Crickets: Four fatal shootings by Memphis Task Force and little coverage from national news

U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty released on Tuesday a campaign ad, a more than one-minute spot in which he praised the work of the Memphis Safe Task Force, the alphabet soup of federal agencies, mixed in with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and Tennessee National Guard, occupying the Bluff City to allegedly crack down on crime. =

In the spot, which Hagerty posted on X, he calls Memphis “one of America’s great cities” before going on to diss Tennessee’s largest city, saying it “fell into a downward spiral” and that “families feared for their safety.”

Hagerty goes on to say it was he who empowered the task force in a voiceover with footage of armed officers. He says the results speak for themselves as he recites arrest numbers given out by the task force over the last few months. 

The timing is really something, and not because of his pending, noncompetitive primary. 

No, Hagerty put the spot out one week after reports that agents with the Memphis Safe Task Force shot and killed four men in just two months, and shot and wounded another three. All of the men killed have been Black. 

There’s been painfully little news coverage of the task force and less of the violence agents have perpetrated.

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I give credit to the local news outlets that have covered it, including MLK50, the Daily Memphian, Memphis Flyer, the Institute for Public Service Reporting and ActionNews 5, the city’s NBC affiliate, among others. 

But outside the city? Crickets. 

There’s been ample coverage of violence by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents across the country, including the killings in Minnesota of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Houston man Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, and the shooting by Madison, Wisconsin, police of Corey Ruiz. 

These were horrific incidents and deserve all the outrage being poured forth across the country. 

But what of Memphis and its people? What of Darren Pigram, who was shot at least three times in May by agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration while he was working the breakfast shift at Burger King? 

As the Lookout’s Anita Wadhwani reported, DEA agents went to Pigram’s work to serve a warrant for a January dispute Pigram had with neighbors over how loud their music was. A man is dead because he complained about loud music. 

And what of Jonah Neal, the 25-year-old Memphis man experiencing a mental health crisis? He’s dead after his mother called authorities to get help for him. 

One would think this tally of killings by the feds would merit a major and ongoing news story, yet where is the concern for Memphis, Tennessee’s largest city and one of the nation’s largest majority-minority cities? Why aren’t national media outlets setting up outposts in the Bluff City and holding local officials accountable? 

I may have buried the lede but at the root lie Tennessee’s elected officials. 

Trump announced in September he was setting up the task force to “end violent crime” through “large-scale saturation of besieged neighborhoods.” Lee, after first telling journalists in August he had not talked to the president about sending Tennessee National Guard troops to Memphis, quickly reversed course saying that in fact, he had been in talks with Trump for months. 

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Lee is a simpering coward who covets Trump’s praise. In 2024, Trump called Lee a “RINO”, Republican in name only, and Lee has been working to ingratiate himself since — as do the state’s other leading Republicans. House Speaker Cameron Sexton, state Sen. Brent Taylor, a leading Republican candidate for the 9th Congressional District — and even Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a putative Democrat have applauded the occupation of Memphis or cooperated with the task force. 

This is a dramatic contrast to how lawmakers have behaved in other states. The shootings in Minnesota of Good and Pretti made national news and sparked vigils across the country not only because of the unprovoked violence but because state leaders like Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison held news conferences and called for investigations. 

On July 17, there was a vigil held in Nashville for Araujo, but there have been no vigils for the Memphis victims. Again, Araujo deserves to be mourned, but so do Pigram and Neal. 

But how would people in Nashville or other parts of the state know about the Memphis killings if news outlets don’t cover it? A cursory review of Knoxville media turned up nothing about Pigram or Neal. Nashville’s NBC affiliate reported on the Pigram shooting in May, using the information reported by Action5 News.

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Memphis, though a beautiful city on the banks of the Mississippi, home to blues music, Elvis Presley and succulent barbeque, has for years been treated as disposable. Running for statewide office from Memphis? Forget it. The last U.S. senator from Memphis retired in 1953; the last Memphis governor in 1911. With the exception of a few Memphis-area state senators and state representatives, the people of the city have been abandoned.

When the state’s leaders prove they’d rather score political points with Trump than make a serious effort at improving life for Memphis’s residents, it’s up to the media to call them out and to bang the drum loudly about the task force’s reign of terror as agents harass volunteer monitors, engage in dangerous behavior and target immigrants with no history of violent crime. 

To fail to report on the ills of the Memphis Safe Task Force and hold elected officials accountable for the mess is to fail at what legendary Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells prescribed as a basic task of journalists: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”