Memphis: At the Top of the Bottom

Memphis has been the scene of some serious corruption in the last few years. And for years before that, as well, although they say that in the old days the corruption was institutionalized, so that there were rules about how you could and could not take advantage of your office.

In round numbers, in the last six years, 66 officials, employees, and contractors have been found guilty of various sorts of government-related crimes. In a city of only 650,000 people, that puts Memphis in the per-capita lead.

With scandals like this, can effective ethics laws be far behind? All the city has now is an aspirational code, but it has to have a real ethics code by June 30 (although Tennessee's new requirements don't ask for much, as I explain in a comment to the Model Code Project). According to a series published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal in March (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), things aren't going as smoothly in council and commission as they are in court.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.

Shelby County commissioner Mike Ritz, who chairs an ad hoc ethics committee, is trying to set up a joint city-county agency similar to Atlanta's, but his colleagues are whittling away at his proposal. They don't like fines. They don't want to fund ethics training. One commissioner said, 'I sure wouldn't want a lay person to decide whether I've done something illegal.' Has the guy heard of juries? What he really wants is a citizens board that is only advisory, that is, without teeth.

A county task force wants to establish a panel of retired judges, and maybe others, to hear ethics complaints, with an assistant county attorney to provide legal assistance. There would not be any staff to investigate or educate.

Ethics reformers in the city seem to be all over the place. The city council has a draft bill for an ethics officer and a website. One city council member is focused on term limits. One reformer is focused on better screening of candidates by the political parties (the Democrats recently started requiring all nominees to sign an ethics pledge, vowing to 'avoid even the appearance of a conflict,' which isn't possible; it's the appearance of 'impropriety' one should try to avoid). Another is focused on the posting of campaign contributions and contracts on the Internet (now he's paying 25 cents a page for the info, since officials won't post it).

And the people of Memphis and Shelby County don't seem to be begging for much of anything. Columnist Wendi C. Thomas wrote, 'our fair city seems to give public corruption the same shrug you'd give a rebellious teenager. ... Memphis will be Memphis - immoral and unethical and mostly apathetic.' In fact, she wrote, 'the shenanigans morph into a weird point of local pride instead of a head-hanging embarrassment. ... We're not angry enough and truth be told, we are entertained by the drama. ... I wonder if the culture of corruption doesn't confirm our worst perceptions of our city and fuel our low self-esteem. It's almost as if we're resigned to receiving shady governance. And until we're fed up enough to make noise at the polls, to complain regularly at council and commission meetings, to sound off to the mayors and the police chief and beyond, that's what we'll get. Not what we deserve, but what we accept.'

That sums up most cities with a lousy ethical environment. It takes not only unethical officials, but apathetic, resigned and, too often, supportive, enabling citizens to make a crooked city.

Back to the corruption itself, and what we can learn from it. One thing that is clear is that the ethical environment was so bad, many people have compromised their ethics for small amounts of money. The big players, however, are in it to keep up lifestyles far beyond their government pay. When you see a government official with a mansion, fancy cars and fancy women, it's usually a clue to something going on, but one that few people seem concerned about. In fact, it's this show of wealth that often gives people the prestige they need to take power. As one person says, 'even if you didn't get rich, you looked like it, and you were perceived as having a whole lot of power, a lot of influence.' Some of the officials on the take still lived beyond their means and filed for bankruptcy. A lot of the bribes were in the form of 'loans' to pay for their lifestyles.

Another motivation, especially for the African-Americans, has been the idea that their time has come, and the whites took what they could all those years they ran the city. Also, the political leaders have believed that they served as a model, that they needed to be successful so that others could aspire to fill their shoes. This, and other racial and ethnic feelings, are part of the general need to rationalize misconduct. White-collar crime is considered to have three elements: opportunity, a perceived need, and an ability to rationalize. The ability to rationalize is probably the most important and overlooked of these elements.

Sadly, the best rationalization of all is having one's actions vetted by lawyers. For example, the city council chair was paid nearly $5 million by the Memphis school system for his architectural work, and a former county commissioner received a consulting fee for helping to steer a school contract to a builder. Both obtained official opinions from government lawyers deeming their actions legal, and that was that (however, see my blog entry on the California Supreme Court decision that officials cannot excuse themselves with a government lawyer's advice, which will hopefully lead to the end of this form of rationalization for self-dealing).

Memphis's problems, as portrayed by this series of articles, are about criminal corruption. But there is a strong relationship between criminal corruption and unethical conduct. The former is what makes newspaper headlines, and the deterrent effect of officials going to prison is certainly greater than that of officials getting their hands slapped, but it is ethical misconduct, especially an environment where it is accepted and protected, that underlies most criminal corruption. Let unethical conduct flourish, and criminal corruption will flourish. In an ethical environment, corruption is truly something only the bad apples do, and most bad apples are not attracted to government in these cities and towns, and they don't succeed. This is probably the most important effect of an ethical environment.

Memphis doesn't seem to get this relationship, or care to. Without a strong ethics commission, leaders who have the moral courage to create a more ethical environment, and citizens who respond to this moral courage, who want something better and believe they can have it, nothing will change in Memphis. It will stay at the top of the bottom.