Democrats defunded Memphis police. Here is what happened next
Conn Carroll
After Michael Brown was shot in the act of assaulting a police officer, the Democrat-controlled city of Memphis, Tennessee, slashed pension benefits for its police department. City officials also vowed to change a police force that was 47% white into something that better reflected a city that was only 27% white.
Hundreds of white police officers got the message they weren’t wanted and left the force. This left the Memphis Police Department hundreds of officers short of what even the Democratic mayor thought was needed to keep residents safe.
To fill this gap, according to journalist Robert Klemko, the police department was forced to lower standards at the police academy. This included dropping the department’s requirement that applicants hold a college degree and making it easier for recruits to pass tests.
All five of the officers charged with the brutal beating and murder of Tyre Nichols joined the department under these new, lower standards.
One of the officers charged, Demetrius Haley, had been a corrections officer in Shelby County. He had been sued for allegedly beating an inmate unconscious in 2016. The lawsuit was dropped after the inmate’s lawyer failed to serve the defendants properly, but neither the Memphis Police Department nor the Shelby County Corrections Department would say if the incident was ever investigated.
“They baby these recruits and do everything they can to help them pass the tests so they don’t lose the body,” former Memphis police lieutenant Brian McNamee told Klemko. “That’s a problem. If somebody can’t pass the tests and can’t grasp the material, you don’t want them on the streets policing you.”
Another officer who trained with some of those charged with killing Nichols, but was not involved in that incident, was allowed to graduate and become an officer despite harassing a female instructor at the academy. Jamarcus Jeames bragged to other recruits that he would soon be having sex with a female instructor at the academy. That instructor filed a complaint with the city, but it was dismissed. Jeames was later found asleep in his car by a Shelby County deputy, who suspected Jeames of drunk driving, but no officer trained to administer DUI tests was on duty at the time.
At a bare minimum, academy rules required Jeames to report his contact with a law enforcement agency during enrollment. He failed to do so, but he was allowed to graduate anyway because it needed the warm bodies. A year later, Jeames was disciplined for turning off his body camera before shooting a man who fled his vehicle after a traffic stop.
“There were several officers in that group with Tyre Nichols that everybody wondered about when they were in the academy,” former Memphis Police Department academy instructor James Lash told Klemko. “You reap what you sow.”