Newly public data shows task force increased traffic and drug charges in Memphis

Many of the arrests made since the Memphis Safe Task Force began its work have been for traffic violations and drug charges, despite its stated focus on violent crime, according to new data shared with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism.

“This is supposed to be a ‘Make Memphis Safe Task Force,’ and really what it is, is a ‘Make Memphis Drive the Speed Limit Task Force,’” said General Sessions Court Clerk Tami Sawyer, whose office will make the data public through a new dashboard on Thursday. 

So far, there hasn’t been an influx of new cases involving violent crimes, said Jonathan Bennett, associate director of the University of Memphis’ Center for Community Research and Evaluation. Bennett worked on the dashboard with Vishant Shah, chief data and analytics officer at the clerk’s office. 

“The data shows there is an increase in traffic stop-related and narcotics arrests. Felony and misdemeanor arrests remain about 50/50,” Bennett said.

Currently, the dashboard only includes arrests leading to new cases, although the clerk’s office plans to add warrant data in the near future. Arrests stemming from pre-existing warrants are “likely a key focus of the task force’s efforts with respect to violent offenders,” Bennett said. The task force said Sunday that more than 1,000 of its 2,342 arrests were on preexisting warrants, but how many of those are for violent crimes remains unclear. 

The Shelby County General Sessions Court’s new dashboard will live on shelbygeneralsessions.com, and will be updated weekly. The dashboard reflects what’s happening in Shelby County’s criminal justice system, including jail and court operations, amid the surge in policing from President Donald Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force. 

Sawyer said publishing the dashboard is a part of her office’s goal to be more transparent — especially since the U.S. Marshal’s Office, which oversees the task force, stopped reporting some information. 

The data indicates that the county’s jails are being crowded with people arrested for narcotics- or traffic-related charges, Sawyer said. The two charges are often interconnected. For example, a highway patrol officer may pull someone over for speeding but also charge them with a drug-related offense if the officer finds marijuana in the vehicle. 

“We already know the jail can’t hold the amount of people that are being detained,” she said. “We know intake can’t hold the amount of people that are being brought in every day. And while some of those arrest numbers have tapered off a bit, we can breathe today, (but) this weekend anything could change.”

According to the September jail report card, the downtown jail is overcapacity, holding 2,804 men. The report card showed 324 women in Jail East, which is near capacity.

The dashboard also shows misdemeanor citations, which officers can choose to issue instead of arresting people who they charge with misdemeanors. However, Shelby County is currently 70 to 80 days behind on digitizing Tennessee Highway Patrol tickets, so the data is incomplete, Sawyer said. As a result, there is currently no way to gauge how the task force is affecting those citations.

Because the highway patrol issues paper tickets to Memphis drivers and delivers hard copies of those tickets to the court, staff must enter each citation line-by-line into the county’s online system. Sometimes, the citations are difficult to read, causing additional delays, Sawyer said. People can’t pay their fines until the tickets have been entered into the system, she said. 

“There’s no standard of how (citations are) written. Some of them are on printouts. Some are handwritten. If it got wet, if it’s been torn (or) crumpled up, that’s how they’re coming to us,” Sawyer said.

Sawyer’s staff had been reading and manually processing 1,500 citations per week since the highway patrol began its surge of enforcement in Memphis in June, she said. That pace has slowed since her office depleted its overtime budget trying to decrease the backlog, Sawyer said.

Right now, Shelby County is the only county in the state that inputs highway patrol citations manually, a process that predates Sawyer’s tenure as clerk. Other counties use the Tennessee Integrated Traffic Analysis Network, called TITAN for short, a statewide database of all traffic-related reports submitted by law enforcement agencies across the state, including the highway patrol. With this system, citations are uploaded online and available within the same day, she said. 

Sawyer said Shelby County will begin using TITAN in mid-December, with no additional cost to the county or taxpayers because the system is free to use, Sawyer said. “TITAN should have been in play before I was elected,” she said. The database launched in 2008.

Once TITAN is implemented, the county will explore how artificial intelligence can be used to quickly input handwritten and printed citations online in order to clear the backlog, Sawyer said.

“Technology was not a priority for this office in previous generations,” she said. “I’m trying to update this office from 1975.”

The arrest data dashboard was originally created for the “Inter-Agency Justice and Operations Work Group,” composed of Shelby County government officials. The group first convened in September, when the criminal justice system saw “chaos” and disruption from the expected influx of task force activity, Sawyer said. The group’s goal is to coordinate and streamline criminal justice system operations. 

Members of the group include county judges, representatives from the district attorney’s office, staff from the public defender’s office, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, judicial commissioners and a county commissioner. Some City of Memphis officials were invited but declined to participate, Sawyer said.

“One of the biggest detriments to people’s civil rights and safety is the fact that we have this slog in operations that’s due to us operating in silos and not working together to advance technology,” Sawyer said. “The surge doesn’t help. (It) has really escalated the inefficiencies.”

Katherine Burgess is the government accountability reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at katherine.burgess@mlk50.com

Brittany Brown is the public safety reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at brittany.brown@mlk50.com

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