As Trump deploys the National Guard to quell crime in Memphis, state representatives are asking for an audit of crime statistics.
Days before President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of the National Guard to Memphis to deal with “tremendous levels of violent crime,” the city’s police department said that crime was at a 25-year low in the city.
While crime has improved in the city in recent months, Memphis remains one of the most crime-ridden big cities in the United States, trailing only Chicago and Houston in total homicides last year.
In the meantime, two Chicago lawmakers have requested an audit of police statistics in that city in response to a whistleblower who claimed that personnel have been pressured to reclassify some crimes.
Trump, before issuing his Sept. 15 memorandum, said the city’s recent improvement in crime statistics should be attributed to his administration’s involvement, which began five months ago.
“The only reason crime is somewhat down in Memphis is because the FBI, and others in the Federal Government, at my direction, have been working there for 5 months – on the absolutely terrible Crime numbers,” Trump said in a Sept. 13 post on his Truth Social account.
Questions From State Lawmakers
One longtime member of the civic government in and around Memphis, state Sen. Brent Taylor, remains highly skeptical that there has been substantial progress on crime in the city. In August, he sent a letter to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation requesting an audit of the Memphis Police Department’s crime reporting practices.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Taylor, who is a former member of Memphis’s City Council and the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, said he received an anonymous tip from a member of the Memphis Police Department indicating that the whistleblower had “been pressured to reclassify some of the crimes” that were submitted into the state’s statistics tracking service, the Tennessee Incident Based Reporting System.
The Aug. 15 letter signed by Taylor, who now represents Shelby County in the Tennessee General Assembly’s Senate, and state Rep. John Gillespie, who represents a Tennessee House district in East Memphis, said those reclassifications included intentionally downgrading felonies to misdemeanors and taking actions to prevent incidents from appearing in “official crime statistics.”
