Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for
your support. So last hour we started talking about the
latest developments in the story of the murder of the
twenty three year old Ukrainian refugee. She was stabbed to
death by a repeat, repeat, repeat offender on the Charlotte
Area Transit Systems light rail line through South End on
Friday night at about ten pm. Her name was Irina Zurutska.
Our friend Andrew Dunn over at Long Leave Politics. He
also is a contributing columnist at the Charlotte Observer, and
he wrote about this yesterday in the paper, and he
made some really good points. He says the civic response
so far has felt strangely blase. Right, He's exactly right,
which is why, despite the Texter's complaint That's why I
covered it on Monday at great length criticized the city Council.
In fact, you'll hear promos of some of the comments
that I was making at that on Monday and Tuesday, yesterday,
and now again today, because I think Andrew Dunn's assessment
is correct, strangely blase, and the through line is and
you've probably heard me say this repeatedly if you've been listening,
the Social Compact. It ties into the story out of Britain,
ties into the story out of DC where the grand
jury refuses to indict somebody for assaulting a federal officer,
ties into this story the social compact. You hear me
talk about high trust societies, right, you must have societal cohesion.
That cannot occur if you have one party in the
compact that is not upholding its end of the bargain.
I trade liberty for security. That's part of why there
is a government. We are all part of this compact.
We are all giving up a little bit of our
liberty and agreeing to live under the rules. And we
set up the rules to say here are the rules,
here's how you change the rules, and here are the
penalties if you do not follow the rules and then
by giving over some of that security or a liberty
rather in exchange for the creation of a government to
create the security apparatus to enforce those rules. When you
have a government that is now not fulfilling its end
of the bargain, there isn't any reason for that compact
to continue. And the people who are in this government,
whether it's the City of Charlotte, the State of North Carolina,
the US government, when you don't fulfill your end of
the bargain, then, as the Founders talked about in the
Declaration of Independence, it's our responsibility to throw off this
tyrannical government because now there's no benefit to me, because
the only thing I was trading the liberty for was
for you to provide an umbrella of security under which
we may all engage in commerce and live our lives.
And as long as we follow the rules and don't
hurt people and break their stuff and take their stuff,
then then we should be allowed to move about freely.
That's the whole point. And if you're not going to
hold up your end of the bargain, well then there
is no bargain anymore. There's no compact. And when our
local officials, state officials, federal officials lose sight of this
fundamental premise, then you've gone tyrannical because now you're not
giving me what I traded for, and now you're just
taxing me, and you're doing all this other stuff. And
you may dress it all up and oh, I'm doing
these nice things for other people and whatever whatever, right,
but you're failing on the fundamental reason for your existence
in the first place. You would not be able to
give the Carolina Panthers hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers,
right if they did not entrust you with their security.
That's the reason you exist. It is your number one
one job, number one. And so when this woman is
murdered at ten o'clock in the evening going into South
End by some you know, whacked out homeless guy who's
got a rap sheet a mile long and was involuntarily
committed by his family, and the courts even recognized. Yeah,
like his own public defender said, he's he needs to
be evaluated. If you can't provide protection from that, then
you need to fix that, because that's part of your responsibility.
That's your job, that's what you're supposed to be doing.
But there's there's been this you know, reimagining of policing
and reimagining of justice, of the justice system under the
banner of equity and the banner of social justice, yes,
but under this banner of you know, defund the police
systemic racism, institutional injustice. Policing is actually the remnants of
the slave trade and all of this garbage. No, it is.
It is fundamental and core to the reason you exist, Gov.
Speaker 2: Co.
Speaker 1: And if you can't do it, or if you won't
do it as an elected official, get the hell out
and let somebody else in to do it. That's it,
because that because that's it, that's the deal. You will
have a continuing erosion of law and order, more chaos,
lower trust in the society. It will break down, and
it breaks down like all preference cascades, slowly at first
and then very quickly. And so the strangely blase a
comment here that Andrew dunmakes is spot on. And the
mayor's comments in that statement she put out, which maybe
somebody didn't hear it, Jimmy, you didn't hear this on
the tax line, but I read the statement, went over
it yesterday, dragged the mayor for it. She gave one
sentence about the victim and spent five paragraphs on how
we failed the attacker. That's what Dounn is talking about
here too. In his piece. Three days after the stabbing,
the CMPD published a graphic bragging about the quote real
picture of crime in our city, claiming that homicides and
armed robberies are down thirty percent from last year. And
Dunn says that may be true or it may not be,
but Arena Zarutzka's murder makes a mockery of the comfort
we try to take in statistics. It reveals something deeper,
a justice system that tolerates career criminals on the streets
and a transit system that shrugs at disorder until it
turns deadly. Right. I mentioned yesterday the man, the veteran
who was beaten by four youths on a bus in Pineville.
Don't know if they've caught those guys, the youths that
went to the hospital. Dunn says, too often Charlotte leaders
have talked about crime as if it's a perception problem.
Uptown business groups launched pr campaigns, new slogans, and billboards
and billboard ads to assure people that it's all safe.
They talk about vibrancy and image, about whether visitors feel comfortable.
But this is not a marketing issue, he says, It's
a human one. Right. In a statement, Mayor vy Lyles
said that Charlotte is by and large a safe city
and that cats is by and large a safe transit system,
and that framing is part of the problem. By and
large is cold comfort when it's your daughter who doesn't
come home. Safety is not something you addage out. He says,
a city worthy of its people treats every writer's life
as non negotiable, not a rounding error. All right, If
you're listening to this show, you know I try to
keep up with all sorts of current events, and I
know you do too, And you've probably heard me say
get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's
how you detect media bias, which is why I've been
so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's
a website, and it combines news from around the world
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description too. I started using ground News a few months
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Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off
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access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps
my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they
make the media landscape more transparent. Let me read some
messages I've got. This is from citizen of NC. It's
a Pete tweet who says Charlotte leaders proclaimed that Charlotte
is a safe city and residents are shocked. Are we are?
We shocked that this could happen. Charlotte is a violent city.
Shootings and stabbings are happening every week. Charlotte hasn't been
safe for a long time. Do not pass more projects
for this train system? Yeah? This is I said this
the other day that I try to not be cynical. No,
hear me out, I try. I'm not saying I succeed.
I'm just saying I try to not be so cynical
all the time, but part of me wonders if the
silence that we are hearing from the local gov Co
officials is because they do not want to draw any
attention to any kind of problem with the train system
while they are going to the voters to ask us
to approve a once sent sales tax to fund and
expansion of this system. Why would we expand a system
that cannot be protected, where people who write it cannot
be protected. A couple of years ago, Christy and I
went to New York. I'm trying to remember how long
ago this was, but we flew up and we flew
into JFK and then we got onto a train to
take it out to Long Island. And it requires some
transfers and stuff. But at the time, there was a
there was this law, large increase in violence in the subways,
and do you remember what they did. They brought in
the National Guard, right they stationed National guardsmen in the
subways and I saw them. I was so scared. I
wasn't actually no, I was not scared. But that show
of force, the same thing that Trump is doing in Washington,
d C. Right, the police presence acts as a deterrence.
And for some reason this idea is lost on the Democrats.
Now they'll talk about community policing. They talk about you
know the old you know cop walking the beat, knowing
the neighborhood and knowing the people and all of that. Yeah,
but it's not just about like acting as a as
an ambassador or some social worker or something. Yes, there
is value in walking the beat, obviously, rather than just
sitting in a patrol car driving around, not meeting people
and you know, learning about the zone you're patrolling. Right,
But there's also something to be said for a lot
of police in an area where there's a lot of
pedestrian activity going on, so they can respond overwhelmingly and
catch the bad guys. But then the second part of
that equation is you have to have a court system
that actually follows through with repercussions. And what we have
seen over the last five to ten years with the
explosion of youth violence, youth crime, car thefts, burglaries, right,
all of that is because we can't treat them like adults.
They had a hard life, we can't throw the book
at them. We're going to end up, you know, the
school to prison pipeline. In all of this, and meanwhile,
people who are playing by the rules, people who are
going about their day, engaging in economic activity and commerce,
you know, engaging in high trust society functions. The people
that you want in your society to be productive members
of it, right, they're the ones that get victimize, and
at some point they realize, I don't want to do
this anymore. I don't want to live here, I don't
want to work here. And then they leave and they
go someplace else that can provide them with that security.
That's where Charlotte is right now. Some people think it's
already lost, it's too late. In all this, I choose
not to believe that. I choose to believe that we
are at a point where city leaders and the court
system and the judges and the magistrates and the attorneys,
you guys, have the ability to turn this around. You
can do it pretty quickly too. You just have to
have the will to do so. But here's a good
point raised by good Why on Twitter. We have a
situation where democrats basically believe certain groups of people should
be given a pass for criminal behavior because they or
their ancestors have been disadvantaged. Right. This is the problem
with this oppressor oppressed worldview that Marxism and culcates in people,
which is that once you're in one group, then that's it,
and then anything you do as an oppressor is bad.
Anything you do as the oppressed is forgivable. You get
a pass for all of that stuff. The innocent woman
killed on the Links train is just an unfortunate casualty,
and she, like all victims, should just accept crimes as
retribution for the past sins the perpetrators have suffered at
the hands of the bigoted majority. This also explains no
cash bail, jury nullifications, and soft sentencing for offenders. Yeah,
he's exactly right, or she's exactly right. He and I
don't know, good Wahoo, what your gender is. I don't
want to misgender you. I'm not trying to be offensive there.
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I promised that I would play you this audio, and
this is from Monday's Charlotte City Council meeting. I'm just
going to play it in its entirety. This woman came
down and spoke to the Charlotte City Council. During the
public forum portion of the meeting, you're going to hear
her comments, and then you're going to hear the response
from city council. I think let's say maybe.
Speaker 2: Hello, everybody. My name is Sheila Ordone. Some of you
know me. I'm here to discuss gang violence and Druid
Hills and the policy failures of this city to prevent
gang violence and violent crime in residential neighborhoods. Those of
you who know me, no, my daughter's house was shot
with twenty nine bullets over to separate shootings April twenty
ninth and August ninth. At first, I could not understand
how this could happen. CMPD knew within twenty four hours
it was mistaken gang retaliation and that the people across
the street were the intended targets. These were renters in
a house using housing vouchers. My daughter tried to talk
to the DA and the city council. I tried to
talk to the city council. We got nowhere. Here's the
bottom line. It is due to policy failure. If this
street were in Wake County, they do full criminal background
checks for all housing vouchers. Full They go back five
years and any felonies Class A through I are disqualifiers.
If this were a habitat house, habitat for humanity in Charlotte,
exact same thing, full criminal background checks, five year look back,
and they take it a step further and they look
misdemeanors going two years back, and I quote they do
this to ensure community safety. Finally, I want to discuss
the word. Oh, I do want to discuss CMPD. They
have been amazing throughout this whole thing. They are not
the problem in Charlotte at all. They did a thorough investigation,
they executed a no knock warrant, they confiscated semi automatic
weapons from the house across the street. They made arrest,
but because one of the offenders was a juvenile, he
was out within three hours back in this house, and
within hours he re entered that cycle of gang violence,
was able to acquire more weapons that led to the
second shooting on August ninth. Thank you, sorry very much
for that, and extruman, we certainly hear what you're.
Speaker 3: Saying, Maticus, it was difficult at this time. Just a
quick question for clarification. It seems like a lot of
the things that she addressed, really should be addressed with
the courts, since it's the magistrate and the judges, not SAMPD.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, So first to hear the mayor, Oh thank you,
I'm so difficult. And then here's Lawana slack Mayfield. Not
our job, sounding a lot like our sheriff Gary. Not
my fault. McFadden. You need to be addressing this to
the courts, not us. This isn't us. What are you
talking to us for.
Speaker 3: That had the conversation to determine whether or not an individual.
So just for clarity, say for your daughter and for you,
just for clarification. Once SAMPD does their job, unfortunately of
having to do and arrest, then it goes to the courts.
Speaker 1: What do you mean unfortunately having to do an arrest.
Why is that unfortunate? It's pretty fortunate for all the
people that won't be killed by random gunfire on the street. No,
seems pretty fortunate to people who live around this gang
house that people are in thanks to housing vouchers, which
is what the speaker, Sheila Nordine, that's what she said.
She said, the house is being occupied by people using
housing vouchers, and if they were up in a different
county like Wake County, they would not be able to
rent that house because they got criminal records and Wake
County screens for that.
Speaker 3: So that would be the magistrate or the judge of
which district attorney. Mayorweather has been working closely with CMPD
as well as hoping to get legislation in rally. But
that's where I think a little more movement regarding the
individuals once they've been arrested would have more impact versus
the city council because CMPD once they make that arrest,
then that individual didn't goes through the court system, and
our officers have no control with the magis STD and
what a judge does. So I just want to make
sure that there's clarification. Thank you for coming down share
Yet I want to make sure that your daughter, as
the resident of the home, is aware of the steps
to help ensure future protections.
Speaker 1: Okay, so she is correct, magistrates, judges, the judicial system, right,
those are all correct points. However, she's ignoring the issue
that the speaker raised, which was the housing vouchers.
Speaker 3: Thank you, jar their very much.
Speaker 4: So now we're going that real quick, manager or attorney,
wouldn't we have authority over housing anything because it relates
to that or these county vouchers or these city But
what is her reference to that?
Speaker 5: The vouchers are issued by the housing in Libyan, the
housing authority, right, So the housing authority or Libyan wouldn't
make maybe another avenue for her to see because of
what I heard in her comments were practices that are
being employed by other jurisdictions, and they may want to
consider those practices as well.
Speaker 4: So it duty of the city or the county is
in Libyan, which is.
Speaker 3: Authority fed its amounta mayor Just just for clarity so
that everybody can hear.
Speaker 1: Ye, okay, you don't know what you're talking about. You
hear the confusion there. Edwin Peacock asked, she's talking about
housing vouchers, So what are those? Where do they come from?
And the manager there says, I think it was the
manager who says maybe it was the county attorney. That's
in Libyan. Oh so that's not us. Oh that's federal.
Somebody says that's not federal, that's not hot. So I
went to their website. We at in Libyan are proactively
redefining our role in the Charlotte community and despired to
be the preferred provider of housing that is affordable for
our growing population by partnering with quality service providers for
supportive services and becoming stronger financially. Our hope is to
become a coloraborative leader who can present effective, affordable solutions
to housing issues in Charlotte. We are a nonprofit real
estate holding company with a public purpose. Our purpose is
to provide decent, safe housing that is affordable to low
and moderate income families while supporting their efforts to achieve
self sufficiently sufficiency. Rather, do you think the Charlotte City
Council might have an ability to influence in Libyan rather
than just telling this citizen, hey, go off and go
try to get them to change their policies. Maybe, just
maybe the City of Charlotte, Charlotte City Council, do they
have any contracts within Libyan? Could they pass an ordinance
of some kind that talks about criminal background checks or something?
Or is that like is this sort of like we
can't do that because a formerly incarcerated person is now
going to be an ab to afford housing in Charlotte
and all of this, and we have a formerly incarcerated
person on the Charlotte City Council. I'm sure she would
be an advocate for that constituency. See, so it's just
this kicking the issue away and somebody else can take
care of that. Let somebody else take care of that,
mind you. These city council members gave themselves pay raises,
not all of them, more on council at the time,
but what was about four years ago they ballooned up
their own compensation package and Edwin Peacock told me on
Twitter the other day that they're somewhere over the sixty
thousand dollars a year for a quote part time job
that they claimed was a full time job. But that's
why they have such high absentee rates, right, They gave
themselves these raises because it's basically full time. We want
to attract people who could just do this work and
not have to have another job. Blah blah blah. And
then we saw the story we covered it the other
day from the Charlotte Observer that oh, actually they got
high rates of absentees and out of like seventy nine meetings,
only three of the meetings have been attended by every
council member and mayor. So we're paying them to go
to go to these offices and they're not doing the work.
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Jerry says, your friend Andrew Dunn is exactly right in
his column, never stop pushing issues such as this. I
lived in Charlotte from seventy one to twenty nineteen. I
raised a child, went through public schools. I would never
do that today for all the reasons you address. It's
very sad how the city has changed, and it's almost
one hundred percent due to the leadership. Sure, we had
wealthy people leading us for years, but while they were
feathering their nests, they helped the rest of us. I
love your cynicism. Keep questioning everything. By the way, just
moved over the state line and glad I did. Jerry
does raise this point. There used to be, like we
used to joke about it, to the public private partnerships.
There were business and civic leaders in Charlotte. There were
the three big ones. Hugh McCall, ed Crutchfield, and Bill Lee.
Lee was with Duke Energy seat president's CEO of Duke Right,
Uh crutch Field who was crutch Field with am I
drawing a blank on that one. First Union, Well it
wasn't first Union back then. Yeah, and then and Hugh
McCall was Bank of America anyway, And they weren't the
only ones, but they were the big ones. And if
they put their names on some sort of a civic project,
people fell in line. People got behind it. The business
of Charlotte has always been business right, and those business
leaders recognize the importance of building up the civic pride
and the local society. For whatever else you want to
say about them, and I'm not making any other comments
about any of their businesses or anything else, but there
was this civic ethic among those, not just them either,
but they were sort of like they were the heavy hitters.
So I think that's what Jerry is referencing. This is
from Craig who says the city rarely checks any train
riders for tickets. This allows the homeless and all their
problems to move around the city at no cost. At
the same time, ridership is inflated when no one pays
and they tout the ridership numbers. Yeah, like, either make
the buses free and stop trying with this, you know,
with this forgery of a fair system, you know, or
or install turnstiles. You guys got a police. You got
to secure the borders of the train stations. I mean,
that's what this comes down to. And I know, democrats
and borders, it's like oil and water. I get it,
but there's you're not going to have people that are
going to be confident in writing this system when anybody
can jump on there's no security on the trains and
the platforms and everything else. It's just you got to
you have to acknowledge here that whatever you were doing
did not work, and you need to adopt mechanisms that do. Really.
Andrew Dunn talked about the response to buy the city
council members to the murder of this Ukrainian refugee, and
you know, he talked about the mayor and her statement
I have as well, which, by the way, like the
way you write that statement is you anchor every single
paragraph in a reference or with a reference to the victim,
don't You don't take one sentence to say thoughts and
prayers and then spend five paragraphs talking about how we
failed the attacker. Right, there are ways to do that.
Confidence only returns after safety is real done, says and
he is exactly right on that. Exactly right, he says.
I don't pretend to have all of the answers, but
if Charlotte doesn't rally to find them, then things are
deeply rotten here. Irena Zarutzka deserved better from us. Her
death is a terrible loss, and if it doesn't joke
Charlotte back to its senses, then we will have failed
her twice. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
the show without your support and the support of the
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thank you so much for listening, and uh, don't break
anything while I'm gone.