Opinion: Memphis officials are fighting the SAFE Task Force because its success exposes years of failure

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The Memphis SAFE Task Force has been operating for six weeks, and early data shows one of the sharpest crime declines the city has reported in years. Violent crime is down more than 30 percent. Aggravated assaults, robberies, burglaries and auto thefts have all fallen below last year’s levels. Calls for service are down, while warrant arrests and gun seizures are up. Every major public-safety indicator is moving in the right direction.

Yet several Memphis and Shelby County officials have responded not with acknowledgment but with escalating criticism. Much of that pushback now rests on a new General Sessions Court dashboard that tracks only the arrests entering that court. It excludes federal arrests, Criminal Court filings, ATF gun cases and more than 1,000 warrant arrests the task force says it has made since October — many of them tied to violent offenders. That means the dashboard omits nearly half of the operation’s enforcement activity and many of its most serious cases.

Despite those limitations, the dashboard has quickly become the basis for the claim that the operation is functioning as a “Make Memphis Drive the Speed Limit Task Force,” a line promoted by Shelby County General Sessions Court Clerk Tami Sawyer. But even one of the analysts who built the dashboard acknowledged that warrant arrests are “likely a key focus” of the operation and are simply not reflected in the tool. The resulting public narrative is built on a partial dataset that fits a political storyline but does not capture the task force’s documented impact on violent crime.

Sawyer’s involvement in shaping this narrative is significant. Her official biography highlights her work as a civil-rights activist, protest organizer and political leader with a background in rhetorical communication. It does not include experience in policing, crime analytics or public-safety operations. That matters when the interpretation of an incomplete dataset leads to sweeping conclusions about the task force’s priorities. A model that excludes the categories where most violent offenders are apprehended cannot meaningfully assess the operation’s performance.

Sawyer has also argued that the task force is overwhelming the jail and contributing to citation-processing delays. But many of the issues she cites long predate the operation. Her office still manually enters highway-patrol citations — an outdated system in place for decades — because Shelby County has yet to implement the state’s free TITAN digital ticketing platform, available since 2008. That backlog reflects long-standing administrative shortcomings, not the strategy or focus of the SAFE Task Force.

Other elected officials have echoed similar objections. Memphis City Council member Jerri Green, who is running for the Democratic nomination for governor in next year’s election, introduced a resolution opposing the deployment and argued that sending in troops “is not a solution” and diverts attention from long-term social programs. State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who is challenging Rep. Steve Cohen in the Democratic primary for Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, has called the operation a “gross abuse of power” and described it as an occupation in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

What these criticisms do not address is the central, inescapable fact: violent crime is falling sharply while the task force is in place. When federal, state and local agencies produce measurable reductions in crime in a matter of weeks, it highlights the shortcomings of earlier approaches and contradicts long-standing ideological positions that cast enforcement efforts as ineffective or harmful. The emerging data presents a reality that conflicts with years of political messaging.

Residents in the neighborhoods most affected by violent crime are responding to what they see outside their homes, not to political narratives. The task force is not a long-term answer to Memphis’ public-safety challenges, but it has delivered immediate gains where previous strategies have struggled. City and county leadership now face a choice. They can continue attacking an operation that is reducing crime, or they can work to integrate those improvements into broader, sustainable public-safety planning.

The public debate ahead should be grounded in the full picture, not in selectively framed statistics that overlook the categories where the task force has been most effective. Memphis residents deserve an honest conversation shaped by facts, not by narratives constructed to avoid uncomfortable comparisons.

Brandon Windsor is the Editor & Publisher of TNPOLITICO.