Trump's Memphis visit was more show than substance on fixing crime |
President Donald Trump’s traveling road show rolled into Memphis on March 23, arriving fully formed, complete with applause lines, supporting players, villains and a rambling script that bent toward performance art.
Memphis knows something about performance. It’s a city that gave the world blues, soul and rock 'n' roll. It values authenticity over bombast.
Politically, it’s arguably the bluest city in the bluest county in ruby red Tennessee. The odds are greater that Elvis is alive than it will ever vote Republican, yet the state’s conservative, MAGA faithful joined the president for his event in the southwestern corner of the state that takes pride in the meme: “When you're bad, you get put in the corner.”
It was unsurprising that Trump did not engage with Memphis as much as project onto it, ignoring its complexities ‒ population loss, intractable poverty and an underperforming economy ‒ and delivering a monologue rather than engaging in a conversation.
It was essentially another installment in the “I Alone Can Fix It” tour, claiming sole credit for a historic decline in crime in Memphis.
Trump claimed to have 'fixed' crime in Memphis
His mission to Memphis began Sept. 15, when he signed a presidential memorandum establishing the Memphis Safe Task Force, which became the basis for the massive deployment of officers from eight federal departments.
The agencies already were collaborating with Memphis police, but for Trump, he alone deserves credit.
The addition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel provokes the most controversy. The agency operates covertly, but it has inspired grassroots groups alerting immigrant communities to its locations while filming its excesses.
Trump said Memphis was "the murder capital of the USA," before then saying crime has “been fixed" and claiming it was down 43%, even if the actual breakdown of crime in the city says differently.
Unlike Trump, Memphis Mayor Paul Young did not declare victory.
“We still have work to do,” Young said, emphasizing that the crime rate decline began before Trump’s task force.
While Trump appeared to nap, his appointees provided the over-the-top accolades that are standard for these events.
Key adviser Steven Miller easily won: “What President Trump has done on border security and public safety is a national miracle that will be studied not only for generations but for centuries to come.”
Notably, none of the federal officials spoke about the causes of crime or anything other than a “lock ‘em up” approach, and ICE's controversial enforcement tactics weren't emphasized.
What Trump's news conference didn't cover
What was most striking was what wasn’t said.
In a city with a troubling history of pretextual traffic stops of Black Memphians for broken tail lights, failing to signal and failing to come to a complete stop, the 17,459 traffic citations in the hunt for undocumented immigrants has opened ICE to the persistent charge that it’s not arresting the “worst of the worst."
An analysis found that 9 out of 10 of the street arrests had no criminal records.
Young, who found a scheduling conflict that kept him from attending Trump’s event, said: “I’ll just be very clear that that’s not a part of this task force that I like, that’s not a part of those efforts that I am supportive of. I think that the immigrants in our community have been a vital part of the growth of our city for the past 10 to 15 years, and we want them to feel welcome in our community.”
The numbers bear him out. Memphis’ population has declined from 650,000 in 2000 to 611,000 today, according to the Census Bureau. The increase in the number of people of Hispanic origin has bucked the overall trend, shooting up to 10.4% of Memphis’ population by 2024.
Federal officials also rightly boasted about locating 150 missing children, but the task force ignored the crisis of about 60,000, or 39%, of Memphis children living in poverty, the second highest child poverty rate in the country.
An unexpected bragging point was that 1,219 guns have been confiscated, since the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly has passed permissive laws that make guns ubiquitous in the city.
Trump supporters cite a poll for the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission by a Republican-leaning polling company that reported 62% support for the task force.
However, based on my own inquiries, I believe most people see only unarmed and uncontroversial National Guard members rather than ICE’s jarring enforcement methods.
Touting short-term fixes for long-term problems
Seeing beyond the immediate is not a Trump administration strength, and he failed to plan for the impact on the justice system. The jail is overcrowded, courts are swamped and prosecutors are struggling to keep up with the influx of cases, but there’s no federal funding support to address these issues.
Consider that the deployment of 1,000 Tennessee National Guard members to Memphis could cost $226 million through Sept. 30, according to a federal memo filed in court. (Costs of the other agencies are undisclosed.)
Meanwhile, the city's police department says it needs 500 additional officers for its optimal size. That would cost more than $37 million, based on calculations using the average annual officer salary in Memphis.
It raises the obvious question: How is the current level of enforcement sustainable when the federal officers leave and there’s no long-term budget support for the city?
Tom Jones is the principal of Smart City Consulting, which focuses on public policy development and strategic planning. He writes a monthly column for Memphis magazine and has written the Smart City Memphis blog for 20 years.