Shelby County Commissioner Endorses Racial Equity Audit of Amy Weirich
Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner told Memphis Watch that he supports conducting a racial equity audit of prosecutor Amy Weirich and the District Attorney General’s Office, endorsing a demand made to the Commission yesterday by a group of community and legal advocates.
Racial discrimination in Memphis’s criminal legal system has been a recent topic of international headlines and condemnation. In the span of about one month, a Black woman received a six-year prison sentence for trying to vote, while a white former sheriff’s deputy accused of raping a 14-year-old girl struck a deal to avoid prison entirely.
The demand letter to the County Commission said that these cases are not isolated, but rather part of a years-long pattern, describing them as “only the most recent and high profile example[s] of how Weirich inflicts devastating harm upon Black Memphians and their communities.” The group called on the County Commission to “ensure that, as the County’s top law enforcement official, Amy Weirich’s policies and practices are properly directed at reducing the most serious crimes, and not further victimizing Black people and perpetuating systemic racial discrimination.”
According to the letter, a racial equity audit is a matter of both equal rights and public safety, with “public confidence in law enforcement and the possibility of fair and impartial justice . . . eroding just as violence in Memphis has reached record levels.”
In Memphis and throughout Shelby County, Black people are disproportionately harmed by both the criminal legal system—bearing the brunt of arrests and incarceration—and violent crime. Black people are about 64% of Memphis’s total population, but 90% of the city’s homicide victims, according to 2020 data. Under Weirich, though, most people who pull the trigger in gun homicide cases are not successfully prosecuted.
The letter also cites “Weirich’s needlessly harsh and punitive tactics” against Black children. “Weirich prosecutes children in adult court more than every other Tennessee District Attorney General combined, and she does so nearly exclusively with Black kids,” the letter says. “From 2018 to 2020, for example, 98% of the 217 Shelby County children transferred to adult court were Black, a rate far surpassing their presence in the general population.”
In 2018, a federal monitor report described Weirich’s tactics as an unconstitutional and “toxic combination for African-American youth.” Yet “racial disparities in youth prosecutions have persisted, and in fact worsened, since then,” the letter says.
The County Commission has already asked for renewed federal oversight to address racial discrimination and other constitutional violations in the local youth justice system. A Racial Equity Audit could add more scrutiny.
Racial Equity Audits are designed to provide an independent, objective, and holistic analysis of an organization’s policies and practices through a racial justice lens—identifying how the organization is exhibiting or exacerbating systemic racial discrimination. Such audits have been increasingly popular among both government agencies and private corporations; In Dallas, for example, an audit released this year found that decades of discriminatory housing policy had disadvantaged Black and Latino neighborhoods, and offered nearly a dozen recommendations.
“In Memphis,” today’s demand letter reads, “we have an urgent and plain need for a similar review of the elected prosecutor.”
The Shelby County Commission convenes next on March 21 and could address the issue then.