Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed TFA CEO John Harris and former Assistant US Attorney Braden Boucek in studio to speculate on final murder charges for the five Memphis police officers involved in the death of Tyre Nichols.
Leahy: In studio, John Harris with the Tennessee Firearms Association and all-star panelist Braden Boucek, the litigation director for the Southeastern Legal Foundation. Braden, you spent five years down in Memphis from 2005 to early 2011 as an Assistant US. Attorney. You worked with members of the Memphis Police Department.
Boucek: That’s correct.
Leahy: And so you know what that culture is. The question that I have for you is how many of those police officers were really great and how many of them were, let’s say, not first rate.
Boucek: (Chuckles) Boy, I don’t know if I’d want to put a ratio on it, but the one thing that I’ll say is how many members did you say they have?
Leahy: 2,000-member police force?
Boucek: And it always seemed like the same six to twelve police officers were making all the big cases.
Leahy: Exactly. And John Harris, you practice law here in Nashville, Davidson County. We have in Nashville, Davidson County the city police. Metro Nashville and County and I think the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department. All they do is run the jail. Right?
Harris: They run the jail when they do civil warrants. Civil warrant, they serve them.
Leahy: And we have a police department here with what, 1,500 or so police officers?
Harris: More slots than they have officers. (Chuckles)
Leahy: Yes, exactly. Now down you were telling us, Braden, that down in Memphis, we’ve got 2,000 members of the Memphis Police Department. And they have a county sheriff in Shelby County because it’s similar, has, what, couple of hundred officers, 500 something?
Boucek: Yes, it’s a more considerable police force. They at least do investigations in a way that the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t as John was saying.
Leahy: I want to get back to the issue of command and control because it looks like this Scorpion Unit, which was within the Organized Crime Unit, one of like 10 or 11 departments, and you’d worked with one of those departments during your six years there. They won’t tell us who was in charge of that.
But from your experience, what level of control down at the departmental level within an organized crime unit would a major or captain have over the police officers in that Organized Crime Unit?
Boucek: Yes, I think that those things are designed to have less control. I think that they’re designed to try to be nimble, to respond to fluid and specialized scenarios, but just because it needs some independent authorization, that only underscores the need for good and effective oversight and command.
Leahy: And training.
Boucek: Oh, absolutely, the training is essential. And one thing that I don’t think it can be said enough, what people saw on that video was bad police work. Among other things, it was also bad police work. Every law enforcement officer I know who is federal or a cop has said the same thing to me. This is bad policing. This is not what we’re trained to do.
Leahy: And if you looked at that body cam video, it struck me the audio that you heard from the police officers did not coincide with the video that you saw. I had the impression that what they were saying was, show us your hands, show us your hands, show us your hands, they must have said that, what, 50 times? How many times does a police officer have to say that without being able to subdue the subject?
Boucek:Â There are five of them.
Leahy: Five of them and one guy. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Boucek: And beating somebody until they show your hands is not the right way to figure out what the guy’s got in his hands.
Leahy: It struck me as performative for the video cam. Right? Because they knew they had their body cams on. Another thing to look at here which is very troubling to me, from what I’ve read is these five police officers who’ve been charged with second-degree murder at the moment…
Boucek: At the moment.
Leahy: At the moment.
Boucek: The investigation is ongoing.
Leahy: Ongoing. And we’ll talk about that investigation process. They were relatively inexperienced, like two or three years. Does Memphis have a problem recruiting quality, experienced individuals to serve as police officers?
Boucek: I can tell you when I was there, I know that there was a period where there had many I mean, I think over 100 paid-for vacancies that they could not staff. And part of the reason was there was a residency restriction that required you to be a Memphis resident.
You couldn’t just live in Shelby County. You couldn’t live in neighboring Arkansas or Olive Branch, and that was artificially restricting the applicant pool. And one of the things that they were debating was removing some of the prohibitions on criminal histories, as I recall.
And I think that we need to go back to see with these guys’ records whether or not they had any actual criminal history or anything indicating a propensity for violence of any kind, psychological assessments, whatever. But that’s something I would absolutely want to know.
Leahy: I would agree with that. I told both of you off the air, that The Tennessee Star, what we’re doing is we’re going to put our investigative team together to get the Freedom of Information Act and get answers from the Memphis Police Department because this thing stinks to high heaven as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t know how you can come to any other conclusion that this was a planned beating which ended up being, in essence, a planned execution. That’s what it looks like to me.
Boucek: If it wasn’t premeditated, it’s worse in a whole different way. If you’re just going to spontaneously start acting this way in this scenario, that’s mind-boggling to me.
Leahy: You were an Assistant US Attorney, not a District Attorney, The district attorney down there, Steve Mulroy recently elected down there, what should he be looking at as he begins to prosecute this case?
Boucek: What I’d be looking for here is anything that can go to premeditation. And within the existing case, I’d be looking for various roles of culpability. You ought to be able to ascertain that from just watching the video. But if this is truly premeditated, if they were targeting this guy, that’s something that ought to be able to come out pretty easily.
Leahy: And if it is premeditated, I think the charges will be raised to first-degree murder.
Boucek: That’s certainly one of the things you have to prove for murder one.
Leahy: Exactly.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “John Harris” by Tennessee Firearms Association, Inc. Photo “Braden Boucek” by Southern Legal Foundation. Background Photo “Memphis Skyline” by Thomas R Machnitzki. CC BY 3.0.
