GOP congressmen want the National Guard in Charlotte. Here's where violent crime is a bigger problem.
Sure, the data can't always tell the entire story. But one representative who's asking for a deployment isn't suggesting the same solution for a more violent place in his own district.
Here’s something:
First off, the nerd in me would like to point out that, well actually, it’s the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police. Second: Rep. Pat Harrigan doesn’t represent Charlotte or any part of Mecklenburg County. His district includes rural and suburban counties north and northwest of Charlotte, along with Winston-Salem. Third: The last time any elected leaders in Charlotte asked for the National Guard to come in to help was in 2016, after a police officer shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott. Protests afterward turned violent, Gov. Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency, the city imposed a curfew, and Charlotte’s police chief called in the Guard and State Highway Patrol to help. And fourth! Charlotte’s leaders—city council, the mayor, nor the police chief—are not asking for a deployment now. The local Fraternal Order of Police has, but that’s an advocacy organization, not one that actually makes official policy or city decisions.
The FOP did, however, get the attention of Republican congressmen Chuck Edwards (who represents the mountains), the aforementioned Pat Harrigan, and Mark Harris (whose district includes Matthews, Mint Hill, and a tiny sliver of southeast Charlotte). All three men sent a letter to North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, asking for a temporary deployment. They cited a recent increase in crime, specifically in Uptown Charlotte, and noted that repeat offenders were committing more crimes. The example: Decarlos Brown, Jr., who’s accused of killing a 23-year-old Ukranian refugee named Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train in August. That story made national news. “The men and women who wear the badge in Charlotte have sounded an unmistakable cry for help,” they wrote. “Yet, you have rejected their cry.”
Back in mid-October, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police leaders said crime is actually down so far this year, noting that the perception of crime doesn’t match the reality. They did state that repeat offenders are the ones causing most of the spikes in crime rates and perception problems. “The cycle of catch and release does not reduce crime in our community,” said Sergeant Todd Martin of the Southeast Service Area Crime Reduction Unit.
My perception? I lived in Charlotte from 2005 until 2015, and in my time covering the news there, I went to a bunch of areas that had a reputation for violence. Not once did I feel unsafe. But that’s easy for me to say.
So, what does the data say?
Well, for one thing, Charlotte objectively used to be much more violent. In 1993, 129 people were murdered in the city. A decade ago, my former WCNC-TV colleague Kevin Ridley and I made a six-minute-long retrospective news story about it. That violent year in Charlotte saw the killings of two police officers, and the capture of a serial killer, Henry Wallace.
After that year, Charlotte changed its policing to a more community-oriented approach. Women like Dee Sumpter and Judy Williams created Mothers of Murdered Offspring to support and advocate for victims’ families (their daughters were both killed by Wallace). For context, 1993 was near the peak of the crack epidemic, and was a tragically bad year for homicides in many other major American cities as well. Since then, Charlotte has never seen that many murders in one year, and the homicide rate has never come close to what it was back then, even with a population that’s more than doubled.
But is Charlotte still the place in North Carolina with the worst violent crime problem? It’s the biggest city in the state, so it holds true that, by raw numbers, it also has the most incidents of violent crime.
But is the rate of crime higher there than in other cities, towns, and rural areas? It seems like the easiest way to figure that out would be to divide the number of crimes by the resident population to standardize things on a per capita basis. However! It’s not quite that simple. “Crime rates per capita are used virtually everywhere to rank and compare cities. However, their usage relies on a strong linear assumption that crime increases at the same pace as the number of people in a region,” wrote Marcos Oliveria in a study published in Crime Science in 2021. That doesn’t always hold true. “In most countries, we find that theft increases superlinearly with population size, whereas burglary increases linearly,” Oliveria writes. One way to more correctly quantify the actual crime rate is to consider all of the people who in a city who don’t live there, like commuters, tourists, and other visitors (In 2023, for example, the Charlotte region saw 31 million visitors by some accounts). If you take that into account, big city and metro area crime rates go down even further.
That being said, a few places clearly have higher crime rates than Charlotte. Robeson County, home to Lumberton, is a place where the average private sector wages are less than half than those in Charlotte and Durham, and poverty rates are twice as high as the state average. The violent crime rate there in 2024, according to statistics from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, was nearly twice as high as Mecklenburg County’s. Scotland and Edgecombe Counties, also largely rural areas, also have higher violent crime rates than Charlotte.
The good news is that crime rates went down in Robeson County last year. That includes murders. “It’s hard to put your finger on it,” sheriff Burnis Wilkins told the Border Belt Independent, who said he didn’t know any one reason why the number or murders went up or down. “Homicides are one of those (things), you don’t know when they’re going to happen.”
In general, violent crime spiked during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and has since dropped, but not to pre-pandemic levels. Even so, says the Independent, the issue is nothing new:
Robeson County … has long struggled with violent crime, which local District Attorney Matt Scott calls a symptom of poverty, drugs and hopelessness. Robeson had the highest violent crime rate among the state’s 100 counties in 2023, according to the State Bureau of Investigation.
Wake County, which has a population 10 times the size of Robeson, saw 56 homicides in 2023 — only 15 more than Robeson.
Scott said his office can barely keep up with the number of cases moving through the Robeson County court system. The state assigns 13 prosecutors to the county, but Scott said studies show Robeson needs 24 or 25.
Recently, though, Robeson County has added more sheriff’s deputies to patrol, and has added a new homicide investigator to lighten the workload. Several agencies are also coming together to help reduce opioid overdoses. They’re still among the highest in the state, but they’re dropping. “When you’re coming together to tackle tough issues,” District Attorney Matt Scott told the Independent, “I think you’re going to see great results. And we have seen great results.”
Look, I get it. It’s easy for Republicans to pick a fight with cities, which are represented largely by Democrats and have more reporters and media organizations running around to amplify their words (I should say that the Border Belt Independent, whose work I’m relying on here, provides excellent coverage for an often overlooked part of North Carolina). I also get that crime is a very personal problem. Years ago in Charlotte, my house was broken into, and the burglars got away with our flat screen TV and some jewelry. Still, I have never personally dealt with violent crime, and I’m not belittling the experience of anyone who’s been a victim of it. Every life lost is a tragedy.
Also, I understand the perception problem. As someone who worked in local TV news for a long time, I feel like I’m constantly trying to atone for my time inside an industry that defers too often to police press releases, and has over-represented the real threat of criminals (Many studies have said this!). It’s worth saying, as much as I can, that actual incidents of crime are generally very low, even though individual stories of crime can be riveting, awful, or both.
In short: Crime can be measured, but safety is a vibe. Sure, I can show you all sort of data and statistics to illustrate where violence is more or less prominent. I can give you proof that the most sensational local narratives about crime are often outliers. That doesn’t stand a chance against a compelling story, personal or otherwise. We, as a society, are fixated on true crime.
That said, data shows that crime is as much a rural problem as it is an urban one. It just tends to get more attention in urban areas because, for one reason, that’s where more people live. The problems are condensed into square blocks instead of being spread out over square miles.
One last thing. In 2016, the same year the National Guard was called into Charlotte, more than 600 members of the Guard had a larger, longer, and more significant deployment to Lumberton and Robeson County … to help with relief after Hurricane Matthew. Mark Harris, who represents Lumberton and Scotland Counties, has not advocated for the National Guard to backstop police or deputies in those more rural area of his district today, where the rates of violent crime are consistently higher than Charlotte’s.
Everyone deserves to be safe. But not everyone, it seems, gets the same response if they’re not.
Comparing crime rates from one year to the other or one city to another definitely has its challenges. I recall speaking with a police officer once about a decrease in crime. He told me that it hadn’t really changed, but how they reported it had. The example he gave was that if someone broke into five cars in a parking lot, they used to write five different reports, but they changed that to one report to cut down on paperwork. The reply to a similar question about the decrease in murders was that people were shooting each other as much as ever, it’s just that the doctors have gotten a whole lot better at saving them.
I consider the DeCarlos Brown incident as a kind of "Human lightning". Lightning is a known risk, unpredictable and unpreventable. It can kill outside or inside a home (fire, electrocution). There are a few things that can reduce the risk but the risk is never eliminated or even diminished significantly. Same with the mentally ill with a knife. How often? Very rare. Tragic, certainly. Laws and military response? To make me laugh.