Stonewalled

Crickets. That’s become the expected response to Memphis Flyer questions sent to the Memphis Safe Task Force (MSTF) over the last year.

That’s not to say President Donald Trump’s select group of heavy-heat-packing military and law enforcement officials has fully blacked-out the press. News releases on big arrests do come through. Press releases on missing kids being found are sent out. But when it goes back the other way — when reporters have questions for them — it’s largely crickets.   

That is not just a Memphis Flyer experience. And it led us to look around and ask other reporters about their own experiences covering the Task Force. Seems like most are hearing what we’re hearing — silence.

Is it a Trump thing? Is it a law enforcement thing? Is it a Memphis thing? Right now, all we have are questions. No answers.

So, a military group and probably hundreds of federal law enforcement agents from across the country have convened here, carried out massive operations, arrested or detained hundreds of people, and they don’t have to answer the public? Isn’t that what the press is for?

We hear you. We’ve been hearing you for a year. But there is very little that “digging harder” can do when it comes to getting real information out of the Task Force. It’s a silent, secret fortress.

Consider that even U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Memphis) demanded answers from U.S. Homeland Security Sec. Markwayne Mullin in July after the Task Force killed two people in Memphis. Cohen wanted a demographic breakdown of ICE agents operating here. He wanted to know about shootings by the Task Force and other federal agents, whether any ICE agents had been part of the Proud Boys. He wanted to know about training materials, hiring standards, independent reviews of excessive force use, and more.

In short, Cohen demanded a lot of answers. A sitting Congressman, that is. And if he ever got those answers, he never shared them publicly. This isn’t a cop-out — when a member of Congress can’t get answers about boots on the ground in Memphis, the Flyer likely can’t either.

The situation for reporters here got so dire, The Guardian reporter George Chidi wandered around Beale Street with a sign pleading with the public to talk with him, because the Task Force refused. (Read more about this below.)

The press has been stonewalled. Plain and simple. It’s the best time to remember the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis quote, “Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant.” And The Washington Post’s official slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness.” Unless something changes dramatically, we’re living in darkness in Memphis, Tennessee. — Toby Sells 

George Chidi, politics and democracy reporter for The Guardian (U.S.), based in the Southeast

*This conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity.

Memphis Flyer: Your background as a military journalist is particularly important. [Regarding the National Guard and MSTF] and their unwillingness to speak to journalists, have you seen anything like this before?

George Chidi: I understand a general reluctance of folks in uniform to talk to the media without pre-clearance. I will tell you historically that has not been the case. Historically, soldiers, including National Guard troops, who are deployed in a public-facing role, are expected to talk to the media. They just need to go report it to the [public] affairs office, [and] they tend to get media training as a part of their deployment.

It’s just a thing, like, this is how you talk to the press. We’re not going to tell you what to say necessarily, but here are some guidelines, like stick to the job and don’t get political. Those have historically been the rules. That’s all changed in the last year and a half under Trump.

There’s been some drift before it, but the Pentagon has locked troops down in ways that are highly unusual. They’re not communicating anything except through the public affairs office. The public affairs office is saying as little as they possibly can about anything. They are referring everything to the United States Marshals Service, which also says as little as possible to the media.

The thing I really want to get across is, historically, this isn’t how they’ve operated. The Department of Defense and even the Marshals Service are not perfectly transparent organizations, but they have historically been more transparent than this, particularly when they are interacting with the public.

Right now, they are outside of their stated policy, [which] in my opinion, is a violation of longstanding Department of Defense practices and policies. Some of those policies have been rewritten in ways that I think are damaging to morale, damaging to the mission, [and] damaging to the surface.

How did you hear of Tyrin Johnson’s shooting?

I spent time talking with local activists who’ve looked at this problem, I spent some time talking to Hunter Demster, then went chasing after the Task Force folks, [and] wrote about their lawsuit.

I heard about the shooting through the media, the same way everybody else did. I immediately started sending out emails. In the course of reporting about the Task Force, I made contact with the United States Marshals Service public affairs office, and immediately called them, sent emails, [and] sent text messages. Did the same thing with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Memphis Police Department, the mayor’s office, and the Department of Defense. Just ‘what happened? Who did it? What are the circumstances? What do you know?’ 

Every entity referred me back to the Marshals Service, which basically doesn’t say anything except ‘this is under investigation,’ and that’s it. There’s no release of body cam [footage] or the video that is obviously going to be present because of the location of a street camera. There’s nothing. I get nothing, and I’m frustrated because again, that’s not how this works.

What led you to Beale for answers?

I’m sitting [in Memphis] with my wife, who came down with me, going ‘if I’m going to be here for three or four days, my physical presence needs to do something.’ I need to be able to do something that I couldn’t do on the phone. If I’m here, I need to produce something more than what I could do with an email.

I’m there thinking ‘how do I get people to talk to me? How do I find the right people who can help me find the right people who will talk to me?’ And I’m like, I wish we could put up a giant billboard and say ‘hey, find me here,’ because that’s worked before in various ways.

I said to hell with it — I’m going to get a sign made. Highly unusual journalism I might add, but not unprecedented for the moment, because the moment requires extraordinary action.

I met Hunter again over at [Tamboli’s Pasta & Pizza], and while I’m there I’m having a sign made at a sign shop. I go to the rally that [state Rep. Justin Pearson] was having with [U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and afterwards I’m like, you know what, time to go to Beale Street.

I got out, and my wife’s walking around with my phone in case I get arrested, because I thought it would be possible that the cops would look at that as [disruptive]. I just walked up to basically everyone I saw on Beale Street for two to three hours, like ‘Hey, you see anything?’

As the picture went viral, two or three days later I got a contact on Signal.

There’s more reporting that needs to be done, and the best of it is going to be done by people who understand Memphis better than I do. It’s going to require legwork and creativity, because the federal government is not going to help.

Brittany Brown, Public Safety Reporter at MLK50: Justice Through Journalism

*This conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity.

Memphis Flyer: How does your role as a public safety reporter intersect with coverage of the MSTF?

Brittany Brown: I’m reporting on public safety from the ground up. Rather than focusing on or just relying on elected officials or those who are in a seat of leadership [and] taking their word, or just reporting off of press releases or things of that nature, I’m out in the community building relationships with people who live in neighborhoods across the city, and meeting people where they are and talking to them — asking them about what their concerns are.

As that relates to the Memphis Safe Task Force, that means talking to people in communities like Orange Mound about what it feels like to see the National Guard in your neighborhood. Talking to community members who live in Berclair, who are experiencing the wake of one of the largest ICE raids in the country. Really talking to the people who are directly impacted by the decisions that those in leadership and power are making.

As a reporter, how do you parse the reality of people you talk to while comparing their statements to what elected officials say?

I think it starts with talking to people, and believing in the fact that people are experts of their own experiences. Experts are not only people with Ph.D.s or people who are professors, researchers, executive directors of nonprofits, or elected officials. People who are living through this thing that we’re writing about are actually the ones who are closest to the issue. Therefore, they’re the ones closest to the solution, to quote Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.

That doesn’t mean as a reporter I’m only relying on what the community says. I’m still doing other necessary reporting, which is records requests, talking to public information officers, and going to different scenes when action is unfolding, whether it’s a protest, a direct action, the aftermath of a raid, [or] a business being shut down by the Task Force. Trying to see these things with my own eyes is actually really important.

When the Task Force first started, there was not any information coming out about its operations in that first four to eight weeks of [them] being here. What we did at MLK50 was split up into reporting teams and we did two different stories, and took a 24-hour approach looking at what it was like to be driving through Memphis and actually seeing the Task Force do policing [and] traffic stops.

Was there anything you’d like to add?

There’s a saying about ‘if you’re not measuring it, you can’t improve it … you can’t manage something that you’re not measuring.’

Essentially, the public does not really know the data of the outcomes of what has happened or occurred since the Task Force has been here in the city. I think the city, county, and our state leadership could do our constituents some justice by making information transparent.

There’s a lot more impact other than the flashy posts we’ll see from the Department of Justice or former Attorney General Pam Bondi on X. ‘So-and-so amount of arrested’ or ‘the number of children recovered.’ But what does this actually mean for our criminal justice system? What does this actually mean for the operations at 201 Poplar and people who are in jail, or people who have to go to court? What about individuals who have been killed by members of the Task Force in the last year? There are still a lot more questions than answers and I think the public wants to know some answers. Our elected officials, those who are in public office, owe us that.

Marc Perrusquia, veteran Memphis investigative journalist and director of the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis

*This conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity.

Memphis Flyer: You’ve covered the Memphis Police Department and other law enforcement agencies for decades. What has it been like trying to cover the Memphis Safe Task Force?

Marc Perrusquia: I’ve always said that covering the Memphis Police Department was like covering the Kremlin. You get that kind of transparency. It’s hard to get anything out of them.

But the Memphis Safe Task Force is like covering the Kremlin on steroids. It is a very tough nut to crack, and there’s no accountability there. There’s very, very little transparency. There is when they want attention on a certain matter, a select issue. But trying to pry information out of them is very difficult to do.

What’s a good example of this?

We did a story that we published back in February about all these high-speed chases that have started since the Task Force has been here.

It’s really tough to get information out of MPD or local law enforcement about arrests. So, we had to scrape the criminal court website to get affidavits of arrest where officers are giving the reasons, in their own words under oath, about why they arrested somebody.

We found that the Task Force had done 75 high-speed chases in those three weeks. If you did the math, it would come out to something like 780 chases over the course of the year. You compare that to what MPD does in a year — they average about, I think, 140. So, it was more than five times as many chases. And about a third of them were winding up with accidents.

I contacted this guy, Ryan Guay, [a onetime Supervisory Deputy at U.S. Marshals Service and onetime spokesperson for the Memphis Safe Task Force]. He was the main contact point. I asked him all these questions in an email: How many high-speed chases had they been doing? Did they have information about a particular fatality that happened in January at a high-speed chase? Did they have any information about injuries related to that? Does the Task Force have a vehicle pursuit policy? I got no answers at all from them. Nothing.

I followed up with similar questions to the Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington and got no answer whatsoever.

Of those 75 chases we were able to identify, most of them — I think it was like 90 percent — were done by the Highway Patrol. They wouldn’t do any interviews. I asked them for their policy. They wouldn’t give it to me. They claim it’s confidential.

You can find MPD’s pursuit policy online. You can find Nashville’s online. You can find Chattanooga’s online. You can find Knoxville’s online.

But you can’t find the Highway Patrol’s online, and they claim it’s confidential. So, I had to sue them. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is suing on my behalf.

How does such stonewalling make you feel?

Frustrated. It’s a disservice to the public.

It used to be, back in the day — and I’m going back like 20, 30 years — when I was at the Commercial Appeal, we used to have a great relationship with law enforcement, MPD, the sheriff’s office. You could go up to the bureaus. You could get information from them. But there’s been this great disconnect over the years for different reasons.

Part of it is, I think, we’ve all become more cynical. Journalists now see their role more as a watchdog, and we’re very often very critical, and rightfully so, of law enforcement.

Part of it, too, is just the decline of legacy media. There really isn’t that power that [officials are] facing anymore. They’ve gotten good at hiding stuff.

Is the difficulty getting information from the Task Force unique, or part of something bigger?

This isn’t just the Memphis Safe Task Force. This is a state of our society.

We’ve got a real crisis in Tennessee, and probably nationally too, getting access to information, getting access to public records. You try to get, for example, body cam footage out of MPD, and you’re going to wait months and years. I’ve had to sue them.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has sued on my behalf six times. One time we sued MPD for body cam footage because they sat on it for two and a half years. We had to sue them, and a judge ruled in our favor.

This has just become the state of how things are done these days: the ignoring, the stonewalling, the dragging it out.