Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland (D) joined Fox13 in Memphis Monday where he was forced to answer some poignant questions about the city’s crime in the wake of a viral video showing a Memphis Police Department (MPD) officer being assaulted by a group of men.
“All of this is completely unacceptable, and somebody out there knows who did both those actions, and they need to call Crime Stoppers because we need quick justice to all those criminals,” Strickland said.
Asked whether the general public was safe from similar attacks faced by the police officer, Strickland avoided the question.
“We’ve had dozens of police officers shot at over the past year – dozens,” he said. “All the more reason those perpetrators ought to be aggressively pursued and in our court system and we ought to have zero tolerance, and I say this all the time.”
Throughout the interview, Strickland blamed lenient sentencing on the crime rate in Memphis.
“At city government and city police, we have zero tolerance for gun violence,” he said. “Our court system has tolerance. And I think we see the result of it here.”
“You can’t rely on police to do everything,” he said later in the interview. “Police by themselves cannot lower crime. They arrest people. The courts have to punish people. But we do have a short-term thing that we’re going to bring out today… we’ve got to reinstate our traffic plan downtown.”
Later, he praised MPD when confronted about the significant drop in police officers in recent years.
“It’s unbelievable that we have these women – thank goodness – who come out every day to protect you and me and put their lives on the line and have to go through that, what you see there, and I’m just so thankful for that,” he said, adding that the city has boosted law enforcement benefits and pay in order to recruit more officers.
Over the past 11 years, MPD’s police force has thinned by 22.6 percent, from 2,449 officers in 2011 to 1,895 officers at the end of last year.
Memphis has earned a reputation as a hotspot for criminal activity.
In fact, it has one of the highest crime rates in the United States, at a rate of 81 per 1000 residents, nearly four times the national average.
In September of last year, a man named Ezekiel Kelly went on a murderous rampage in the city, which he streamed live on Facebook. He faces three murder charges along with a slew of others, and prosecutors say they will seek the death penalty if he is convicted.
That brazen act of violence occurred just after Eliza Fletcher, a school teacher, was kidnapped by a man with a long criminal history, raped and later found dead.
Days after the kidnapping, the suspect in the Fletcher case was linked to a separate rape by DNA evidence, the testing of which was delayed due to a backlog at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI).
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter.
Image “Mayor Jim Strickland” by Mayor Jim Strickland and “Memphis Street Fight” by Fox13 Memphis.
reminder that this is the result of generations of democrat rule.
this is the fruits of their work.
Jim Strickland…..got rid of that historic civil war park……does nothing about crime…..Memphis deserves and needs a new leader….as do many of our large cities unfortunately. No Freddie in Nashville please…..
Busineses & Decent people should move the hell out of Memphis & let the thugs kill each other. If prosecutors won’t prosecute, & police officers are attacked by gangs. Then get the hell out if you can. These people don’t deserve Freedom. They aren’t capable of functioning in a civil society.
Governor Lee your Red Flag Laws won’t help this out of control crime. Stop Attacking Law Abiding Citizens, when you are inviting the Soros Paid Antifa/ BLM who riot for a living. That’s what Justin Jones resume was before he was elected.
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If you look at state data on gun-related deaths, realize that more than half of them are suicides, then Memphis and Nashville account for the vast majority of the remainder, and primarily by a certain demographic group, you can only come to one conclusion: we need a special session of the legislature to take other people’s guns away.