Toy Cops, Real Guns

The state has given armed MHA security officers the authority to act like cops, but not the training.

by Jacqueline Marino

few months ago Rev. Ronnie Tullos was driving slowly through the Cleaborn Homes public-housing development looking for some people who attend church at the nearby Inner City Outreach Center. As he drove past the ramshackle, two-story apartment buildings, he saw a blue-and-white Memphis Housing Authority security car approaching him from the opposite direction.

Tullos remembers the way the driver snapped his head around and stared at him as they passed each other, then turned his car around down the street.

PHOTO BY DANIEL BALL

Once Tullos drove off the Cleaborn Homes property, the driver of the MHA car flashed his lights. Because the car was still a good distance from him, Tullos didn’t think the driver was signaling for him to pull over.

But when Tullos turned into ICOC’s driveway, the MHA car pulled up behind him.

Tullos and his passenger, associate pastor Ronnie Johnson, claim a security officer then jumped out of the car with his hand on his gun, looking as if he was going to pull it out of its holster. He chided them for not pulling over and informed them that a Jeep Grand Cherokee like the one they were driving had been reported stolen.

Tullos was livid. For one thing, MHA security officers have no authority off MHA property. For another, the officer was proving to him what Cleaborn residents who attend ICOC had been saying for a long time: MHA security officers harass residents. Some allegedly stop people in the developments without reason. They do random strip searches for drugs and otherwise abuse their powers.

After his personal encounter, Tullos finally decided to consult the MHA officials.

“A lot of these guys they’ve given pistols and badges to are running wild, thinking they’re Rambo,” Tullos says. “People in my church have told me they can’t even sit on their front porch for fear they’ll be searched by MHA.”

Complaints of harassment are commonly filed against law-enforcement officers and agencies. Many of them turn out to be meritless. But the complaints lodged against MHA security officers, called “investigators,” deserve special attention.

Before last year, MHA security officers were considered armed security guards. Now they’re something else. They’re something more. They’ve become a new breed of security guard – one with police powers. And they’re making up the rules as they go along.

In 1997, against the wishes of Mayor Willie Herenton and Memphis Police Director Walter Winfrey, the state legislature gave MHA’s security officers the same authority police officers have to carry guns and make arrests within the borders of MHA’s 22 housing developments.

Since then, however, the state has not ensured that MHA officers receive the same training and certification that regular officers receive from Tennessee’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST Commission). In fact, according to the commission’s hand-kept files, only four employees of MHA’s 65-person investigative division are POST-certified. According to MHA, only 31 have completed at least 320 hours of training required for full-time law-enforcement officers.

A Flyer investigation has also found that at least five security employees, some of whom are working under a federal drug elimination grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), have pleaded guilty to or been convicted of misdemeanor charges involving drugs, theft, gaming, or force. People with those prior convictions typically are not eligible for POST certification, according to the commission’s guidelines.

State representative Kathryn Bowers, who sponsored the legislation giving police powers to public-housing security officers, says MHA is breaking the law by employing investigators who are not POST-certified.

“It was not the intent of the legislation for anyone to be policing the housing authority who is not POST-certified,” she says. “When I was working with [former MHA executive director] Jerome Ryans, it was his intention to employ people who were POST-certified. Along the way, their priorities must have changed.”

Suspicious, but composed, MHA Manager of Security Clyde Venson slides over the inter-office memorandum describing his department’s investigation of the Tullos incident.

Venson has been at the helm of MHA security for the last five years. He’s also been a deputy sheriff, a probation and parole officer, a chief criminal investigator for the state attorney general’s office, and an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for sheriff. He lost to former MPD director Melvin Burgess, who in turn lost in the general election to A.C. Gilless last month.

Venson doesn’t evade questions, nor does he sugarcoat his responses. But he does like to digress. His answers to reported complaints against his investigators often turn into pontifications on the harsh realities of crime in public housing and his personal philosophy of law enforcement.

“There’s three sides to every story,” he says. “There’s the two sides and then there’s the way it really happened.”

Back in April, Venson says his officers did see Tullos driving slowly through Cleaborn Homes in a manner characteristic of people looking to buy drugs in the developments. MHA officers did follow him. But when Tullos pulled into ICOC, the officers realized it was just the neighborhood pastor. Field Commander Howard B. Terry, who investigated the incident, says the officer got out of the car in a nonthreatening manner in order to greet Tullos.

Terry says Tullos could not remember the exact date of the incident, nor was he able to identify the officer who stopped him.

Tullos is indignant when he hears that Venson has dismissed his complaint.

“I have no reason to lie,” he says. “They do. I was just trying to help them. One day they’re going to beat up or strip-search the wrong person and there’s going to be a riot down there.”

Venson dismisses allegations that his officers have harassed residents, blaming the perceived increase of complaints on the greater presence MHA security has gained in the developments over the last several years.

“An officer tells people to pick up a bottle and they think it’s harassment,” he says.

As for hiring individuals who have prior misdemeanor convictions, Venson pleads ignorance.

According to MHA’s “minimum acceptable qualifications” for a security officer, applicants must have no “misdemeanors that may cast an adverse reflection on moral turpitude.”

Venson says if he had known that investigator Kenneth King pleaded guilty to assault after punching a club employee in the jaw in 1991, he would not have hired him. He also said he didn’t know that investigator Gelinda Dickerson, a public-housing resident, pleaded guilty in 1990 to possessing crack cocaine and trying to steal two SuperNintendos from a Target store two days before Christmas.

Three other security employees have prior convictions involving gaming, driving under the influence of intoxication/drugs, and malicious mischief. Venson says he only knew about one of them and that person was hired before he came to MHA.

The Flyer obtained information about the criminal histories of the investigators by searching General Sessions court records. Venson says the people who did background checks on his investigators did not report the same information.

“If you go through any [law enforcement] department, you will find people with these charges,” he says. “These charges didn’t come up when they did their check. Everybody’s liable to make a mistake.”

Like Tullos, Citywide Residents Council president Myrtice Askew of Cleaborn Homes has heard complaints from residents, as have four other resident presidents contacted for this story.

Last year Askew witnessed security officers chase a young man through Getwell Gardens and then remove his pants and search him for drugs in front of bystanders. Venson acknowledges that there was an officer who thought he had the authority to do strip searches. He no longer works for MHA security.

Askew called the Flyer after a story that appeared in the August 28th edition of The Commercial Appeal praised the job MHA security is doing in her development. She said the story erroneously portrayed residents in the development as criminals and painted an overly complimentary picture of MHA security.

Later in the week, Askew called a special meeting of resident presidents who told the Flyer how they really felt about the job MHA security is doing in public housing.

“It’s not that crime is increasing, it’s just that crime is not being dealt with properly,” says Delores Harris, president of the Venson Center housing development. “People who report the crime are getting retaliated against, and they [security officers] like to say they have a lack of manpower.”

When asked if they hear complaints from residents about security on a regular basis, all of the presidents in the room nodded their heads yes. Most of the complaints involve MHA security being exceedingly harsh in their words and actions, including pushing people against squad cars to search them and yelling at them to get off their front porches and yards.

Askew is in favor of MHA security having more of a presence in the housing developments, but she says some bad officers have made their way onto the force and need to be weeded out.

“We need protection,” she said. “You can’t hardly sit on your porch anymore because of the bullets whizzing past.”

By protection, Askew means she wants more officers with better training. Right now some of them don’t know what they’re doing, she says, and others abuse their positions of authority.

“You can tell who’s a police officer [on the MHA Security force] and who’s not,” Askew says.

To ensure that Memphis police officers and sheriff’s deputies enforce the law fairly and effectively, the POST Commission requires trainees to complete courses in firearms, criminal law, and other related subjects. POST certification also insulates the department, somewhat, from liability should lawsuits arise. Robert Bryden, president of the Memphis-Shelby Crime Commission, says “It’s a common-sense thing that they [MHA investigators] should be POST-certified.”

That’s not the position taken by the POST Commission, however. It still considers MHA officers security guards. But Mark Bracy, executive secretary of the POST Commission, says the issue about whether to certify them did come up at a meeting held after the legislation passed last year.

Essentially, the commission’s members interpreted the law differently than Bowers. Nowhere in the legislation does it specify that public-housing officers must be POST-certified, they decided. It only requires them to receive 40 hours of in-service training each year.

Bracy says that even if the legislation required POST certification, the commission still couldn’t do it unless additional legislation was passed changing the commission’s guidelines. The commission can only certify full-time police officers working for a police agency of the state. Most MHA security investigators are funded through a federal grant.

“We can’t train federal officers,” Bracy says.

The POST Commission does not certify highway patrol officers or officers of the National Park Service either. One reason for that is financial. Bracy says POST-certified officers receive yearly supplements of $600 each as long as they complete 40 hours of in-service training. The state already doles out more than $5 million each year in salary supplements.

Brenda Cleaver, manager of the state HUD office that reviews MHA’s drug elimination grant application each year, did not know MHA security investigators do not receive all the training required of police officers until the Flyer called her last month. HUD requires personnel funded by the drug elimination grant to meet “all relevant Federal, State, tribal, or local government insurance, licensing, certification, training, bonding, or other similar law enforcement requirements.”

In MHA’s 1997 grant application, it says that since 1995 all investigators have been trained at the MPD or the sheriff’s department academies and are “POST Certified in accordance with requirements of the State of Tennessee…”

It’s not true. But it’s not that they haven’t tried, either.

Since the law passed, the POST commission has turned down repeated requests for certification from MHA security investigators. Venson says the terms of the legislation will be satisfied without getting his officers POST-certified, as long as they all complete required POST-training by either the MPD or the sheriff’s department.

Venson says all investigators have the same rank, but only the ones who have received POST training actually make arrests. But several investigators contacted by the Flyer say this isn’t true and that in the field there is no distinction between investigators who are POST-certified and those who are not.

The number of regional training slots available for MHA investigators is few, Venson says. Of the 31 investigators who have received POST training, three also work as Memphis police officers and 15 as part-time reserve deputies for the sheriff’s department. They have received POST training from those agencies.

“It’s not a problem that some don’t have POST certification [currently],” Venson says. “If you go to any other small police department – look in the TCA Code Annotated – and they have a window [to get officers trained].

Other law-enforcement authorities in the city, however, do not see MHA Security as a police department. Some, like sheriff’s department Inspector David Wing who works in the public-housing developments, think it’s problematic that there are armed security officers who have had no more than 40 hours of training enforcing the law in the city’s crime-ridden housing projects.

“I think there’s always a problem when you put a group together like that and give them guns and police powers,” he says. “I’m not saying they don’t have good officers, but you do get into some gray areas.”

Police powers didn’t come easy to MHA security. It was a long, hard-fought battle that has spanned more than a decade.

The city’s dilapidated, overpopulated public-housing developments have long been breeding grounds for crime, especially the selling of illegal drugs. Crime statistics compiled by MHA and MPD do not coincide because of different reporting techniques. But according to MHA, there were 13 homicides, 163 assaults, six rapes, and 221 burglaries on the developments in 1997 alone. From August 1996 to June 1997, MHA Security made 228 drug arrests in the developments.

In its 1997 drug elimination grant application, MHA states that drug dealers have taken over people’s front porches. Gangs roam the developments, intimidating residents. And mothers “put their babies to bed in bathtubs for protection as shots ring out at night.”

Proponents of police powers for security investigators have said they can have a greater impact on crime than either the MPD or the sheriff’s department, even though both agencies have increased their presence in the developments over the last few years. But supporters have also stressed that a public-housing security force is ineffective without powers of arrest.

“Anyone who wants to put people serving in a security capacity in public housing in the city of Memphis in the state we’re in now without police powers is borderline on dereliction,” Venson says. “That’s just like me sending you out in the middle of the ocean without an oar.”

In 1995, the bill stalled in a state senate committee because some senators were concerned about having untrained, armed officers patrolling the developments. Besides Herenton and Winfrey, MHA board chair Ricky Wilkins spoke out against MHA developing its own police force in 1996 mainly for financial reasons. Only seven MHA security personnel are paid through the general operating budget. The rest are funded through two-year grants from HUD that could end at any time.

Representative Bowers says she agreed to sponsor legislation granting MHA security police powers only because POST certification was required. The bill passed in April 1997. In November, MHA received a $1.8 million drug elimination grant – $100,000 more than the year before. Venson says the number of security investigators increased from 35 to more than 60.

Still, MPD Deputy Chief Samuel Moses hasn’t noticed much of a change in the way MHA Security patrols the developments. In fact, he wasn’t even aware of the legislation giving MHA investigators police powers. Like Winfrey, Moses still considers them security guards.

Right now, because MHA is not insured to transport the people they arrest on the developments to the county jail, they rely on the MPD and the sheriff’s department to do so. They also do not investigate felony offenses or execute search warrants.

Venson has tried to get insurance that would enable them to transport offenders to the jail, but he insists he’s not trying to turn MHA security investigators into police officers.

“MHA’s goal was never to establish a police agency,” he says. “We wanted people that serve in the capacity of providing security that have police powers.… I want enough people so that I can cause the residents in public housing, even though they may be poor and even though they may be less fortunate, to have a chance to raise their families in a safe environment so they can give them a chance to pursue the American dream.”

In addition to denying charges that his security force is undertrained and confrontational with residents, Venson says MHA Security has effectively fought crime in the developments. Residents often think of it before the MPD when a crime occurs, he says. They make between 35 and 40 calls to the MHA crime line during every eight-hour shift.

But it’s going to take more than spin-doctoring and police powers to improve the reputation of MHA Security in public housing. Both Tullos and Askew say it’s well-known that many MHA officers do not have the same training that MPD officers have, nor do they have the same respect.

On the evening of August 20th, almost every stairwell and garbage-strewn piece of lawn in Oates Manor is occupied. Young men sit on car hoods and drive beat-up cars slowly through the parking lot of the North Memphis public-housing development. Women in shorts and T-shirts sit on the steps while small children play in the gutters and grassy areas littered with broken glass.

One 37-year-old man wearing a wooden crucifix around his neck and two Playboy bunny earrings in his left earlobe hangs onto the railing recounting his only two experiences with MHA security.

The first was several months ago when he was sitting on his car in the parking lot. MHA security officers approached him and made him lean against the car with his hands on the hood. Then they frisked him and emptied out his pockets for no apparent reason, he says, using abusive language as they searched him.

He compares that to the time he and a friend were walking to a nearby convenience store and a bullet whizzed past, ripping through the sleeve of his friend’s shirt and then ricocheting off a nearby building. He claims two MHA security vehicles were parked close enough to hear the shot, but did nothing.

A small crowd of people gather around to tell of other incidents. None of them want to give their names for fear of retaliation. Even though few recount having suffered any abuses or harassment, the distrust of security and MHA in general hovers like the oppressive August humidity, which refuses to let up even as the sun goes down.

“Have you ever been harassed by MHA security?” one young man is asked.

He shakes his head.

“Not yet,” he replies.

“They promise to put you through the police academy and get you trained,” Echols says. “They promise you a career.”