ACLU-TN Urges Independent Legal Monitor to Investigate the Memphis Police Department’s Conduct at the No Kings Rally

MEMPHIS, TN — The Memphis Police Department “uses excessive force.” Its officers “rapidly escalate encounters.” And the department “makes unlawful arrests.” Those were the findings of a 2024 Department of Justice investigation. Many Memphians are now echoing those concerns after witnessing officers’ heavy-handed tactics and arrests of peaceful demonstrators at the March 28 Memphis No Kings rally. Late yesterday, the ACLU of Tennessee sent a letter to Independent Monitor Edward L. Stanton III urging him to investigate whether MPD’s conduct on March 28 violated the Kendrick Consent Decree, a landmark federal court order.

Specifically, the investigation should determine whether:

• MPD’s forcible intervention interfered with First Amendment activity and was intended to deter future protest

• MPD failed to seek required director authorization before intervening, as the decree stipulates

• Photographs, body-worn camera footage, or other intelligence gathered at the march has been preserved or shared in ways that violate the decree’s strict restrictions on surveillance and information sharing

The decree has protected Memphis residents’ First Amendment rights since 1978, placing enforceable limits on how MPD can surveil, monitor, and intimidate people for exercising their constitutional rights. What happened at the No Kings rally raises serious questions about whether those obligations were honored.

The No Kings rally is an event designed to sound the alarm about the rise of authoritarianism and attempts to normalize its insidious violence. And yet, MPD subjected peaceful demonstrators to pepper spray, physical force, and mass detentions.

“On March 28, as Memphians were singing and gathering in solidarity just steps from Robert Church Park, MPD officers grabbed protest marshals from behind, pushed people to the ground, and ‘pepper sprayed’ our fellow Memphians at close range,” said Lucas Cameron-Vaughn, interim legal director of the ACLU of Tennessee.

“The Kendrick Consent Decree exists precisely to prevent officers from using force or intimidation to chill lawful assembly,” he added.
The right to peaceably assemble is a Constitutional guarantee. It does not disappear because those in power find protecting that right inconvenient. If MPD’s conduct on March 28 goes unchecked, the message sent to every Memphian is that dissent comes at the cost of constitutional rights. That is a message the ACLU of Tennessee will not allow to stand.

City officials have said they are reviewing the incident and that the officers involved have been placed on administrative leave. But punishing individuals without wholesale system reform leaves Memphians vulnerable to the same patterns and practices that produced March 28 in the first place.

“Memphis has been here before, and the record on fulfilled reform promises is not encouraging, which is why urgent intervention is needed,” said ACLU of Tennessee Executive Director Miriam R. Nemeth.

MPD has an inconsistent record on follow-through. In 2020, following the death of George Floyd and a national reckoning with racial injustice, former Mayor Jim Strickland created the Advisory Council on Reimagining Policing. In 2025, following the death of Tyré Nichols and the release of the damning DOJ report, Mayor Paul Young formed his own police reform task force. Both efforts are the policy equivalent of thoughts and prayers. Whatever written reforms were mandated dried in invisible ink.

Transparency has also been a struggle for MPD. In February, the ACLU and Stand for Children Tennessee sued MPD and Memphis Mayor Paul Young for unlawfully denying access to public records that would shed light on the department's use of force policies. That records request, sent in May 2025, sought to determine whether MPD had taken any meaningful steps to address the misconduct and civil rights violations the DOJ identified under the Biden Administration. The ACLU filed similar requests in six other jurisdictions that received DOJ reports on unlawful policing. Six cities opened their files. Memphis refused.

Transparency has also been conspicuously absent around MPD’s role in the dubiously named Memphis Safe Task Force. MPD’s handling of the March 28 No Kings protest is the latest entry in a long and unsettling record.

The question is not whether MPD crossed a line on March 28. The question is whether long-promised change will finally come. The ACLU of Tennessee will continue to demand transparency, accountability, and reform, and we will not stop until Memphians in every precinct, at every protest, and on every porch enjoy the rights our Constitution guarantees.

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