Cooperate, collaborate, communicate:
Task force combats gun crime with collaborative review
Task Force battles gun crime with Project Safe Neighborhood initiative.
When Memphis police Sgt. Willie Mathena was a patrol officer, he discovered that criminals were bothering an elderly woman he always checked on.
She loved to sit on her South Memphis front porch, but drug dealers told her she had to go inside when they signaled by turning on a light. She couldn’t come back outside until the light was off and they were done with their transactions.
Police did surveillance and raided the drug dealers’ house, arresting the perpetrators.
Later the woman told Mathena, “I can finally sit on the porch again thanks to you,” Mathena recalled in a recent interview with The Commercial Appeal.
“I told her, ‘No, it’s thanks to you, you can sit on the porch again,’” Mathena said. “I just helped you do something that needed to be done.”
Mathena, who joined the Memphis Police Department in 1995, was checking on the woman about a decade before joining the Project Safe Neighborhoods Task Force, a national initiative to reduce gang and gun violence.
Law enforcement and prosecutors meet every week to review cases where guns, ammunition or shell casings are recovered. They work to weed out the worst offenders. All citations, memos, arrests and offense reports are reviewed. They arrest fugitives and wanted parties, run local and nationwide criminal histories of each suspect, present cases to grand juries and subpoena witnesses.
The local PSN has reviewed more than 28,000 incidents, including 2,000 last year.
“We have seen an uptick with violent crime here in Memphis and Shelby County and so that is why this is so important,” said U.S. Attorney Edward L. Stanton III. “What you have with this initiative is cooperation, collaboration and communication. State, federal and local law enforcement all playing well in the sandbox for one common cause and that is to combat violent crime here in Shelby County.”
Stanton’s spokesman Louis Goggans said a few examples of the results of Western Tennessee cases of the initiative are:
Christopher John Clark, who was sentenced in 2013 to 76 years in prison for multiple weapons violations, assault and carjackings
Christopher Criswell, who was sentenced to 20 years in 2015 years for unlawful possession of nine casings of ammunition after an apartment shooting
Kedrick White, who was sentenced to 20 years in 2015 for the armed robbery of a gas station
Javalus Bullard, who was sentenced to more than 15 years in 2015 for illegally possessing a handgun, which he used to shoot at his girlfriend
Lereginald Strong, who was sentenced to more than 30 years in 2013 for an armed carjacking
State and federal authorities prosecuted Brashard “Hotboy” Gibbs, who was convicted of killing a man in a 2013 driveby shooting at a Lamar Avenue car wash and shooting at three people driving on Interstate 240. He was sentenced to life plus 143 years in his state case and 20 years in federal prison for being a felon in possession of shell casings.
A Memphis police lieutenant, Chris Moffatt, supervises the Project Safe Neighborhoods task force, which comprises one Memphis police sergeant, eight Memphis police investigators, one Shelby County Sheriff’s Office investigator and one agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives.
The task force investigated a 2014 smash-and-grab at the Wolfchase Galleria when a group of men with sledgehammers stole jewelry at about 7:30 p.m. on a Saturday. The task force followed leads to Houston where similar offenses had been committed.
“We did the case from beginning to end,” Mathena said. “We ended up actually going to Houston and working with Houston in arresting those guys for the smash-and-grab.”
Before joining the task force in 2008, Detective Zachery Gatlin was a patrol officer in South Memphis where he saw the impact of violent crime. Around 2000, he was working a shooting call when children came out to play by the squad cars outside of the crime scene.
He asked one boy why everybody was outside with all the police around working.
For the boy, who was about 10, the reason was safety.
“He looked up and said, ‘Because we know nothing will happen right now,’ ” Gatlin recalled.
On the task force, Gatlin said violent offenders, including people who fire into crowds and shoot up houses, are those they aim to remove from the community for long periods of time.
“We go after some of the worst individuals,” Gatlin said.