There's a joke people from Memphis understand. If you go to St. Louis, you might get shot by a gang member for your shoes. If you go to Memphis, you might get shot by the cops for your shoes.
It goes up and down. The majority are gang-on-gang. We've also seen lots of muggings, rape, and murder of non-gang members. Sometimes part of initiations, but mostly for fun. They've expanded into the areas once thought safe. 10-20 on one attacks or entire lots/streets of cars robbed/vandalized happen periodically. At one point, some thugs were shooting people at red lights before robbing their cars. This week, some were trying to open doors in my neighboorhood at night with the families in them. Can't imagine they had something nice like a quick robbery in mind. No surprise police kicked out The First 48, too, to protect tourism revenue. ;)
"That said, the Mall of Memphis (Mall of Murder) had to shut down"
Mall of Murder! Been a few months since someone mentioned that. You had to have lived in Memphis or talked to some Memphians. Well, I don't know how far media spreads about such things.
Anyway, my family mostly avoided it. I did go there as part of a school's "field trip" for their kids. Just getting them out of school a while to have some supervised fun. Toward the end, they decided to skip the food court since a different gang was on every side of it. You could barely see the food places. Woman at exit dressed like a dominatrix out of Sin City or something with a whip on her side. Sexy, but dangerous. I briefly admired the whip being an Indiana Jones fan. Got a smile slash watch-your-ass look out of her on way out. Only positive thing I remember in the Mall of Murder.
"If you go to Memphis, you might get shot by the cops for your shoes. "
Specially if they're the wrong color. Or shirt, jacket, pants, or bandana. ;) I don't know if you heard but they're waiving felonies for people willing to join the Memphis police. All those BLM protestors and such griping about how they act are too scurred to put on a uniform even with large salary policing those same neighborhoods. So hard to recruit cops that they're bringing in felons. I think they said "non-violent" but so many are gang members. Maybe the next, non-violent felony will be forging data on the felony part of police applications.
All that said, most folks there are OK. Same with cops. Our thugs are just more aggressive, willing to drive further from home, and so on. That combines with a media that only covers the negative stuff. We have parties, tons of businesses, church outreach/activities, artists, engineers, you name it. Barely covered on the news between the arsons and murders. I hate the media...
Another interesting part is that the history, esp racism around neighborhood lines, means you can go from the hood to middle-class just crossing a single street. It's so weird. I've had a hard time finding examples of that to show outsiders. I'll probably have to make one some time. I did find a video of someone driving around North Memphis below for anyone wondering what it looks like. Plus another showing all our hoods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UNPM3N5aac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHi0sDw-wTw
Two things to notice. First, many folks complain people don't pay attention to just stare at their phones. In first vid, notice everyone pays attention even some staring down people that come in. That's biggest indicator you need to watch your ass. The second illustrates how different they look with some having nice properties. Nicer than most I lived in! It's the thug culture and mental attitudes that drive it, though. Hence, always the same shit regardless of how much better the area is, who's the majority, and so on.
Isn't the message of BLM that the cops in many cases are basically another criminal gang? So the messenger is to blame when that becomes literally true?
Now, enter BLM. Those stories hit Facebok and Twitter. The black folks from Memphis to North Mississippi reading that stuff say a cop killing them is their biggest worry. That they're getting killed disproportionally everywhere with every stop maybe they're last. Some laid siege to I-40 and the airport to protest police killing black people. Police and protestors got through that without incident despite protestors aggressively marching at police to incite them.
Now for reality: almost all murders here are black civilians kiling other people, mostly black. We have latino gangs and cartels here, too. Mostly, but not entirely, gang members doing murders. Mostly in same hood neighborhoods. The police usually try to arrest, not shoot, them (see First 48 Memphis episodes). BLM might have prevented murders by blocking off those areas instead of the police and public (major Interstate on busy day) who were not killing innocent black people.
Although some cities need a protest, BLM and its supporters in Mid-South were totally full of crap scapegoating cops as main threat to black people when it's actually black and latino thugs. And cops stay trying to catch them, either for justice (good cops) or to eliminate competitors (bad cops). It's telling that the black guy talking about it most on local media always brings up number of black victims, but omits perps. They'll get further addressing real racism and police issues if they stop repeating lies in their media. Makes audience assume they crying wolf again.
I don't claim any particular knowledge of what's wrong with the police anywhere, but when cops or people who identify with them say reflexively "well, we'll just stop defending you from the thugs if you don't like us" my gut tells me that it means they already were deliberately enabling "thugs"; the declamation sounds like something that people have repeated to themselves for years, bottled up the justification for corruption and the protests just give permission to let it out.
This isn't a black problem so much as an asset turned liability in human nature. Bruce Schneier wrote about it before where people are more likely to believe anecdotes, especially scary ones (eg worst-case scenarios), from their peers than objective data collected from either peers or other side. The hypothesis at the time was that its a trait that helped early humans survive against threats that killed them (esp ate them). The people that listened to a story about what came before a death (eg animal attack) might survive more often than those who dispassionately collected and analyzed data before committing to something. Over time, the ones that were left were more likely to believe what the group was telling them focused on the same risks, esp extreme ones that rarely happen but result in death.
So, that's what the BLM folks were doing. The people they identify with were making these claims. They supported them using far-away examples like Ferguson and Baltimore. They believed them going with the flow. It's the same effect behind the many Trump voters out here worried everyone that's Middle Eastern might be a terrorist that might take lives. Although, they do hardly anything like better diets or extra vigilance behind the wheel to avoid the leading causes of death of Americans. They're also not looking at every right-wing, patriotic person despite such people committing acts of terrorism in the past or collecting lots of guns planning for... something. Jump on and defend anything from in-group while excluding, perverting, or reflexively dismissing out-group.
Human nature I'm afraid. Everyone doing this needs to learn to knock it off since it just makes us fight for nothing. More important, we miss opportunities to discuss what's really going on to improve our circumstances. The BLM people's BS is easily called out with the middle and right-leaning folks reacting as "You can't trust any of this stuff. People just bullshiting for attention to their causes." We can't stop racism creating reactions like that. Sadly and unfairly, we have to be better than most people in accuracy making sure we consistently build our interpretations on solid data with no misdirections or lies. Especially selective stuff. Consistently good use of data, civil interpretations, and pre-packaged solutions are the right combo to get more people onboard fixing things. Fortunately, there's quite a few of us down here trying to do that with many more just trying to get along despite our differences. The peaceful results of the I-40 protest in a often-racist, often-murderous area confirm how well we do this I think. We were all so worried shit would happen but it didn't. (slow, long sigh of relief)