With all this money to policing and even more to prisons, it is a shocking fact to find out that Memphis allocates exactly $0 every year to education and our schools— perpetuating cycles of the school to prison nexus and over-policed neighborhoods. Also, gentrification and crowded juvenile detention centers are contributing to the rise of crime and the fall of community education, rather than the idea of not enough police. The education budget is allocated by the county and state— however, each year the county budget decreases more and more due to multiple suburbs seceding as municipalities so as to not share funding with the city, effectively reinstating segregation (Kebede 2020). With this quasi-segregation, the property taxes from the most affluent neighborhoods are now only going to municipalities rather than city schools that have been serving the community for years.

For context on the Memphis city budget, these infographic show budget comparisons between police spending and other education unrelated costs. Specifically honing in on the homeless initiative in a city riddled with poverty. For every dollar that the city spends on policing, they only allocate .08 of a cent for the homelessness initiative, which comes out to almost an identical number of dollars as the Police Director’s (Michael Rallings) yearly salary (J. Dylan 2020).  Still, all of these policy issues directly correlate with education— addressing homelessness for example when 2,000 students in the Shelby County district are facing homelessness.