Trump’s strategy to ‘Make Memphis Safe Again’ has failed once before | The president’s plans for Memphis resemble the aggressive, showy, and ultimately failed crime-fighting strategy once used by the city’s police

I’m adding YIMBY to this because of the “city with a severe gun problem tries to exercise self-governance by banning permitless open-carry by referendum but is pre-empted by a hostile state government” dimension. I think it’s another good argument for metro areas’ self-governance.

> When President Donald Trump describes his plans to deploy the National Guard to Memphis as a “replica” of what he’s done with federal troops in Washington, D.C., he’s attempting to make two points: first, that it’s appropriate for him to deploy the military in American cities at all, and second, that doing so effectively reduces crime in cities that just happen to be run and disproportionately populated by his perceived political foes. But the vision he has laid out to “make Memphis safe again” is familiar in another key way: It looks a lot like the crime-fighting strategy the city tried just a few years ago—one that ultimately failed.

> The president signed an executive memorandum on September 15 directing federal agents to combat street crime in Memphis through “hypervigilant policing,” “aggressive prosecutions,” and “strict enforcement of applicable quality-of-life, nuisance, and public-safety laws.” The memo called for “large-scale saturation of besieged neighborhoods” and highlighted issues such as graffiti, noise, public intoxication, and traffic violations as areas of focus for federal agents set to descend on the city.

> **All of this sounds remarkably similar to what Memphis tried previously—an effort that, according to the Department of Justice, had disastrous results. “We have reasonable cause to believe that MPD and the City engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution and federal law,” DOJ investigators wrote in a December 2024 report on the Memphis Police Department’s activities, sharply rebuking a policing style that managed to antagonize local residents while doing little to solve or prevent violent crime. “First, MPD uses excessive force. Second, MPD makes unlawful stops, searches, and arrests. Third, MPD unlawfully discriminates against Black people when enforcing the law.”**

> In response to that report—which found that crime had worsened despite the city’s constitutionally questionable crackdown—Memphis leaders said they had already intervened to stop the most egregious abuses. But with the support of Tennessee’s Republican state leaders, Trump now appears eager to return to the “saturation-style enforcement” that the Justice Department said was effective at arresting thousands of Memphians for traffic violations and nonviolent offenses but abysmal at catching the gang members and other criminals driving the city’s high violent-crime rate.

> Most of the people I spoke with in Memphis acknowledged that the city does have a serious crime problem. Although violence has decreased significantly this year—overall crime is at a 25-year low, police said this month—Memphis ended 2024 with the highest rate of violent crime in the nation, according to FBI data. In recent years, homicides have regularly topped 300 a year in the city of about 630,000—a murder rate that the White House recently noted was four times higher than that of Mexico City. When I asked officials in Memphis why the city’s crime rate had remained so high, several pointed to a 2021 state law allowing for permitless open carry of firearms, saying that it has exacerbated gun violence. In November, Memphis residents voted heavily in favor of a referendum opposing permitless gun ownership, although the superseding state law has blocked the city ordinance from going into effect. More than 90 percent of recent murders in the city involved a firearm. Trump’s memo on “Restoring Law and Order in Memphis,” however, does not mention gun violence.

> Bill Lee, Tennessee’s Republican governor, has already begun dispatching dozens of state troopers into Memphis ahead of the expected arrival of federal troops. Lee, who went to the White House last week to personally thank Trump for the troop deployment, said he hoped the effort would result in “sustained crime lowering.” But Lee and the National Guard are still sorting out the details, which has delayed what had been expected to be an imminent deployment. It could be weeks before troops are in Memphis, a Pentagon official speaking on the condition of anonymity told The Atlantic. Among the challenges are federal budgetary concerns due to the end of the fiscal year and a possible government shutdown, the official said.

> In the meantime, the state troopers have focused on traffic stops, issuing hundreds of tickets in recent days, local officials told me. The push is reminiscent of a strategy Memphians have become accustomed to—and, in many cases, annoyed with—even as their city has become more violent. Over a five-year period ending in 2023, officers in Memphis issued three times as many tickets as did their counterparts in the more populous city of Nashville, making 800,000 traffic stops and issuing 300,000 tickets, according to the Department of Justice. During that same period, murders in the city increased from 186 to 348 annually.

> The strategy resembles one of the tactics federal agents have employed in Washington, D.C., during the surge that began last month. Police checkpoints were set up to stop people for traffic infractions, and officers tended to use the stops as an opportunity to check drivers’ immigration status or search for outstanding warrants. White House officials credit the highly visible efforts with bringing down rates of carjackings and other crimes, although criminal-justice experts have suggested that such decreases [are likely to be short-lived](https://archive.is/pNfNs).

> Memphis’s mayor, its police chief, and most of the city’s officers are Black. The group of leaders Trump assembled last week at the White House to announce the “Memphis Safe Task Force” and discuss the city’s future—Lee, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and a cadre of Cabinet officials—were almost exclusively white. Several Memphians I spoke with flagged the dynamic as troubling. Wigginton called it “jarring.”

> City leaders have said they would welcome federal help to combat violent crime, particularly to address Memphis’s low clearance rates for the most serious offenses. Memphis police arrested a suspect in only 28 percent of murders in 2022 and 14 percent of murders in 2023, well below the national rate of 50 percent, according to FBI data. The clearance rates for nonfatal shootings have been even lower. Given the seriousness of the crime problem, Trump’s memo highlighting “public intoxication” and “unpermitted disturbances and demonstrations” has led to a fair share of eye rolling among local officials, Tami Sawyer, the general-sessions court clerk for Shelby County, which includes Memphis, told me. “They’re going to come arrest people for vagrancy and loitering and noise and graffiti, but they’re not going to take the guns out of circulation,” said Sawyer, who oversees much of the operation for the misdemeanor court cases and the jail in downtown Memphis.

!ping BROKEN-WINDOWS&SNEK&YIMBY