Ben Crump responds to former mayor Strickland's letter about police ordinances

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - One last message from the outgoing mayor.

As Mayor Paul Young begins his first week in office, FOX13 obtained a letter addressed to the city council, written by former Mayor Jim Strickland.

The letter expressed his concerns about a handful of police reform ordinances passed last spring, following the death of Tyre Nichols.

A day after the letter was made public, attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, who represents the family of Tyre Nichols, responded to the revaluation that Strickland never supported the ordinances. 

“Additionally, we are deeply disturbed by the recent revelation by former Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland that he actively avoided signing and enforcing the Driving Equality Act in honor of Tyre Nichols that the Memphis City Council passed in Spring 2023, directing meaningful reform in how Memphis Police should conduct and report traffic stops," a press release from Crump and Romanucci said. "We will hold Mayor Paul Young accountable to his pledge to enact these reforms. These types of commonsense changes to police policies and practices are essential to establishing trust between communities and police. Our team has actively called for consistent, national systemic police reform since the murder of George Floyd. Had changes to law enforcement policies been enacted in 2020, we strongly believe Tyre Nichols would be alive today. ”

Council members say expressing why there was no support now is troubling.

“I was really shocked by the tone of the letter,” said former council chairman Martavius Jones.

He said the letter was emailed to all of the city council during his last business day in office.

“The proper venue for former Mayor Strickland, if he didn't agree with those ordinances, was to let a court decide. He didn't do that. He decided that I'm just going to defy the laws of the Memphis City Council and not follow them,” said Jones.

The 4-page letter outlined about the six police reform ordinances passed by city council last year following the death of Nichols.

The ordinances include annual audits of the Memphis Police Department training academy and requiring police to use marked vehicles for traffic stops.

Strickland explained that part of the reason he does not support it is because the ordinances ‘violate the charter of the city’ by interfering with the policies and operations of the Memphis Police Department.

Despite Strickland’s sentiments, Mayor Paul Young said Thursday that he will sign off and enforce these ordinances. “We will enforce the ordinances as approved by the city council.”

Chief C.J. Davis said her department has already made the adjustments.

“We have to have policies that mirror city ordinances so we changed the policies anyway. You know, we didn't have to wait for the mayor to sign or not sign. So our policies have been changed. Our officers have had roll call training and they have been operating, you know, under those ordinances and we haven't had any issues,” said Davis.

These ordinances passed through the city council last spring.

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Game of Thrones author sues ChatGPT owner OpenAI

By Tom Gerken & Liv McMahonTechnology reporters

US authors George RR Martin and John Grisham are suing ChatGPT-owner OpenAI over claims their copyright was infringed to train the system.

Martin is known for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted into HBO show Game of Thrones.

ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) "learn" by analysing a massive amount of data often sourced online.

The lawsuit claims the authors' books were used without their permission to make ChatGPT smarter.

OpenAI said it respected the rights of authors, and believed "they should benefit from AI technology".

Other prominent authors named in the complaint include Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and George Saunders.

The case has been brought to the federal court in Manhattan, New York, by the Authors Guild, a trade group in the US working on behalf of the named authors.

According to the filing, it accused OpenAI of engaging in "systematic theft on a mass scale".

It follows similar legal action brought by comedian Sarah Silverman in July, as well as an open letter signed by authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman that same month calling for AI companies to compensate them for using their work.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said: "We're having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working co-operatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI.

"We're optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together."

The case argues that the LLM was fed data from copyrighted books without the permission of the authors, in part because it was able to provide accurate summaries of them.

The lawsuit also pointed to a broader concern in the media industry - that this kind of technology is "displacing human-authored" content.

Patrick Goold, reader in law at City University, told BBC News that while he could sympathise with the authors behind the lawsuit, he believed it was unlikely it would succeed, saying they would initially need to prove ChatGPT had copied and duplicated their work.

"They're actually not really worried about copyright, what they're worried about is that AI is a job killer," he said, likening the concerns to those screenwriters are currently protesting against in Hollywood.

"When we're talking about AI automation and replacing human labour... it's just not something that copyright should fix.

"What we need to be doing is going to Parliament and Congress and talking about how AI is going to displace the creative arts and what we need to do about that in the future."

The case is the latest in a long line of complaints brought against developers of so-called generative AI - that is, artificial intelligence that can create media based on text prompts - over this concern.

It comes after digital artists sued text-to-image generators Stability AI and Midjourney in January, claiming they only function by being trained on copyrighted artwork.

And OpenAI is also facing a lawsuit, alongside Microsoft and programming site GitHub, from a group of computing experts who argue their code was used without their permission to train an AI called Copilot.

None of these lawsuits has yet been resolved.

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