When Paul Young was sworn in as the mayor of Memphis more than two months ago, he vowed to find ways to improve public safety in the city.
It’s a tough task. The city is still recovering, a year after the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx worker by five Memphis police officers. That was one out of a record-breaking 398 homicides Memphis suffered in 2023, among the highest in America, and nearly a 40% increase from 2022. The city started 2024 with more than two dozen killings, as this year’s homicide total continues a similar trajectory.
Young decided to seek help from his mayoral peers nationwide. Facing similar concerns, many responded.
A group of Black mayors and officials from two dozen of the nation’s biggest cities will meet in Memphis this week to share their most effective crime strategies, USA TODAY has exclusively learned.
Although homicides and violent crimes fell across the country last year, they are still higher than pre-pandemic levels ‒ major concerns the newly launched Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime (BMCC) will address starting Wednesday.
“All of our cities are looking for solutions,” Young, who’s spearheading the initiative, told USA TODAY.
“Numbers alone don’t capture full story”
The coalition’s meeting comes as crime dropped in several key categories nationally, last year.
There was a 13% decline in murders in 2023 from 2022, a 6% reduction in reported violent crime and a 4% decrease in reported property crime last year compared to 2022, recent FBI data shows.
Those figures mean the U.S. in 2023 experienced one of the largest single-year reductions in crime since modern record-keeping began around 1960, according to the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a nonpartisan think-tank that will present the latest crime trends during the coalition’s closed-door sessions.
“The recent decrease in murders is encouraging, but far more can and must be done to achieve lasting reductions in homicide and other violent crime,” the CCJ said in its recent trends report.
Nationally, homicides remained about 18% above 2019’s total, said Adam Gelb, the Council of Criminal Justice’s CEO.
“The statistics do not necessarily drive people concerns about crime, most are not sitting around following whether a certain statistic is up by 10% or down 10%,” Gelb said. “They are getting lots of information from lots of different sources that the numbers alone don’t capture the full story.”
Gelb said the CCJ plans to share with the mayors such stats that may strike chords including that Black males in America were eight times more likely to die by homicide and Black females were four times more likely to die the same way in 2020 and 2021 than their white counterparts.
“I think it is always important to look at issues that impact our community and disproportionately impact African Americans as I believe in taking a comprehensive approach from crime happening in the first place,” said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who is dispatching deputy mayors Karren Lane (community safety) and Brian Williams (public safety) to Memphis to share and learn about new strategies.
The nation’s second-largest city, L.A. saw a 17% drop in homicides and a 3.2% decrease in violent crime last year, Bass said. However, city officials say they need to improve in other categories such as property crime which climbed by 3.5% and retail theft, which spiked by 16%, last year.
Memphis Police officials told the USA TODAY Network’s Memphis Commercial Appeal last month that other major violent and property crimes show signs of slowing, except homicides. Violent crime is currently down 12% from this time a year ago.
“It’s really, really hard to feel like there’s a decrease in crime in Memphis right now because our homicides have just been popping the way that they are,” Memphis Police Public Information Officer Theresa Carlson said. “It’s been like that for so long, but there are areas where we’ve seen that we’re having success.”
Gelb said several other big cities including New York, Detroit, and Baltimore are showing progress, too.
“There are some good things happening in some cities across the country, but the efforts are uneven at best,” Gelb said.
In New York City, where overall crime continues to decline, hundreds of National Guard members are now patrolling and searching passengers’ bags for weapons at busy subway stations to fight crime, Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to USA TODAY he knows firsthand as a former police officer “it’s not just about keeping people safe, it’s also making sure they feel safe.”
Both New York and Memphis had roughly the same number of homicides last year, though New York, America’s biggest city, has 13-times more people.
Adams commended Young for convening the Black Mayors Coalition on Crime in Memphis, the country’s largest majority Black city, “to have an honest conversation around protecting our cities and delivering peace of mind at a time when our communities need it most.”
Gelb added that even with the lower crime stats, most Americans, “don’t want to have a false sense of security, as there’s a big battle going on right now between perception and tolerance.”
A Gallup poll released in November said 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in the country than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a “very” or “extremely” serious crime problem, the highest in the poll’s history dating to 2000.
“It’s the brazenness, the randomness of crimes that just hits people differently,” Gelb said.
‘Still a ways to go’
Lane, the Los Angeles deputy mayor for community service, said she is interested in sharing with peers how her city has managed a 26% reduction in gang-related homicides that many cities, such as Memphis, might be interested in replicating.
Lane also wants to talk with representatives from Newark, New Jersey, Chicago and Baltimore about their emerging community violence intervention programs and ask them what they are doing to prevent retail theft, property and quality of life crimes.
“We’re really looking forward to participating in ongoing work of the coalition as we’re hopeful it will create progressive changes across the nation,” Lane said.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, who will be attending this week’s event, agrees. She said creative leaders often share and implement public safety strategies with each other because they don’t have time to reinvent the wheel.
“We don’t have all of the solutions and when we see or hear that something is working well in another municipality, we would like to know more about it,” Jones said. “And if we want to adopt it, we’ll maybe tweak it to our specific needs and let it roll.”
Jones said efforts like that led St. Louis to the biggest overall drop in crime in about a decade, including a 21% reduction in homicides last year (158 in 2023 compared to 200 in 2022), a 24% decrease in shooting incidents and a 23% decline in shooting victims, according to city statistics.
Also, juvenile shootings were nearly cut in half (47%) and the number of juvenile victim incidents fell by 50%. There were also decreases in felony thefts (39%), auto thefts (19%), burglaries (12%), robberies (11%) and aggravated assaults (6%).
“We have been on a yearslong journey and we’re making great strides,” said Jones, crediting Police Chief Robert Tracy in his first year leading the department as part of the turnaround, along with officers and community stakeholders. “We are pleased with the progress, but we still have a ways to go.”
The mayor also cites the city’s Office of Violence Prevention and its crisis response unit, which Jones calls the “Cops and Clinicians” initiative. This is where a clinical social worker goes with a police officer to offer immediate mental health services on some calls, reducing the need for police and emergency responses. It’s a strategy she borrowed from similar programs in Denver and Houston.
Bass said she believes it is a “fundamental mistake” to expect the police to pick up the pieces for non-criminal issues like mental health.
“As a society, if we don’t address their problems in the beginning, there wouldn’t always become a need for law enforcement intervention,” Bass said.
Young, who was previously president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission, said he’s hoping to reduce crime by reaching the small group responsible for 80% of the city’s crimes. He recently met with some of his city’s highest-ranking gang leaders and created a weeklong ceasefire that drew national attention.
Young, 44, said his relative youth helped the gang members relate to him and that they told him they wanted to get good-paying jobs and the training needed to get them.
When asked why he was tackling crime so early in his administration, Young said frankly, “I have no other choice.”
Lucas Finton with USA TODAY Network’s The Memphis Commercial Appeal contributed
