Shelby County's interagency justice dashboard aims to speed ticket processing and host spring —safe surrender— clinic

Tammy Sawyer, Shelby County general sessions court clerk, presented the Interagency Justice Operations work group and a new IJOE dashboard to commissioners on March 4. Sawyer said the group was created to end operational silos across courts, the sheriff's office, pretrial services and Shelby County ITS, and that the dashboard is intended to provide cross-agency transparency and better operational coordination.

Sawyer highlighted several operational outcomes from the IJOE effort: reduced intake-to-release bottlenecks, digitized flow from arrest to bail using the Justice Enterprise system, and planned integration with Tennessee's Titan electronic ticketing so Highway Patrol tickets will be processed electronically. Sawyer said the implementation testing is roughly 45% complete and that the county expects tighter integration and backlog uploads by March, so Highway Patrol tickets will be available online for payment.

She also described targeted jail-population reviews coordinated with the district attorney and sheriff's office that have moved forward about 100 cases, reducing pressure on the jail. During the winter storm, Sawyer said the interagency pipeline allowed the county to hold two arraignments and deliver video arraignments for detainees who otherwise would have required transport.

At several points commissioners asked whether the dashboard can break down data by crime type, ZIP code or district and whether ICE arrests are tracked. Sawyer said the current dashboard can break out felony vs. misdemeanor warrants and classify cases (motor-vehicle, drug, nonviolent) and that the county is working to add district and ZIP-code breakdowns tied to a separate CLEAR initiative. She said ICE flags are handled through the Memphis Safe Task Force and are not currently tracked in IJOE.

Sawyer announced a planned spring 2026 safe-surrender (warrant clinic) for people with nonviolent misdemeanor warrants; participants will be seen by judges or judicial commissioners and will not be booked into the jail, the clerk said, emphasizing that "safe surrender does not mean no arrest" for people with orders that require detention. The clerk said a communications plan will precede the event so the public understands eligible offenses and steps.

Commissioners asked staff to consider formalizing IJOE as a subcommittee to preserve cross-agency coordination across administrations; Sawyer said she supports making it a formal entity similar to the IT subcommittee. The dashboard is undergoing a background review with Shelby County IT and staff said they plan eventual raw-data release so community organizations can query data without using public-records requests. Attribution in this story is to Tammy Sawyer's March 4 presentation and commissioner questions recorded in the committee transcript.