Metro Pulse/Citybeat

Comment
on this story

Seven Days

Wednesday, November 27
A new program of "alcohol awareness" is reported to be added to the UT curriculum. Wonder who thought UT students were unaware of alcohol?

Thursday, November 28
A front-page News-Sentinel photo depicts Sheriff Tim Hutchison and Police Chief Phil Keith shaking hands. That should be cause enough for Thanksgiving.

Friday, November 29
Day-after-Thanksgiving Christmas sales are up by 12 percent over last year's day-after retail rampage. Probably people are just stocking up to delay the effects of anticipated wartime rationing.

Saturday, November 30
The Vols whip up on poor ol' Kentucky again and declare a successful football season, except for those pesky losses in all the games that really counted.

Monday, December 2
A survey by the Knoxville Coalition for the Homeless is featured in the News-Sentinelunder the headline, "Survey: More homeless sleep outside." Well, yeah-uh. What a disclosure.

Tuesday, December 3
Horse thieves! Rustlers! Right here in Knox County! And hangin's been abolished, dagnab it.

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
Cutting edge, that's what last week's Knoxville Found is. In case you don't know (and you would if you read Joe Tarr's article, "Urban Scrawl," from early last year), graffiti in hard-to-reach places is a really hip art form now. So this doodling on a billboard along I-40 near the Papermill exit is just another example of youth culture at its finest.
Only two readers, Jackie Knoll and Susie Howard, both of Knoxville, correctly identified the photo. Jackie will have to settle for honorable mention, because Susie was first to respond.
Susie seems to have a great deal of knowledge about local graffiti artists, noting that the billboard in question had "been 'tagged' by 'CRD' a local graffiti crew." she concludes her message with an admonishment that next time we "show a picture that represents CDK the original graffiti crew in k-town."
Since we probably won't be doing another graffiti-ized Knoxville Found anytime soon, we hope Susie will be mollified by a copy of All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned from My Golf-Playing Cats, which is actually a collection of the hip, cutting-edge comic strip, Tom the Dancing Bug, by Ruben Bolling.

Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend

ROCKY HILL TO SEQUOYAH ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ZONE CHANGE
Thursday, Dec. 5
6:30 p.m.
Sequoyah School gym
942 South Gate St.
Review of rezoning of some Rocky Hill Elementary School students into the Sequoyah School zone.

KNOXVILLE COALITION FOR THE HOMELESS
Tuesday, Dec. 10
8:30 a.m.
L.T. Ross Bldg.
Election of the 2003 coalition officers is on the agenda.

METROPOLITAN PLANNING COMMISSION
Tuesday, Dec. 10
6:30 p.m.
Ritta Elementary School Library
6228 Washington Pk.
On the agenda is reviewing input on the Northeast County Sector Plan from November meetings, establishing mission and goals, and following up on unanswered questions.

CITY COUNCIL
Tuesday, Dec. 10
7 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
Regular meeting.

In Black & White
Thumbs down or up for prints at pawn shops?

When law enforcement agencies asked the Legislature to require people trying to pawn items in Tennessee to first give a thumprint, a great furor was raised over privacy and discrimination issues and the added burden to be placed on pawnbrokers. The bill that would have applied statewide failed, but another passed that mandated thumbprints from pawn clients in Knox and Shelby Counties as a pilot program.

Today, more than a year after the law went into effect, that practice is still being questioned. Law enforcement officials and pawnbrokers contacted in Knoxville, however, voiced either favorable or neutral opinions on the law and its effectiveness.

"I think it has been working out pretty well," says Knoxville Police Lt. Eddie Biggs, a supervisor in the criminal investigations division who oversees the department's pawnshop unit, which checks up on the city's 26 pawnbrokers. The county outside the city is home to five more.

"When this thing was first passed and went into effect, we invited everyone with the pawnshops to a session at the Foundry to explain how the law worked and how the system was going to work and how to take the thumbprints," Biggs says. He says compliance has been generally good.

In the 12 months from September 2001 to September 2002, Biggs says, police here recovered $70,379 worth of stolen goods from among pawned items, made 82 arrests as a result, and subpoenaed 64 thumbprints as evidence to verify the identities of suspects in those cases. He did not supply the number of related convictions, because many of those cases are yet to be resolved, but he says he believes the thumbprint requirement is also serving as a deterrent to pawning stolen goods.

Knox County Attorney General Randy Nichols, who lobbied for the bill in Nashville as a member of a group called the Public Safety Coalition, agrees, calling the law a "very effective tool for law enforcement." Nichols says the thumbprint evidence in a case where a couple killed a neighbor and pawned some of the victim's possessions helped lead to guilty pleas to murder charges and life sentences for both.

Nichols says he expects the coalition to go back to the Legislature in 2004, armed with a couple of years of statistical and anecdotal data from Knoxville and Memphis to seek to extend the program statewide.

The thumbprints were additional requirements added to name, address, sex, date of birth and Tennessee Driver's License or other specified photo identification that must be obtained by pawnshops from their loan customers. The shops must submit that information, except for the print, with lists of pawned items, to police or sheriff's departments, or both, within 48 hours of the transaction. The prints are to be made available on request.

Opposition to the extension of the law can still be expected next year, according to Barbara O'Brien, government relations director for Cash America, an international pawnshop chain with 23 shops in Memphis and about 25 in Nashville. The prevalent argument last year was that if the state makes pawnshops take thumbprints, the same should be required at flea markets and consignment shops.

O'Brien says she also anticipates that the NAACP will lobby against it on grounds of discrimination against a class of people based on where and how they choose to get a loan, and that the NRA will continue its opposition. The latter, according to Gen. Nichols, was based loosely on the grounds that the thumbprint requirement was a step toward gun confiscation by the government.

O'Brien's company, which lobbied against the original bill, will be asking to see proof of its effectiveness. "Is there enough justification to continue it and take it statewide?" she asks, pointing to her own research that shows property crime clearance rates have remained essentially unchanged in Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville after the law was imposed on the pawnshops, with Nashville's rate of solving property crimes the highest, despite its exclusion from the program.

O'Brien says that in the company's Memphis shops, representing about half the pawnbrokers in Shelby County, there have been no requests for thumbprints by law enforcement agencies, she says there have been fewer than 600 items put "on hold" for investigation by police agencies there, out of more than 350,000 items pawned.

The law's effects may, indeed, be hard to measure because of all the variables in evidence collection, but Nichols says an important point that may be overlooked is that the prints may exonerate some innocent people accused because of identity theft.

Those cases are rare, according to Mike Rowe, manager of Charlie's Super Pawn in Bearden, who says the four shops under his owners' control in Knox County have felt no business effects, as far as he knows, from the new law, which he says is pretty easy to enforce and is "not a big issue with us."

Rowe says none of the prints his store has taken have been subpoenaed yet. He adds that most stolen goods are trafficked through flea markets and other unregulated outlets on the street, such as antique shops or used merchandise retailers.

Jimmy Rowland, manager of Uncle Easy's Pawn & Loan on Chapman Highway agrees with that assessment of fencing practices, but he says he was requiring thumbprints of pawn customers at his independent shop two years before the law went into effect. "I think it's a good idea," Rowland says, in that it may turn some people away who'd want to pawn something stolen. "That's good. I don't see the riff-raff coming in here I used to see."

Frank Kerns, owner of the independent Penny Pawn shop on Broadway, says he was against the law at first, but now believes in it. "I think it's probably kept some criminals out of pawnshops, and we don't need them in here. It's made it nicer, too, that we don't have to go to court, just send the prints," he says.

"I haven't had one customer complain about it," Kerns says, and that satisfies him that the law has not interfered with his legitimate business.

—Barry Henderson

Waiting for TDOT
The next step, a downtown project, may come soon

For almost two decades, the Tennessee Department of Transportation has been planning to rebuild Interstate 40 through the heart of downtown Knoxville. TDOT still doesn't have a final design for the project and hasn't decided yet if it will shut down the interstate during the work.

However, those plans are shaping up and will likely be finalized in the next couple of years.

"We first funded for design in '86 or '87," says TDOT spokeswoman, Luanne Grandinetti. "I've been talking about Fourth and Gill ever since I've been here, and I've been here 10 years."

The section of I-40 through the Fourth and Gill neighborhood is generally considered the worst in the region. Only two-lanes wide where the James White Parkway intersects, the road has frequent bottlenecks and accidents.

The road's original placement did a lot of damage to the city's core, severing a number of key neighborhoods to the north from downtown and exacerbating the flight or residents and businesses to the suburbs. Some of those neighborhoods have rebounded since, including Fourth and Gill, Old North Knoxville, and Parkridge. Residents there fear a massive construction project could be another setback, but hope it could also alleviate some of the problems I-40 caused.

The state is still a long way from breaking ground on the project. The plans are to first build the Fifth Avenue connector, taking the Broadway ramp all the way to Summit Hill (thus eliminating the traffic that hops on I-40 for a short distance to the James White Parkway). That $25 million project won't be bid until 2004 and will take about two years to finish, Grandinetti says. Which means construction won't start on I-40 until at least 2006, she says.

TDOT's working design calls for I-40 to follow the same grade and elevation that the current road does. However, residents have been pushing for a design that would put the highway slightly below ground, which would cut down on noise and sight pollution, says Larry Fitzpatrick, a civil engineer who lives in Fourth and Gill. The neighborhood group produced their own design, which would put the road about 10 to 20 feet below ground level.

TDOT at first argued that design would increases costs by about $20 million more than the $120 million they expect to spend. "I expect [the cost estimate] has gone up because I think everybody agrees there's more work they have to do on bridges than they initially estimated on their plan," Fitzpatrick says.

Residents have met with TDOT officials twice this year, including one meeting a month ago. "They said, 'OK, we'll look at it,'" Fitzpatrick says.

One idea that's being floated is the possibility that I-40 would be closed during the construction. Cars would use the Fifth Avenue connector and I-640 as detours. "That's just something that was thrown out there," Grandinetti says. "I don't know how much of a possibility it is. Of course, it's a major inconvenience, but you do get [the work] done a lot quicker."

Fitzpatrick likes the idea because it would mean quieter evenings in his neighborhood while the construction is going on. Jeff Welch, executive director of the Transportation Planning Organization, a regional group that looks at design issues, says the TPO hasn't declared a preference yet. "What happens is going to depend on the new commissioner, the alternative selected and how quickly you can get it done," he says.

For now, everyone is waiting on TDOT. "About all we can do is wait for the design to come out, because the engineers are going to engineer it," Fitzpatrick says. But new information should be out soon and then people will be able to react, he says. "I'd give it another 60 days. It shouldn't be too long."

—Joe Tarr