MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Bail in Shelby County has been an issue that WREG has extensively reported on. One nonprofit, Memphis Crime Beat, has released its own findings regarding bail settings in courts.
“We have a data analysis team, we have a couple of engineers on the team – one of them myself,” President and Executive Director of Memphis Crime Beat, Leslie Taylor said. “We also have a data analyst with 30 years of experience.”
In March, the WREG Investigators team talked about this group, as we sat with them as they observed Shelby County courtrooms.
Taylor said they have about 20 people doing this every day.
“It’s very difficult for the public to know who is setting bail in Shelby County. On the judicial commissioner’s and on the judge’s side sometimes they’re using a code, rather than their name and the public doesn’t have the key to the code. So we can’t tell which judicial commissioner or judge is setting the initial bail,” Taylor said. “Based on our findings, we believe that people are behaving differently based on how they’re identified. So, the people that are reducing the bond the most are the ones that are unidentified in the database. The ones that are reducing the least are the ones that are identified by that code that I mentioned.”
They say the goal of their data is accountability.
“We want people to be accountable for the decisions that might be made and however they came up with the idea. There is bail, there is no bail, there’s reduced bail and these are the things that need to be addressed for public safety,” Vice President of Memphis Crime Beat, Norman Blake said.
“These people work for us. They’re elected officials or they’re appointed by elected officials and we all know that we have managers that work for a reason. Those people are watching our performance, making sure that we’re doing a good job, right,” Taylor said. “When we’re not paying attention to the type of work our local leaders are doing what kind of outcome do we expect? So our elected leaders are only as good as we make them.”
A spokesperson with the Memphis Police said the group has the support of Interim Chief CJ Davis.