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A new homeless shelter for women and expanded programs to combat homelessness in the city were announced by city and county officials Thursday

At a joint meeting of the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission Thursday, officials detailed plans for an $8 million relocation and expansion of the Hospitality Hub, an organization that assists homeless men and women, providing customized care, resources, or referrals in partnership with other organizations.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland who was at Thursday’s meeting said homelessness is a “community issue and what we’re bringing to you today is a community solution.”

The solution addresses the lack of emergency shelter beds for homeless women and of assistance for the homeless population during the day,” Strickland said.

The new Hub, which will move from a spot near Second and Beale to the former City of Memphis Public Service Inspection Station on Washington, will house a resource center, an outdoor day plaza, and a women’s shelter.

The women’s shelter will be built to house at least 32 women, officials said. Kelcey Johnson, executive director of the Hub said the shelter is meant to house women for four to nine days, but in some cases, women might need to stay up to 30 days.

Johnson said there is a significant need for shelters here that serve women: “I never have to say to a man ‘tonight you have to sleep outside, but I frequently have to say to a woman ‘tonight you have to sleep outside because there’s no bed for you.’”

Based on data from the Hub, 37 percent of Memphis’ homeless population are women, but only 6 percent of the beds in shelters are open to women, city council chairman Kemp Conrad noted.

“A barrier-free facility for homeless women in our community does not exist, and it is unacceptable,” Conrad said.

The outdoor day plaza, to be created in partnership with Youngblood Studio, will be a place that the homeless individuals can relax and rest.

The plaza will include shade, seating, art, play areas, a garden, and a stage. The Hub also plans to activate the space with music, food, and art programs. The space will serve as a heating and cooling center as well.

The plaza is expected to be open by summer.

• Full Build
• Layout of planned facility

Private funding totaling $5 million has already been secured for the facility. The city and county are both planning to add additional funds to that each year through 2021 of up to $1.2 million.

The goal of this new effort is to eliminate street-level homelessness within 30 months, officials said.

The city council and county commission will vote on a resolution confirming funding allocations at their next respective meetings in May.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris’ 2020 budget proposal will include the largest investment in pre-K in county history, according to officials.

Harris announced Tuesday that the budget allocates $6 million for pre-K and early childhood education.

The mayor will present his full proposed budget to the Shelby County Commission on April 29th.

If approved, $5.5 million will go toward pre-K classrooms and the remaining $500,000 will be allocated to the Porter-Leath organization for Early Head Start, a program that helps families care for their infants and toddlers through comprehensive services. Porter-Leath will use that investment to leverage more than $4 million in additional resources, officials said.

The mayor’s budget is also expected to identify a dedicated funding source for early childhood education.

This comes as an $8 million grant that has funded 1,000 students since 2014 is set to run out in June. The county and city plan to invest $16.6 in pre-K by 2022, which should fund those 1,000 seats plus an additional 1,000 more.

The city began looking at funding county-wide pre-K last year, putting $3 million of excess city revenues as seed money into a dedicated fund. Additionally, a portion of city property tax revenue and taxes paid by companies whose PILOT (pay-in-lieu-of-taxes) incentive has expired began going to the fund.

The Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission both voted in March to select a fiscal agent that will manage and raise additional dollars for the pre-K fund. The fiscal agent will also be tasked with creating high-quality pre-K classrooms.

The head of the team appointed by the court to monitor the Memphis Police Department’s (MPD) adherence to a federal judge’s October ruling on police surveillance said at a Tuesday hearing that the city has been “cooperative” and “responsive” so far. 

U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla appointed former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton of the Butler Snow Law Firm to lead the independent monitoring group in December after he ruled in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee v. the city of Memphis case. McCalla said the city failed to train its officers on the 1978 consent decree that bars political surveillance of citizens and that MPD did violate that decree.

As a result, the court imposed sanctions on the police department, including the appointment of Stanton and several others to monitor the implementation of the court’s recommendations.

The court instructed the department to revise its policies on political intelligence and train officers accordingly, establish a process for approving criminal investigations that may incidentally result in gathering political intelligence, establish written guidelines for the use of social media searches, and maintain a list of those searches.

• Ed Stanton III

Giving a progress report to the court, Stanton said Tuesday that over the past three and a half months, the team has been acting as the “eyes and ears of the court,” conducting a comprehensive review of MPD’s code of conduct, it’s onboarding and training process, and social media practices, including a record of the search terms used by the department.

“It’s important to know that to date, the city, through its counsel, has been extremely cooperative, responsive, and resourceful in providing the documents and files the monitoring team has requested thus far,” Stanton said. “Still, it’s impossible to obtain instant solutions or compliance.”

Stanton said the team is still evaluating data and thousands of documents from the city.

Another important part of the process will be meeting with Lt. Col. Anthony Rudolph, training commander for MPD, to learn more about the training officers receive relating to social media and surveillance.

Stanton said the team was hoping to meet with Rudolph before Tuesday’s hearing, but wasn’t able to as Rudolph is out of the country.

Judge McCalla said meeting with Rudolph is crucial to the process, calling the parties’ inability to set a meeting with the commander a “miscue” that should not have occurred: “This should have happened a while ago.”

Another member of the monitoring team, Jim Letten, a former U.S. Attorney, said once Rudolph returns, the team will assess MPD’s current policies and training program, adjusting or adding to it if necessary. The aim is to “preserve the department’s investigative goals” while “preserving the right to express and enjoy the First Amendment.”

To do this, the department has to put a training program in place that will “reach every single officer in the department,” training them to “recognize and protect First Amendment rights,” Letten said.

The final recommendations the team makes to the court won’t “threaten degrading the police department’s ability to effectively investigate, find offenders, and protect citizens,” but it won’t “offend the consent decree,” Letten said.

Rachel Levinson-Walden of the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, also serving on the monitoring team, said MPD has made “significant efforts” to address the concerns raised by the team.

Levinson-Walden said this has been “a major factor” in the team’s ability to accommodate the court’s requests.

“The city has made significant progress already and has been extremely cooperative, but there’s more to be done in terms of training and putting protocols in place and in terms of embracing the values set out by this court,” Levinson-Walden said. “Where we are seeing the policies headed are by-and-large in a very good direction.”

But Levinson-Walden reminded the court of why everyone was there Tuesday in the first place: ”In general, social media surveillance by law enforcement can be intimidating and chilling, especially when the focus is people exercising their constitutional right or when it’s disproportionately focused on communities of color.”

Citing a set of police guidelines relating to the use of social media for intelligence drafted by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance in 2013, Levinson-Walden highlighted the need for oversight mechanisms to make sure the department is adhering to the consent decree.

The 2013 guidelines recommend that any law enforcement action involving undercover activity, including developing an undercover profile on social media, should require documentation of all activity, periodic reviews, and auditing of the undercover processes.

Levinson-Walden also said that if a police department is using social media for investigative purposes, then its social media policies should be available to the public.

This isn’t an area that has gotten much attention on a national level, she said. But she and others are in the process of drafting legislation that would put transparency and accountability mechanisms in place for law enforcement agencies using social media.

Levinson-Walden found through a survey that of the 156 police departments in the country who have purchased social media monitoring software, only 18 of them have information-gathering policies that are available to the public.

A major focus of the legislation would be to make sure the public understands how law enforcement is using social media and have an opportunity to provide input on that process.

The bill would also provide certain protections for juveniles, put restrictions on undercover accounts, and require a yearly report from departments on how they are using social media.

Judge McCalla told the monitoring team, along with attorneys for the city and the ACLU that he would like to have all proposed policy revisions drafted within 90 days.

• DEA
• The opioid fentanyl can be 100 times more potent than morphine.

Though the number of opioid prescriptions filled each year in Tennessee and Shelby County has been decreasing since 2013, the number of opioid overdose deaths have not. 

The latest available data from the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) shows that of the 1,776 drug overdose deaths that occurred in the state in 2017, 1,268 of them were opioid related.

Nationwide, 30 Americans die every day from opioid overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Opioids include prescription opioids such as hydrocodone, oxycodone, morphine, and fentanyl, which can be 100 times more potent than morphine, as well as heroin and opium.

Shelby County saw a total of 207 drug overdose deaths in 2017. Of those, 159 were caused by an opioid. Nine more opioid-related deaths occurred that year than in 2016 and 66 more than in 2013. 

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid often mixed with other illegal drugs and sold on the street, was by far the deadliest opioid in Shelby County in 2017. It led to 106 overdose deaths, while heroin led to 59 and opioid pain relievers led to 52.

• Tennessee Department of Health
• Fatal overdose data for Shelby County

Shelby County had the state's third-highest number of opioid overdose deaths in 2017 behind Knox County, which had 196, and Davidson County, which had 184.

The TDH report also shows that in 2017, 66 percent of Tennesseans who died from an opioid overdose, filled a prescription included in the Tennessee Controlled Substance Monitoring Database within a year of their death.

Thirty-seven percent of Tennessee residents who died from an overdose that year filled a prescription for an opioid within two months of their death. This is a 20 percent decrease from the number who did so in 2013.

Just under 6.9 million opioid prescriptions were filled across the state in 2017. That's a little over a million less than were filled in 2013. 

In Shelby County, which has a population of about 939,000 people, 607,512 opioid prescriptions were filled for pain in 2017. This number has steadily declined from 2013 when 718,103 opioid prescriptions were filled.

D. Michael Dunavant, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, said last week that many times those who end up addicted to heroin start with a dependence to prescription painkillers.

“Opioid misuse and abuse is an insidious epidemic, created in large part by the over-prescribing of potent opioids nationwide, and unfortunately, Tennessee and West Tennessee is at the center of that epidemic,” Dunavant said at a press conference last week as he detailed the indictment of sixteen medical professionals from Tennessee, including five from Memphis who allegedly illegally distributed of opioid prescriptions.

Five Memphis medical professionals were indicted Thursday for illegally distributing opioid prescriptions to patients — in one case in return for sexual favors.

The five Memphis professionals were indicted along with 11 others from Jackson, Tennessee, who were arrested in a Wednesday sweep coordinated by U.S. Attorneys and the Department of Justice’s Appalachian Regional Prescription Opioid Strike Force (ARPO).

D. Michael Dunavant, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, said the 16 defendants together allegedly distributed more than 350,000 prescriptions for controlled substances, equalling about 32 million pills.

“Opioid misuse and abuse is an insidious epidemic, created in large part by the over-prescribing of potent opioids nationwide, and unfortunately, Tennessee is at the center,” Dunavant said. “ We will not stand by and allow the harmful and oftentimes deadly practice of over-prescribing highly addictive drugs to continue unchecked.

“Along with our partners, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will pursue medical personnel who misuse their positions of trust to blatantly disregard and endanger others’ very lives for their own financial gain.”

Through “good old-fashioned police work,” undercover efforts, and data analytics, Dunavant said the ARPO Strike Force was able to identify medical professionals in West Tennessee prescribing excessive amounts of narcotics.

Defendant Richard Farmer, a Memphis psychiatrist, allegedly issued controlled substances at his clinic here without a medical diagnosis and sometimes in return for sexual favors. Farmer is also accused of providing these substances to pregnant women.

Two more local doctors, Michael Hellman and Thomas Hughes, were also taken into custody and indicted Wednesday. Hellman is accused of prescribing large amounts of promethazine with codeine, a Schedule V controlled substance, without doing medical examinations.

Hellman gave these substances to confidential informants on multiple occasions, according to court documents.

Hughes, an endocrinologist, is accused of fraudulently dispensing a Schedule III substance for testosterone to himself.

James Litton, a former nurse practitioner, is charged with conspiracy to distribute and dispense controlled substances, as well as healthcare fraud.

Finally, Kathryn Russell, a registered nurse here, allegedly prescribed opioids and other drug cocktails to drug-seekers with no legitimate medical purposes. Court documents also indicate that Russell might have been under the influence of drugs while working.

If found guilty, all of the defendants, with exclusion of Hughes, face up to 20 years imprisonment and a fine of up to $1 million. Hughes, faces up to four years of imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000 for dispensing substances to himself. Law enforcement will look to link each of the 16 individuals to specific cases of opioid overdoses, Dunavant said.

“It is clear that these defendants charged in this ARPO Strike Force initiative has contributed to and caused much harm, addiction, pain, injury, and perhaps even death here in West Tennessee,” Dunavant said. “These physicians are nothing more than white-coated drug dealers with prescription pads. And if these licensed medical professionals are going to act like drug dealers, we’re going to treat them like drugs dealers.”

Dunavant added that he “had no problem signing the 16 indictments,” and that there “will be more to come.”

The ARPO Strike Force, formed in October, is a joint law-enforcement effort by the FBI, DEA, several U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, and others. The mission of the strike force is to identify and investigate health care fraud involving the illegal distribution of opioids

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 130 Americans die every day from opioid overdose.

Kayaks and stand-up paddle boards will be available to rent at the River Garden Park beginning Saturday, May 4th.

The Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP), in partnership with Kayak Memphis, is launching the rental program as a way to help Memphians connect with the river.

“Our job is to give as many Memphians as possible the opportunity to reconnect with their river,” George Abbott, director of external affairs for the MRPP. “Kayaking in the harbor or enjoying Mud Island Park is one of many ways that all can come to the river, celebrate 200 years of Memphis and look forward to what’s to come. Grab a friend and come to the river today!”

The equipment will be available to rent every day at the Fourth Cup coffee kiosk in the River Garden from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.

• MRPP
• Kayak and paddle board rentals will be available at the River Garden Park near Mud Island.

Kayaks and paddle boards will cost $20 for the first hour. A two-person kayak will cost $30 an hour. For each option, every additional hour would be $10.

On opening day, rentals will be discounted at $20 per two hours. 

To help those unfamiliar with kayaking, MRPP and Kayak Memphis staff will offer a free kayaking orientation each Saturday in May at 2 p.m. The orientation will demonstrate the best practices for first-time kayakers.

Kayakers can paddle across the harbor to dock at Mud Island Park or travel north on the harbor for about three miles.