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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BrownFlush" data-source="post: 5506227" data-attributes="member: 65823">Hope this helps...."I do think that a lot of people have missed this story. And this was a lack of institutional control at the Memphis Police Department that caused this. And let me explain a quick timeline for you. Several years ago, the Memphis City Council decided they were going to be on the forefront of defund the police movement. How they did that was by taking away the retirement benefits for fire and police. When that happened, it was a catastrophic event in Memphis because all of the senior members of the Memphis police force, and the EMTs, and the fire department, turned in their resignations for retirement. They said, if you're not going to give us what we've been working so hard for, and you're taking away our retirement benefits, we're going to instantly leave to a different place that is safer or pays us more money, because you're literally stripping us of what you promised us. That is when this, in my opinion, basically that was what lit the match. So all of these people that had ties to the community, that were respected by the community, that could talk to the different people in the different neighborhoods vanished.""Then you had another thing that happened. They wanted to defund the police again. And they decided that not a single law enforcement officer could live outside of Shelby County. Now, if you look at Memphis on a map, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas, I can literally drive in all three states, in 15 minutes, at the speed limit. That's how close they are. People live in Mississippi and work at FedEx. Thousands of them work and live in Mississippi and work in Memphis, tens of thousands. And that was their way, again, of defunding the police, getting rid of police officers. The citizens of Memphis were so outraged, they decided to get it on the ballot so that the citizens could vote, saying, we don't care where a police officer lives. We're down at that point, 500 police officers, that has now gone to 700 police officers we are missing. That is the city's own study. And what they did was, the city council said, no, screw you, citizens. They took it off the ballot and said you cannot hire a police officer that doesn't live inside of Shelby County. When that happened, you have a bunch of young cops now, just like this, this SCORPION group. Two years, three years, four years of service without having enough captains to even look over them. When the new police chief C.J Davis, who I think did an excellent job with this. She came in the city. The first thing she said was, I desperately need senior law enforcement officials to mentor and to oversee a extremely young police force because all of my good guys have been here that were invested in the community that lived here, they've all retired." The crime in Memphis is so out of control - and I'm a victim of a gun crime, and I grew up in a law enforcement family. I had to use a gun to save my own life. It was a gang initiation in Memphis, Tennessee, where two gang members tried to kill me on purpose. It was a, it was to get in the gang. They call it having blood in the game. When you're dealing with a city that's out of control, where every single police officer every day is on edge and there are constant carjackings, there are constant seniors being beaten. Two weeks ago, we had a man that was accused of first degree murder that walked out of jail with zero bail, no bail. He was accused in charge of killing a man, first degree murder, and he walked out. When I and others exposed it in Memphis, they said, oh, the system got it wrong. We'll go re-arrest him and have set a bail for him. These cops are on edge. As soon as there was a scuffle and he took off running, they're on heightened alert because this is now a war zone in Memphis."-Ben Ferguson</blockquote>

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