting victims.
“We have been on a yearslong journey and we’re making great strides,” said Jones. “We are pleased with the progress, but we still have a ways to go.”
Contributing: Lucas Finton, Memphis Commercial Appeal