Week One!

Happy New Year. As I said in my inaugural address, this is the rarest of fresh starts - new year, new Council, new Mayor - and I look forward to capitalizing on the opportunities presented by this kind of clean slate. We have serious work ahead of us - public safety, crime, poverty, and blight are not problems one person can fix, regardless of the position that person holds. We must work together to find solutions and strategies that work for our city. And we officially began that work this week with our City Council and Mayoral swearing-in.

Watch the inaugural livestream here!

Keeping my promise to create a pandemic-like response to crime, we held our first inter-agency public safety task force meeting yesterday. We brought together local and state government officials, the DA, juvenile courts, and MPD to begin defining our common approach. We agreed to prioritize violent crimes, repeat offenders, and data/data-sharing in our suppression efforts. We stood together for a press conference after the meeting to symbolize our unity around the efforts to restore order to our city.

As I mentioned in my inaugural address, I have big plans for my first 100 days and will share more details of that plan next week, but in my address, I pledged to:

• Meet with community groups from each council district to more fully understand what matters most to our community
• Meet weekly with MPD, juvenile courts, and the DA’s office.
• Activate a special public safety task force
• Meet with small business owners and faith and community leaders

And, as you can tell from my updates above, we are checking off that list! Additionally, we plan to Identify and begin paving segments of key corridors in core city neighborhoods and complete our plan to utilize technology to address crime throughout our city. I have a goal of adding 1000 cameras to our Connect2Memphis.org system and 1000 names to our Emergency notification system. Please help me further those goals by clicking the links to register your home or business cameras, and to sign up for emergency notifications.

Thank you for trusting me with the job of Mayor of your city. I am honored to serve in this role and excited to bring to my administration a team of innovators who will help define our collective path forward. I know it won't be easy. But I know it can be done. We will turn the page. We will create a brighter, safer, stronger future for our city.

 

In partnership,

 

Paul A. Young

 

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