In Tennessee, rhetoric hits reality in charged U.S. political debates over gun violence, carjackings and crime – The Globe and Mail

As Autura Eason-Williams drove home one July Monday in 2022, she appears not to have noticed the three youths tailing her. They had spotted her Infiniti Q50, a frequent target of auto theft, on the expressway, police would later say.

A 52-year-old leader of the United Methodist Church in Memphis, Tenn., Ms. Eason-Williams certainly would have had other things on her mind: She worked on programs to provide opportunities to at-risk adolescents and help low-income women access health care.

Pulling into the driveway of her house on a tree-lined suburban street, she talked on the phone with a fellow clergywoman, Birgitte French. Surveillance video shows another car roll up, two figures emerge and approach either side of Ms. Eason-Williams’s vehicle.

Over the phone line, her laughter suddenly turned to screaming. “I said ‘Autura, Autura, what’s happening?’ ” Ms. French recalls. “And then I heard the shots.” A 15-year-old carjacker named Miguel Andrade opened fire, pulled Ms. Eason-Williams out of her car and jumped into the driver’s seat. He backed up over her as he drove off. She was pronounced dead in hospital.

Police arrested Miguel later that night, after he carjacked another woman, led officers on a chase and crashed. On probation for a previous carjacking at gunpoint, he was wearing an ankle monitor when he shot Ms. Eason-Williams. And yet, he was freed on US$200,000 bail for the year and a half his case took to work through the court system. Earlier this month, he went to prison for 28 years after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and carjacking.

For Memphis, killings such as Ms. Eason-Williams’s have exemplified the worst of the U.S.’s gun violence epidemic. If a much-loved pillar of the community can be gunned down in front of her home, no one is completely safe. The motive, meanwhile, is all too familiar amid waves of auto theft and carjacking around the country. And her killer’s bail raises tough questions about judicial leniency.

Over all, the past two years have brought a steady decline in crime across the U.S. following a pandemic-era spike. But some cities and some offences have seen no reprieve. Memphis logged its highest-ever total of homicides last year, while rates of auto-theft are still climbing nationally. Particularly unsettling is the involvement of so many underage suspects and the seeming randomness of so many offences.

Crime is also set to be a key issue in this year’s presidential race. Former president Donald Trump is calling for National Guard troops to crack down in major cities and police officers to shoot shoplifters on sight.

On the streets of Memphis, anti-violence workers who spoke with The Globe and Mail see the causes of the crisis as significantly more complex than a simple lack of law and order. They point to crime’s perennial drivers, guns and poverty, both of which are particularly widespread here. They also hypothesize more proximate factors, many of them contentious: social-media feuding, policing tactics and the bail system. “It’s a disease cluster, like COVID,” says Dedrick Chism of the group Heal 901, named for the city’s area code. “We all are affected by it.”

And non-profits such as the one where Mr. Chism works are pushing very different solutions, trying to reach the people most at risk of getting involved in violence in a bid to defuse conflicts and steer them toward better lives.

On a balmy December afternoon, Renardo Baker steers his 10-seater van through Memphis’s Orange Mound neighbourhood. The bearded, heavy-set 48-year-old once dealt drugs in this place of strip plazas and clapboard bungalows, and now helps others escape the violence.

Emblazoned with the name of his group, I Shall Not Die But Live, the van offers rides to a safe house he runs, where people can get counselling and find refuge.

This day, Mr. Baker passes a mural painted with the face of one of his friends murdered six years ago and a school field where a teenage boy was killed last spring.

A city of 630,000 atop the bluffs of the Mississippi River, Memphis is best known for its neon-adorned blues bars, Graceland and the National Civil Rights Museum. Its airport is FedEx’s largest hub.

Founded in the 1890s, Orange Mound was historically a Black safe haven in the era of segregation. But this city and neighbourhood have long struggled with chronic poverty. Orange Mound’s US$28,000 median household income is less than half the national average.

For some, the lack of opportunity means a lifetime of low-wage jobs. For others, joining a gang. “It makes it hard for kids to focus on school when they’ve got to put food on the table,” Mr. Baker says.

Add to this the sheer ease of getting a gun.

Tennessee has some of the U.S.’s weakest firearms laws, as do nearby Mississippi and Arkansas. All three states allow people to buy guns without a background check and do not require that firearms used in crimes be traced. The country has also been beset in recent years by the rise of ghost guns, which are assembled from kits purchased online and typically have no serial numbers.

Last year, Tennessee further softened the rules by eliminating the need for a permit to carry guns in public.

“Since they came up with that open-carry law, people are bold with the guns. Everybody has one. They’ve got them hanging out of their pockets,” says Paul Richardson, 42, another gang exit outreach worker riding along with Mr. Baker. “It takes you back to the wild west movie days.”

Antonio Huntsman, 47, who runs neighbourhood football programs, says the steady demolition of public housing buildings has been a problem, too. This has pushed more people, including gang members, into areas where they must live next door to their rivals and sparked conflict.

“We have had a lot of apartments torn down, which spread everybody to places where they normally wouldn’t be around each other,” he says.

On a macro level, the picture in the U.S. looks better than it did during the worst of the pandemic. Gun violence spiked across the country in 2020 and 2021. In 2022 and 2023, it began to subside while remaining higher than before the pandemic.

The improvements are not universal, however. In Memphis, homicides hit 398 in 2023, one of the country’s highest rates. Washington, Cleveland and Dallas also saw increases. Auto thefts, meanwhile, began rising nationwide in 2021 and continued this trend last year.

Delvin Lane, a former leader of the Gangster Disciples who now runs a city-backed gang exit program, says much crime plays out through social media. Young people who want to gain status are incentivized to record bad acts and upload them. TikTok shows a steady stream of videos of people joyriding in stolen cars.

“A lot of these guys are doing what’s called resume-building. The quickest way to get validity is to show that you’ve actually done this,” Mr. Lane, 46, says.

Another consequence of the open-carry law is a rash of car break-ins, fuelled by criminals looking for guns. They tend to target vehicles parked near post offices, courthouses, schools and other places where firearms aren’t allowed, reasoning that people will leave their guns in their cars, he says. “They know the places people can’t bring their guns inside. That’s where they’re bopping.”

District Attorney Steve Mulroy is skeptical that bringing the hammer down with longer sentences or more arrests – let alone dispatching soldiers, as Mr. Trump champions – would do very much.

The 59-year-old former civil rights lawyer and law professor argues that a better strategy would be to increase Memphis police’s abysmally low clearance rates by paying for the department to hire more detectives. The force solved just 18 per cent of all crimes in 2022, including fewer than one-third of homicides. Toronto police, by comparison, cleared 80 per cent of homicide cases in the past two years.

“For decades, our consistent response to rising crime has been to lock more people up and to lock them up for longer, and it manifestly hasn’t worked,” says Mr. Mulroy, as he sits in his offices atop the fortress-like building that houses Memphis’s courts and county jail. “In order to deter crime, punishment should be swift and certain; it need not be severe.”

Elected a little over a year ago on a platform of judicial reform, he has aimed to divert non-violent offences into restorative justice programs – in which defendants agree to perform community service or pay restitution rather than go through the court system – while increasing resources to prosecute gun crimes.

For instance, the office now prioritizes pressing ahead with prosecutions of non-fatal shootings, even in cases where victims or witnesses are not co-operating. Prosecutors are also obliged to seek prison sentences, rather than probation, for such cases. Related offences, such as someone caught with a gun in a stolen car, are also flagged for special attention.

The bail system has come under fire for some eyebrow-raising releases of people accused of first-degree murder. Under Tennessee law, there is a presumption that all prisoners not subject to the death penalty have a right to bail.

Mr. Mulroy agrees with the criticism but contends that the problem is overstated. People on bail committing further violent crimes happens in fewer than 4 per cent of cases, he says. He’s also concerned about imposing a “tax on poverty” by setting higher bails in all cases.

“If this is the defendant’s third, fourth, fifth offence, then we should be leaning more heavily into setting bail so high that they are not out,” he says. “But in every system, you have to worry about both false negatives and false positives.”

Memphis has already tried the tough-on-crime approach with disastrous consequences. In 2021, Chief Cerelyn Davis created a group dubbed the Scorpion Unit, aggressive officers sent to boost arrests in high-crime areas. In January of last year, they beat Tyre Nichols to death during a traffic stop. In the aftermath, Ms. Davis disbanded the unit and fired the officers involved, five of whom are now charged with murder.

Community anti-violence workers, for their part, aren’t waiting for solutions from the state.

Dedrick Chism patrols the New Horizons apartment complex near the airport. He builds relationships with residents in order to mediate disputes.

“If there’s a shooting, we’re going to get with this group or this person or this family and we’re going to try to stop it spreading,” says Mr. Chism, 48. “Even if I’m home at 3 o’clock in the morning when a shooting occurs, I get right on it.”

Mr. Lane’s organization, 901 Bloc Squad, connects people with things that they need to avoid criminal involvement, whether work, education or gas money. One program, for instance, sets people up with coding classes. At Bloc Squad’s headquarters, a cavernous concrete building off a suburban arterial road, Mr. Lane is building a boxing ring to give people an alternative activity after school. “We provide everything that the big homie provides – the love, the attention – but on the positive side.”

Another group, Memphis Allies, launched last year with a large cash infusion from a private charity to offer a wide array of services to people trying to get into a better life.

Outreach workers, including Mr. Baker, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Huntsman, identify people at high risk of involvement in violence and convince them to join. Once someone does, they are given a life coach and case manager to help find school and work opportunities. A therapist helps them develop the mindset to stay away from violence.

It is painstaking work, but Memphis Allies sees it as vital, given the inability of the criminal justice system alone to stop crime. “There’s a place for prosecution,” says Susan Deason, the group’s executive director, “but we’re not going to incarcerate or prosecute our way out of this problem.”

In a multipurpose room in Ms. French’s church, she has assembled the library of her best friend, Ms. Eason-Williams. The murdered pastor and married mother of four believed in restorative justice and community intervention strategies for dealing with crime. She worked with the police on a program to set young offenders up with community work. Over the years, she also oversaw church mentorship, basketball and reading programs.

“It’s really a matter of giving children a place to belong and let them know that they’re loved,” Ms. French says.

To her, the justice system’s treatment of Miguel Andrade, the triggerman, has been backward. On one hand, she says, the decision to twice let him walk out of jail is inexplicable. “What are they doing releasing him when he’s in a gang?”

On the other, she contends that prosecuting him as an adult, a decision made by Mr. Mulroy’s predecessor as DA, all but precludes any chance at rehabilitation. “Given the right mentors, the right guidance, you can turn your life around,” she says. “I want to believe that.”

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