Undermining a Brand: The Arkham Edition

Has anyone noticed that 201 has turned into Arkham Asylum? Apparently, the most famous criminal in the Shelby County Criminal Justice system can just walk out of 201 at will. Not once but TWICE. Welcome to another edition of undermining your political brand.

Sheriff Luttrel has widely been credited with running the jail system pretty well. So much so that he was expected to take the Shelby County Mayor's election relatively easily. He had a large campaign finance advantage and cross-over appeal, meaning white democrats would vote for him. Letting a murderer walk out of jail TWICE blows that brand up. The only way we know this guy accidentally got released was because of the high profile previous escape. This guy isn't exactly Steve McQueen from "The Great Escape", he just walks out, like Otis in Mayberry. How many other lesser criminals have just walked out? It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that probably a lot of folks have.

This is how I see the debate between Luttrell and Malone in a few months.

Luttrell-"I'm running on my trusted leadership of the jail."
Malone-"How many murderers walked out of jail this week."
Luttell-"Now that is an uncalled for comment Ms. Malone."
Malone-"Oh really, have you re-caught Murdering Otis yet?"

Basically, that's how it will go because you can't spin letting murders walk out of jail. Democrats could really get rough with a day count of how long Murdering Otis has been on the lam. God help Luttrel if that guy commits another crime. The next murder victim will be Luttrel's political career. It is already a victim of aggravated assault.

The Effects of Believing We Can Not Think for Ourselves

I saw a few days ago that Mayor Wharton launched a "Bank On Memphis" initiative. That's good and something that should have been done a long time ago. Yet as I read the statement, something struck me. "According to the Pew Research Center, there are between 30,000 and 50,000 people in Shelby County right now who do not use any kind of mainstream financial institution." We really needed the Pew Foundation to tell us this before somebody decided to do something? (Here's the whole statement)
There are organizations that have been working on financial services to low income areas for years, primarily The Rise Foundation. Your humble blogger made a map 4 years ago showing where banks were and weren't located in this city. (View here) There were people here in Memphis with the awareness and capability to start addressing this problem, yet because we don't believe that our own citizens are smart enough to grasp such complex issues, we wasted several years until some outside entity points out the obvious. How many other issues are we waiting for some DC/NY organization to mention us. I'll take suggestions in the comments.