Public Safety

Public safety is top of mind in awareness right now, and for good reason. Local news seems to cover nothing but crime, and people rightly fear for their safety. Still, there are concrete steps we can take at the legislative level to address this issue.

Crime Lab

Simply stated, Shelby County should have its own crime lab, and it will be my first priority to get the state to help fund it.

There have been many well-publicized instances recently where the lack of a local lab has been a huge part of the problem. A local kindergarten teacher was allegedly murdered by a man who had committed a rape over a year earlier, but he was not charged for the rape until after he committed the murder because of a year-long delay in getting test results back. We still have a huge backlog and inexcusable delays on testing rape kits, and this is just the most notable incident.

I have had my own vehicle broken in to three times in the last 18 months, and each time I spoke with the responding officers they mentioned the long wait times for processing evidence. We cannot allow such delays to handcuff our law enforcement.

Local officials, from the very top, are begging for a local crime lab. The need is clear, and this should be a bi-partisan issue.

Gun Proliferation

We MUST address the proliferation of guns in our state, and especially in our district. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for Tennessee children. Our legislature has made it entirely too easy for criminals to get guns, and a few simple changes can begin to reverse some negative trends.

First, we need to repeal permit-less carry. Allowing people to purchase guns without so much as a background check is a frightening idea, and we should at least require proof that they know how to safely operate a gun before we allow them to carry loaded firearms publicly.

We should also allow courts to issue extreme risk orders of protection, temporarily restricting access to individuals who are at risk of harming themselves or others. Not only do guns contribute dramatically to the occurrence of violent crime, they are also instrumental in our high suicide rate.

A huge driver of the increase in crime in Shelby County has been the sudden rise in the number of vehicle break-ins by criminals looking for guns, including in my own cases. The fact that it is now legal to store guns carelessly in cars is the direct cause of this problem, and contributes massively to the proliferation of illegal guns in our community. We should immediately require SECURE storage of guns in all vehicles.

I have had multiple conversations about each of these issues with local law enforcement officials, and they are unanimous in their support for all of these measures. Public opinion is also solidly behind each of these ideas. They would dramatically increase public safety without infringing on our rights. Again, support for these measures should be bipartisan, but extremist Republicans have shown that they will defy public opinion, and law enforcement, to protect the gun lobby. We will have to outvote them at the polls.