Sessions’ crime speech plays to racial biases, not real solutions

Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd of about 100 federal, state and local law enforcement officials at the U.S. district courthouse in Memphis Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions expressed appreciation for law enforcement and addressed violent crime. He said that “every lawful tool” will be used to “take the most violent offenders off our streets.”

Citing a 43-percent increase in homicides last year in Memphis, he said “these aren’t just numbers.”

“These are people, our citizens whose safety and lives are at stake everyday,” he said. “They are people like the residents in Sycamore Lake Apartments here in northeast Memphis. Last week, two men were shot there and killed during a drug deal, according to the local detectives who worked the case. Tragically, this is not an uncommon thing there; since 2014, seven people, including a soon-to-be mother and her unborn baby, were murdered in just that apartment complex.”

Sessions also decried incidents of violent crime in other cities, saying ‘this is not acceptable in America.”

Congressman David Kustoff, who welcomed and introduced Sessions, said law enforcement has been under siege A crowd of more than 100 people marched in protest during Jeff Sessions' visit.

Jeff Sessions could have saved the end of his drug speech for the beginning. And he could have saved it for a speech in Nashville. Or Knoxville. Or Chattanooga.

But then again, when you’re trying to drum up support for harsh, largely ineffective penalties for drug crimes, a mostly-black city like Memphis is a convenient stage for playing to fears.

The attorney general singled out Memphis’ violent crime rate in a speech earlier this month — one in which he announced that he was, in effect, reinstating the mandatory minimum sentencing policies that the Justice Department had halted under the Obama administration.

Then yesterday, Sessions visited Memphis to double-down on that talk about how horrible the violence was here, how bad the drugs were here, and how his people weren’t going to put up with it. On the violence, he’s right. Last year, 228 people were killed in Memphis — 195 of which were classified as murders. That rate mirrors the violence that wracked the city in the 1990s.