The Memphis Safe Task Force (MSTF) announced on December 15th that it had surpassed 4,000 arrests since the October launch of its initiative, “underscoring a sustained commitment to reducing violent crime and protecting the most vulnerable in Memphis neighborhoods,” the press release stated.
After a month of the force’s activity here, I spent some weeks working to access public records regarding the 1,000-plus arrests that had accumulated at that point — arrests leaders claim to have been tracking on the city’s Safe Data site (memphistn.gov/safedata). The info there is provided in such a confused format — separating “warrant arrests” from “total arrests” while having an apparent number of felonies vs. misdemeanors in each category, numbers that don’t add up, and a blatant lack of transparency even at surface level with upwards of a thousand charges filed in the “other” category (out of what they say, as of December 18th, is 4,316 arrests) — it is not meant to be understood. Looking over the charts, it would be easy to miss that detail — nearly 22 percent were detained for publicly unknown or “other” charges. The site and its numbers create a facade of safety as the task force itself has focused largely on traffic stops (47,625 as of this writing) and immigrations arrests, profiling Black and brown people at a rate well beyond the already high level of pretextual stops we’ve seen — and fought against — in recent years.
When probed to release public information on arrestee demographics, charges, and more, MSTF officials in mid-November replied, “The Task Force has remained transparent throughout this operation, and the numbers shared are those tracked through our established metric system. We do not break the data down much further … that is not how the information is gathered.” Freedom of Information Act public records requests submitted to U.S. Marshals, the proprietors of the data, have yet to be acknowledged beyond “received.”
The extent of transparency I’ve seen is via crafted press releases: “Traffic Stops by Memphis Safe Task Force Remove Guns, Drugs, and Dangerous Offenders from Streets”; “Fake Badge, No Authority: Memphis Safe Task Force Arrests Criminal TBI Impersonator”; “There’s No Escaping Justice, Memphis Safe Task Force Ends Fugitives’ Run from Accountability.”
They have announced the capture of alleged gang members, murder suspects, and sex offenders, and I absolutely praise efforts to remove violent criminals from our streets. But some cases they’ve highlighted bring into question the truth of their narrative — arrests for “Felon in Possession of a Firearm” and “Possession of a Controlled Substance” were news enough to send out a press release, yet immigrations arrests have been wiped completely from the publicly tracked data. These highlights also situate the Memphis Police Department as a failure — with its many outstanding warrants for various offenses, mild to heinous, neglecting to find on their own sex offenders who hadn’t registered or re-registered, for example. But even for the most serious criminals who have been apprehended, the public records are not available. We get what they give us.
What’s truly heartbreaking is the number of people who’ve sat idly by, or worse, in agreement with what’s happening in our city under the guise of public safety. While just last week, a video showed 850 Memphians lined up through a maze of halls in queue for traffic court — 850 on the docket for one day; people who had to take time off of work and otherwise waste hours standing in 201 Poplar for a tag light or tint infraction. The jail itself is grossly overcrowded, with several inmates dying in recent months and conditions reportedly unsanitary and torturous. And the task force’s own release illustrated that there are criminals impersonating the feds. Perhaps that wouldn’t be so easy to do if the officers were all uniformed, badged, unmasked, and in marked cars. But as has been shown, they work undercover, trailing troopers in old pick-up trucks or new SUVs, and their actions aren’t being tracked in any way that can be analyzed or accounted for.
If the aim, as repeatedly stated by force officials, is to “protect the most vulnerable,” this misuse of funds and force is even more vile. Funnel that money into food, housing, and education. Stop pulling people over for their skin color and writing tickets to already struggling citizens. Until all of our city’s people have stable foundations to build upon, safety is an illusion and the freedom we enjoy in Memphis, and in this country, slips farther away.
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