Paul Ryburn's Journal

From the Commercial Appeal: Willie “Wild Bill” Storey, owner and namesake of Wild Bill’s juke joint at 1580 Vollintine, passed away this weekend at age 88.

Midtown Ryan has more on Wild Bill on his blog.

Every morning, I walk two blocks down the Main Street Mall to Jack’s Food Store to grab my morning Mountain Dew. And almost every day, there are three or four panhandlers standing in front of Easy Way next door. “Gimme change!” they’ll shout as I pass by.

Well, this morning I made the walk to the store, and what did I see?

Note the second window pane from the left. Here’s a closer look:

You can click the image above for an even closer look. As you can see, the window has been completely smashed in. You’ll also notice that the glass is still there, suggesting that whoever smashed the window was not trying to break in to commit burglary – they just wanted to vandalize the place.

My guess is that one of the panhandlers who constantly loiter outside got pissed off (they’re never in good moods – Easy Way tends to get some of the most surly bums in the city) and vented their frustrations on Easy Way’s window.

Not sure whether to blame Easy Way itself, for not being more aggressive in getting authorizations of agency against these people… or the police, for knowing Main and Jefferson is a problem corner and failing to do anything about it.

People have e-mailed me about applying Broken Windows Theory to panhandling… in Easy Way’s case, looks like it’s more than just a theory.

Pictured above is one of the trivia questions – the BEST QUESTION EVER, as a matter of fact – from trivia last night at the Flying Saucer. In case you can’t read it, it says, “What is the capital of Romania?” Needless to say we got this one right. The Rapscallions ended up with a second-place finish, bringing our gift certificate stash to a whopping $35.

We hope to see more Romania questions from Pete the Trivia Guy… my only complaint is that this should have been the 20-point final bonus question, not a 4-point second round question. If any beautiful Romanian girls who live in Memphis read this blog, we’d like to invite you to come be part of the team, so we can get Romania questions right in the future.

If you miss dancing to the tunes spun by legendary Downtown DJ Hollywood Raiford, you have one more chance to catch him.

Raiford will be spinning him at The Phoenix Club’s Luau at the Botanic Gardens, Friday August 17. $30 ticket includes beer and libations. Not a bad deal. I’ve never been to any of the Phoenix Club’s events, but I know it’s a great organization and they raise a lot of money for the Boys & Girls Club. Definitely worth our support.

Heh… I have a feeling that the Phoenix Club is going to see an influx of new partiers at this event… people who miss Raiford. I may have to make it out to this one. Since it’s a luau theme, I certainly have the attire.

Less than one day after being announced, the Handling-Panhandling online forum has grown to 54 members, and we have some good discussion going on the list. Later today I’ll post some notes from our meeting with the CCC’s security coordinator to the list.

If you want to learn how to join, please read the previous post.

Everyone,

It has become clear that the downtown community is fed up with the panhandling problem. I have received a massive number of e-mail responses to last week’s posts on panhandling, all of them expressing frustration and saying, “Why can’t we all work together on this?” They’re right – we need to get everyone involved. Residents, business owners, downtown employees, civic leaders, political candidates, the police.

So Mike King and I got together and created an online forum where we can all do just that. It’s a Google group called Handling-Panhandling and we foresee the following things happening there:

• Sharing ideas on how existing laws can be enforced better
• Suggestions on improvements to existing laws
• Sharing information on known problem panhandlers – photos, where they hang out, their M.O., and most importantly their NAMES. If we can learn their names, business owners will be able to file Authorizations of Agency against them, and we’ll be able to check to see which ones have warrants.
• Venting frustrations! A place to post your panhandling stories. The Center City Commission’s security coordinator needs these from you, in order to illustrate how bad panhandling has become.
• Politicizing the issue, and forcing mayoral and city council candidates to state what they would do to fight panhandling if elected.

We created the forum Friday and invited about 20 people to join – we wanted to keep the initial number small while we tested for a few days. It’s now ready to be opened up to the public. We already have some important people on board – people who work with the Center City Commission, the Convention & Visitors Bureau, business owners, members of the media. We hope to get civic leaders and the police on the group very soon. Most importantly, we hope to get YOU on the group, if panhandling has affected your life in some way.

We’re implementing a couple of controls to keep the quality of the discussion high: First of all, when you sign up to join, you have to explain why this issue is important to you. Just a couple of sentences is enough – we just need to hear that this issue matters to you personally for some reason.

Second, we’re implementing a code of conduct, posted below. Read over it, and at the bottom of this post you’ll find a link to join.

HANDLING-PANHANDLING GROUP CODE OF CONDUCT

Welcome to the Handling-Panhandling Google group. This is a place where Downtown stakeholders – residents, civic leaders, business owners, community organizations, visitors, etc. – can come together to share information and work together on solutions to the panhandling problem Downtown. In order to keep the quality of information high, we ask that everyone observe the following rules of conduct:

• Off-topic posts – those not about panhandling – will be deleted. This is not a place to discuss other problems Downtown (e.g. cruising) or to promote events, businesses, websites, etc. that are not related to panhandling.
• This group is about the career and aggressive panhandlers who degrade the quality of life Downtown. It is not about the legitimate homeless who are truly in need/want of assistance to turn their life around – that’s an important topic as well, but it’s off-topic for this group. The career and aggressive panhandlers generally are not homeless.
• Please respect your fellow group members. It’s fine to discuss and disagree, but personal attacks on fellow group members (including civic leaders, who we hope will join this list) will not be tolerated.
• Remarks that are racist in nature will absolutely not be tolerated. These posts will be deleted, and their authors banned immediately.
• Group managers reserve the right to delete posts, warn users, and when necessary ban users in response to posts that violate the rules above or the spirit of the group in any way.

In summary – let’s all respect each other on this list, and work together to effect positive change.

To join the group, go to Handling-Panhandling on Google Groups. Mike King and I, who worked with the police last year as part of Residents for a Safer Downtown Memphis, will be the moderators. Thanks and we hope to see you there.

The following e-mail was sent to me from an out-of-town guest. He most recently visited Memphis the weekend of June 30, when they had the fireworks Downtown. I asked and received his permission to publish it.

Paul,

I enjoy your blog. I live in Huntsville and have visited Memphis twice in
the past year or so. The last time was during the end of June this year.

The thing that struck me about this last visit was the incredible number of
panhandlers. I know you’ve written quite a bit about it and have taken
photos. Good job.

As a tourist, I was very turned off by the incessant begging. I think Main
and Madison was the worst area. We were trying to get on the trolley and no
less than three separate panhandlers hit us at the same stop. Went back
there the next day and got hit up again.

The city is going to lose its tourists if they don’t do something about it.

Keep up the good work.

Got some more for ya. I’m going to keep going with this for a while.

This is the first thing I saw when I walked out the door yesterday afternoon. Normally I wouldn’t post such a blurry image, but in this case it’s probably better that it is blurry – it’s one of the area’s career panhandlers, urinating on the side of my apartment building. What a lovely thing for Downtown’s tourists to see as they walk down Main Street.

Oh well, it could be worse, I’ve never seen one doing “number two” in the alley.

If I rubbed a magic lamp and a genie appeared and told me I could make one – but ONLY one – panhandler disappear from Memphis, the woman pictured above would be my choice, without a shadow of a doubt. This woman first approached me about 10 years ago in the parking lot of Piggly Wiggly in Midtown. She showed me papers from a mental hospital and told me she needed money for cab fare to Millington. When I told her sorry, but I couldn’t help, she started screaming and cussing at me, loud enough to be heard a block away. She followed me all the way to my car, yelling.

Since then I’ve seen her all over Downtown and Midtown. She’s usually accompanied by a black male, 6’4″, thin, about 40. He won’t walk right next to her, but about 20 feet behind, or across the street. He lets her do all the begging, as far as I can tell. Sometimes she’ll walk right past you, but when she wants money she’s aggressive. I once saw her coming on Second and crossed the street to avoid her – and she crossed too. So I crossed back – and so did she. So I crossed a third time, and she did too and by this time she was within 10 feet of me – but I ducked into the back door of McGuinness and she couldn’t follow me. So she stood there in the middle of the street, cussing me out.

I’ll try to get a better picture of her, and the guy too. She’s short, only about 5 feet tall. This is definitely one to watch out for.

I stood and watched this guy begging passersby for about 5 minutes at the Madison/Main trolley stop and in front of Walgreens. I pretended to be a tourist taking pictures of the entire Main Street Mall, so he wouldn’t figure out I was really taking pictures of him. At one point he crossed the street, I pointed the camera at a nearby trolley. As he got right next to me he stopped and looked at the camera, and made the following attempt to start a conversation: “What are you taking, pictures?”

I turned to him, looked him right in the eye and said, “HEY, GREAT OBSERVATION, GENIUS!!!” and he darted off. Maybe he was trying to make me believe he was mentally challenged by asking the stupidest possible question. But, Downtown already has a bum who does the “retarded” gimmick (and pics of him will be coming soon, don’t worry) so that one’s taken. I guess if I hadn’t had the camera he would’ve asked, “Hey, what’s that you’re wearing, a shirt?”

Since then I’ve seen him all over the place – Main, Second, Peabody Place – begging for money. He’ll walk up to one person right after the next. He definitely understands that panhandling is a numbers game.

Here’s another one doing the popular “flower man” gimmick, where he tries to sell you a flower. You can tell he picked this at a public park, because no flower shop in town would be caught dead selling such a pathetic flower. Needless to say he doesn’t have a vendor’s permit to be selling on public streets.

… And that’s all the pics for now. Setup of the online panhandling forum is going well – I’ve got a select group of about 15 people on there now, to get some discussion going before I roll it out to the public. Look for an announcement on Monday.

Once again, thanks to all of you who have e-mailed me this week, in response to my panhandling posts. Many of you expressed that you are as fed up as I am, and many of you had some good ideas, some creative possible solutions.

Well, next week we’re going to have a place where we can all work together on this. My friend Mike King and I are in the process of setting up an online forum where the community can discuss the issue. Some of the things we hope to see posted there are

• Ideas for new laws to restrict panhandling – for example, some cities have enacted laws making panhandling illegal within 20 feet of outdoor or patio restaurant seating;
• Ideas for ways the city can better enforce the laws it already has
• Information on career and aggressive panhandlers who are known to cause problems Downtown. If we all share info, we may be able to learn some of these people’s real names, and find out if they have outstanding warrants that could get them off the streets.
• Information on where the real problem hotspots are in the area
• Ways to politicize the issue, and force the mayoral and City Council candidates to take a position on panhandling

The political candidates, by the way, will be invited to join the forum and participate. So will the upper brass of the downtown police precinct – Mike King and I already have a relationship with them, from when we formed Residents for a Safer Downtown Memphis last year and asked for their help with Downtown crime.

The forum should be ready early next week. We’re in the process of setting it up right now. We’re also discussing some rules to put in place to keep the quality of discussion high. If you sent me an e-mail in the past week about panhandling, you’ll be sent an invitation to join the forum when it’s ready – otherwise, just stay tuned to this blog, and I’ll be posting the info here.