In the early hours of July 5, 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson was shot and killed by National Guardsmen assigned to the Memphis Safe Task Force. Last week, the Shelby County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide and revealed a disturbing detail: Johnson had been shot in the lower back, not the chest as previously reported.
That finding raises serious new questions about the circumstances surrounding Johnson’s death and the account the public was initially given. He was the fourth Black man to die in an encounter with the Memphis Safe Task Force in just three months.
For me, the larger questions raised by these encounters are deeply personal. I am a middle-aged Black man, a native Memphian, and someone who spent nearly seven years incarcerated for a crime I did not commit. I know what happens when society puts more faith in enforcement than in people. Losing years of my life to a wrongful conviction, I have learned that arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration are not the same thing as safety. Enforcement may sometimes be necessary, but it cannot be the foundation of a healthy community.
My experience shapes how I see the Memphis Safe Task Force (MSTF), and I am deeply concerned that the federal government now wants to make it a public safety model for other cities through its Model Cities Initiative.
Before the Task Force arrived in September 2025, crime was already declining. Since then, the MSTF has generated lawsuits, sparked controversy over immigration enforcement, raised questions about transparency and legal authority, and fatally shot four residents in just three months. State and federal agents have also conducted more than 100,000 traffic stops and made thousands of arrests, many for nonviolent offenses and further straining an already overcrowded jail system that has long faced serious concerns about safety, staffing, and inhumane conditions. As the Department of Justice considers expanding its Model Cities Initiative, we encourage leaders to continue funding public safety solutions that combat the roots of crime and make the biggest impact on ending cycles of violence.
Through the Justice & Safety Alliance, a coalition of organizations working to advance a more community-centered vision of public safety, many of us have spent years advocating for greater investment in these kinds of solutions. Instead of relying almost exclusively on law enforcement, we believe an effective public safety effort needs to include violence prevention, youth opportunities, restorative justice, trauma recovery, and other community-based strategies.
History has shown us that you cannot arrest your way to healthy communities. If the federal government wants to invest $300 hundred million dollars in public safety, it should invest in the things that create lasting safety: stable housing, quality schools, living-wage jobs, youth opportunities, mental health services, violence prevention programs, and second chances for people returning home.
Those investments do more than respond to crime. They help prevent it.
I believe this because real safety is not measured by the number of arrests made. Real safety is measured by the number of people who never enter the justice system in the first place.
Things like stable housing, quality schools, living-wage jobs, youth opportunities, and second chances are better alternatives to lock ‘em up and throw away the key. To go a step further, Trauma Recovery Centers (TRCs) are also an effective, evidence-based investment for addressing systemic issues. TRCs focus on a missing piece in traditional victim services: the unaddressed trauma that prevents victims from fully recovering and communities from being healthy. They provide comprehensive services for victims of violent crime, including mental health services, clinical case management, crisis intervention, assistance with navigating the justice system, and accessing victim compensation support. And they do this all for about $1 million per year.
The Memphis Safe Task Force should not become a model for cities across America. What should be replicated is a model that puts communities, not enforcement, at the center of public safety. That is the model America should be investing in.
Dr. William E. Arnold Jr. is Director of Justice and Reentry Initiatives at Memphis For All and a facilitator of the Justice & Safety Alliance, a Memphis-based coalition advocating for a community-centered approach to public safety rooted in prevention, opportunity, accountability, and well-being.
