Early on in the advent of the ongoing occupation, opinions and hearsay — some from local ranking officials — are predominating over actual evidence about events per se.
County Trustee Regina Newman informed readers of her Facebook page thusly — “Attention: on Peabody between McLean & Cooper: 4 Fed vehicles and a trooper, men in full gear & guns on street. Pay attention folks.”
Newman followed that up with a somewhat fuller alert: “People harassed, beat up, apt complex raided in Midtown, family dog shot in front of kids, etc., etc. Summer Avenue a ghost town as to commerce at noon. This is what happens when you ‘unleash’ undisciplined cowboys with carte blanche.”
(Less apocalyptic accounts, it should be said, were flourishing on social media and in conversation documenting what appeared to be a stepped-up number of traffic stops by unmarked vehicles as well as by state troopers in official cars.)
Besides serving as an unofficial Paul Revere of the emergency, the term-limited Newman seems also to be breaking with tradition by including a prominently displayed likeness of Joseph Lee, an office employee and a candidate to succeed his boss next year, in an official brochure containing facts and figures about the trustee’s office.
• If your message doesn’t work with one legislative tribunal, try another. That would seem to be the modus operandi of Republican state Senator Brent Taylor, whose somewhat fevered crusade to remove Memphis District Attorney Steve Mulroy from office fizzled out in the GOP-dominated state Senate in this year’s General Assembly.
Last week, Taylor took his vendetta against Mulroy before the Judiciary Committee of the U. S. Senate for a hearing entitled “Blue City Chaos and Tragedy.” The hearing was spearheaded by U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a candidate for Tennessee governor in 2026. Blackburn and Taylor were rivals for the 7th district congressional seat won by Blackburn in 2002, but they have long since settled into a close working relationship featuring an early endorsement of Blackburn’s gubernatorial candidacy by Taylor.
Focusing his remarks on the ongoing dispatch of National Guard and federal officials to Memphis, purportedly to deal with crime, Taylor told the senators, “The root of this crisis lies in part with our Soros-backed DA.”
Apprised of the development, Mulroy scoffed at Taylor’s claim, noting that violent crime had spiked under his Republican predecessor Amy Weirich and had eased during his tenure.
Fellow Democrats in Washington backed Mulroy — like New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who said, “The pretext for this hearing is a farce. It’s belied by the evidence.”
What’s next for Taylor? The United Nations?
• Local concern about the city’s predicament, whatever the evidence, was bolstered by an announcement last week by Governor Bill Lee of a forthcoming grant to Memphis for operations of the Memphis Safe Task Force, as the Memphis incursion has been dubbed by President Trump.
But this apparent serendipity comes with a thicket of complications: Is this amount different from an equivalently purposed sum promised the city at the time of Lee’s State of the State address in February? How much of that originally mentioned sum, totaling $275 million, is still forthcoming? And how will the state largesse, of whatever denomination, influence the city’s still-inconclusive negotiations to keep the NBA Grizzlies once the current operating agreement with the team expires in 2029?