Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so
much for your support. So you know me, I am
a giver, okay, And I watch the various local govc
meetings and such so you don't have to. I watch
a lot of things so you don't have to. And
today it was the emergency meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission.
It wasn't that bad, actually, I mean it was okay.
I think they could have done a better job of
telling people from the general public that shut up, we
don't want to hear from you before the meeting. I
think that would have been the time to do that,
rather than end your meeting with calls from the general
public to be able to make comments and you saying no,
we're not going to hear from you at this meeting,
and so maybe we'll have to schedule another meeting where
we will listen to the two or three of you
who showed up to speak to us about this issue
that we care so so very much about, namely safety
and security on the Charlotte area transit system. Obviously, this
was prompted by some pretty bad responses from local officials
after the murder of a twenty three year old Ukrainian
refugee named Arena Zarutska, who was murdered stabbed to death
in cold blood on a train in the South End
a little over a week ago, and the sort of
blase or tipid responses from various elected officials prompted even
more outrage. It like, why are you not taking this
more seriously, particularly as you are trying to convince us
to approve a one cent sales tax increase for expansion
of the very transit system where the murder occurred. And
then I think, after like twenty four hours of that
kind of blowback and then starting to realize, oh my gosh,
you know, we've got millions of dollars in a marketing
campaign at risk now because of this murder, and our
response to the murder seemed like I'm not saying I
know their motives, but it just kind of seemed like
they wanted it to go away, to just not comment
on it, just sweep it under the rug so as
to not jeopardize the vote. And then it turned out
that they're response might actually be jeopardizing the vote. So
then they held this emergency security meeting, and again I
watched it. You're welcome, Okay. So here's what Mark Garrison,
our news director, wrote up here for the WBT dot
com report. Charlotte Transit now admits that the homeless man
who stabbed a young woman to death on the city's
light rail on August twenty second never paid to ride
the train. No way, I would have never get Actually
I did guess that. I totally guessed that because obviously
the homeless guy got on the train where we don't
do any kind of fair collection, we don't do any
kind of monitoring for that sort of stuff. And it
becomes as Edwin Peacock pointed out, and we played his
video from Friday night when he rode the light rail
up and down from the South to the New and
back again, and you know, he's videotaping himself in front
of a group of guys in the back of the
train car, and he called it a rolling shelter for them.
They were treating it as a rolling shelter. So anybody
who has been on the light rail line knows of
these issues, and they know that fair collection is spotty
at best. And so when there's a homeless guy on
the train, I think the logical assumption is that the
homeless guy is not paying. Do you know why that's
a logical assumption, because he's homeless, right exactly there. If
he's got some money, chances are he's not paying a fare, right,
he's using the money to buy something else that is
of greater importance to him, especially when not having paid
the fare is only going to get you just tossed
off the train if you're caught. If you're caught, and
that's not even that, that's not even likely under the
current sort of honor system that we've been running on.
And that's really what it's been, an honor system. And
so I pointed out a week and a half ago
after the murder of this woman that they need to
do something to fortify access. Right, you need to make
sure that people who are getting on the train are
paying to get on the train, because people who are homeless,
they may not be the most stable of mind. They
they're they're not going to get on the trains if
they're going to get booted off immediately or prevented from
getting on the trains. And there are different systems around
America that have addressed this in various ways. And I
mentioned at the time that the Long Island Railroad they
police this through a conductor that walks through. They've got
the little whole puncher thing, and they take your ticket
and they punch your ticket. You get a ticket out
of the machine. You pay it the machine, you know,
a kiosk. You get a little paper ticket and you
get on the train and then somebody comes along and
they clip it from for whatever station you're going to,
and then they stick it in the back of the seat.
There are actually little holders on the seat where your
ticket goes, and there's a person on every train. That's
how the Long Island Railroad does it. Now the subway
is a bit different. They have controlled access through turnstiles.
And these are not just like your I mean some
of them, yeah, some of them are just like the
waist high ones where you walk through it. You know,
you get a little card and you scan it and
bebeep and you walk through and it allows one person
at time. But then people sometimes jump those they jump
over them and run in. And when you have people
that are evading the fare, and if you don't have enforcement,
what they have found is that it increases crime in
the mass transit system. Do you remember a couple of
years the Governor of New York sent the National Guard
right down to the subway system to patrol because of
the crime situation. People were getting thrown in front of
subway cars and being killed and such. There was violence
and robberies and such, and so she sent out the
National Guard to help police the subways, which should send
a message that the visual presence of highly trained armed
security acts as a deterrent against crime. And if you
reduce the fair jumpers, you reduce that the people who
evade the fairs. You keep criminals out, and if you
have a presence of law enforcement, you keep crime limited.
This is not reinventing the wheel here, people. Okay, these
are things that have been known for a while. So
today at the Metropolitan Transit Commission meeting, they discussed greater
enforcement of fair collection and they're going to decouple the
fair collecting from security because I guess, right now, you've
got this private security firm that acts as you know,
security for all of the CAT system, and they just
kind of hang out on the platform. Some of them
may jump on a train, ride it down, get off,
hang out at that platform, get on the train again. Whatever.
They kind of go up and down all around. But
it's not a constant presence. There's not one security personnel
on every train. So now they're talking about I guess
decoupling from security to have a fair collection agent at
the train stops. But why not just like it's not
like we've got a billion trains here, we only have
a few, Like, why not just put one on every train.
When I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's,
and before he died, my mom and my dad took
care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago,
there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers
and family. But things are different today because of the
work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of
Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with
huge hearts. I've been a supporter for twenty five years.
This cause means a lot to me. I participate in
the annual Walk to end Alzheimer's and I'm leading a
Charlotte team again this year and it's called once again
Pete's Pack. You can sign up and you can join
the team and walk with us. It's on October eighteenth,
that truest field. Sign up at alz dot org slash
Walk and then you could search for my team name
Pete's Pack. There's also a link at the petepod dot com.
There's also a link in the description of this podcast. Also,
I'll be am seeing the Gastonia Walk on October eleventh,
and so you can make a team and join that
one too, or make a donation and help me hit
my goal of five thousand dollars. If you do, I
really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks
all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot
org slash Walk for all the dates and locations. We're
closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us
get there? Will you walk with me? For a different future,
for families, for more time for treatments. This is why
we walk let me go to the text line here.
This is from the WBT text line driven by Libertybewig GMC.
I've been accused of profiling. Yeah, yeah, I do profile.
Oh my gosh, I can't believe he said that. Why
would you admit that? Because I do, and so do you.
By the way, so does everybody. Everybody profiles to some degree.
There's actually a whole division in the FBI. Have you
heard They made TV shows about it, like profiling, trying
to develop a profile, get in the mind of somebody,
you know, like based on characteristics and this sort of thing. So, yeah,
what the studies have shown it's the same thing in
line with the broken windows theory of policing, which is,
you know, if you don't allow the windows to stay
broken and you go in and you fix them up,
it sends a signal that this is not acceptable. If
you allow the broken windows to remain broken, more windows
get broken and more crime enters the area because people
know that nobody cares, right, So that's part of the
that's part of the psychology of all of this. Same
thing goes with the fair jumpers, those who avoid paying
the fares to go into the mass transit systems and such.
When you allow that sort of behavior to occur, then
you get more of it, and criminals then take over
your transit system, and then people who are not criminals
do not want to ride your transit system anymore, let
alone vote for a tax increase to expand it. So
this is the dilemma that the Charlotte officials are having
now because of the murder of this young woman on
what August twenty second seth texts into the text line.
Let's be honest, the folks wanting the tax hike don't
even ride the train. They don't care. They just need
a place to launder money. Do you launder money on
the train? I did not know that. Is that a
special car? I'm gonna have to check that out. No,
A lot, look, a lot of this has to do
with the development deals right along the train line. You
saw what happened in South End. You get all of
this development that gets clustered around the train line, and
that's by design. And so yeah, doing an extension of
the rail line does promote more development along that rail line. Now,
the question is would that development occur in other parts
of the city, right? Are you just sort of just
directing the development to the train line when it would
otherwise occur elsewhere. This is also sort of the economic
argument about paying for stadium renovations, and don't worry, we
do that too. But if you pay for that, the
idea is, oh, look at all the economic activity it generates, right,
does it? Or does it just move it from other
competing venues? Right? Like, Okay, I can't go to this
stadium because it doesn't exist. But I have these disposable
dollars and I'm going to spend them on something else.
Maybe I go out to eat, or I go to
a play or some theater production something. So I'm still
spending the money on entertainment. It's just not going to
that particular stadium. So I do believe, yes, that part
of it is that you have a lot of the
people that are pushing this or pushing it because they
look at it as an economic development tool, a tool
that will probably help them in their enterprises. Sure, Dean
asks if homeless people avoid paying on toll roads or
entering be of a stadium. No, No, Well, Also, I
guess homeless people with a vehicle, if they drove in
the toll lane, they would probably get caught, Well, they
probably wouldn't have a license plate that's up to date.
Maybe they could have one of the dirty thirties, the
thirty day tags. You know, how come private business has
ways of controlling it and the government remains clueless. Well,
because if the private sector doesn't figure out a way
to protect its revenue stream, it goes out of business.
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Slash terms Limited time offer. This story by Will Lewis
at qcnews dot com Queen City News. City leaders are
taking action to improve safety on local buses and light
rail trains after a string of violent incidents, including a
deadly stabbing. Charlotte Mayor Vylyles, who also chairs the Metropolitan
Transit Commission, has called a special meeting that occurred today
at nine am. I watched it to address growing concerns
about safety on Charlotte's public transit system, operated by CATS
Charlotte Area Transit System. The move follows the tragic death
of twenty three year old Arena Zarutzka, who was fatally
stabbed on the Links Blue Line on August twenty second.
Police said she was attacked by a man she did
not know. He's been identified as thirty one year old
to Carlos to de Wan Dewan ord or dju Won,
probably the one to Carlos Brown Junior, who now faces
a charge of first degree murder. The surveillance video reportedly
shows that he was on the train, she came in,
sat in front of him, and about four minutes later,
without any warning whatsoever, he just stood up, stabbed her
three times in the neck and then got off the
train and she died on the scene. Police caught him.
He did not attempt to flee. It's not like he
ran away. And so cat's officials say, oh, the system worked,
see because people saw it and they called nine one one,
and nine one one responded and they found the guy
within six minutes, and it all worked well. And I
would submit it quote worked. In other words, you caught
him because he did not run, because he's deranged. He
did not run. Had he fled, had he run away,
you probably would not have caught him in six minutes
number one. Number two. There is this line that is
being advanced that because of the nature of the attack,
there was literally nothing that you know, police or security
could have done. And if you're saying that, you know
the guy stood up without any kind of provocation. He
was deranged. He just saw her and just took out
a knife, stood up, stabbed her, got off the train,
and you would not have even had time to attempt
to stop him physically, to restrain him from the attack.
And that may be very well true, but that is
not the only way that scenario, that hypothetical plays out.
So if you're going to use this nothing we could
have done hypothetical, it's only honest that you include the
other hypothetical, the counter hypothetical, which is he never would
have attempted it had he seen a security official or
a law enforcement officer on the train with him. And
this is a direct response to the mayor of Davidson,
Randy Knox, who made this very comment today on he
was zoom calling in. He was virtually joining. He's in
Colorado apparently, and so he was, he was joining remotely,
and he made this argument like, I'm not sure there's
anything that additional security would have done just because the
guy attacked her without any provocation. It happened so quickly,
there was nothing anybody could do right. And again, that
is one way that that hypothetically would have played out.
You have a security officer who is on the train,
the guy is deranged and he's intent on murdering the girl.
He stands up and murders her, and then the security
guard engages afterwards. That's one hypothetical. The other hypothetical is
that the deranged man sees the cop and does not
attack the girl because the mere presence acts as a determ,
which we know to be true. We know this to
be true. Even democrats know this to be true. They
just spent five years denying it because of Saint George
Floyd and the radical communist lefties in their base demanded
a defund the police campaign and that all the cops
are racist and all the police institutions are racist, and
so they had to go along with all of this.
They were cowardly. They did not want to push back
against the stupid narrative, or they believed it themselves. By
the way, I just saw this. Matthew Iglesias of the Left.
He writes a substack newsletter called slow Boring. He was
one of the founders of vox dot com, and he writes, today,
how everybody, even up to Zoron Mamdani, the Kami Jihati
adjacent mayoral candidate up in New York City, everybody is
now against defunding the police. He says, good for him
and good for everybody else. But if more people had
been willing to be pain in the butt contrarians in
the spring of twenty twenty, maybe we could have avoided
this whole dead end. Yeah, some people like me were
saying defunding the police is a very stupid thing and
Democrats should not be signing on to this dumb assery.
He says, defunding the police is now deader than a
door nail, as witnessed by Mamdani disavowing it while campaigning
to become mayor of New York City. That interesting zorin Mamdani,
who will not condemn the phrase globalize the Antifada from
the river to the sea. Right, That's why I call
him Gihati adjacent. Right, So he won't condemn any of
that stuff. He won't disavow any of that stuff, any
of his previous comments on that, He's not distancing himself
from any of that stuff. But on the defunding the police, yes,
now he is disavowing that effort. Now he's walking that back.
When people started talking nonsense about this after George Floyd's murder,
I couldn't help but point out that they were wrong.
Iglesias said. Research came out way before the summer of
fiery but mostly peaceful rioting that the benefits of police
hiring that were part of the two thousand and nine
Obama stimulus bill, right Bill Clinton. Remember it funded a
whole bunch of law enforcement positions. This is not new research,
This is understood. People understand this. I think progressives view
it as cringe and unfair to even talk about this today, since,
after all, few cities actually cut police funding. But that
just underscores how unwise it was to let the energy
of the police reform moven go off the rails like
it did. The opportunity cost was immense, and I think
the country would have been much better off over the
last five years if there'd been more and faster pushback. Right,
But I think you're forgetting Orange Man bad, therefore defund
the police. That was the calculation. All right, You hear
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better returns. Jeff on the text line says, listening to
the stories coming out about cats, it seems like it's
the wild West out there, no one enforcing any rules.
How can we invite Trump to bring the National Guard
in to make our streets safe? Well, you know, the
mayor could request assistance from the governor there. That's something
that they could do. The North Carolina legislature could fund
more local police. They could do block grants for hiring
and salaries for law enforcement officers. Right, these are some
solution in the past year. According to Queen City News,
in November twenty twenty three, a writer was stabbed after
arguing with another passenger. Last summer, and off duty security
guard got into a fight on a bus. That's spilled
into uptown streets, and during the same summer last year
there were two other stabbings and a shooting within just
one month. Let me go over to the phones here
and chat with Bain. Hello, Ban, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: I p hey. Theoretically, I understand the argument that extra
security may not have saved that young lady's life, but
I think that's a very shallow approach. And I can
tell you this, if he didn't have a ticket and
couldn't get on, she'd be alive today.
Speaker 1: Correct, Yeah, he did not have a ticket. That's what
they think.
Speaker 2: Let's start. Let's start with the simplest approach that's easy
to take care of now before we start bringing in
the National Guard. You've got to have a ticket.
Speaker 1: So what they're looking for. What they're looking to do
is some sort of a validator system where you buy
the ticket and a lot of people buy them and
they're just on their smartphones and such, and so you
would buy the ticket, get on the train. There would
be some sort of a validation machine or something that
you would then I guess, scan your phone against this
machine and then if somebody walks through that you can
show your phone that you're validated, but if somebody doesn't
walk through, then there's no validation. It doesn't matter if
it's a paper ticket or it's on your phone, you know.
Speaker 2: Right, that's what you still got to have an all right,
you've got to have another set of eyes, whether it's
security or volunteers, to say who has a ticket who doesn't.
Right on the Long Island Railroad, those guys were not
law enforcement officers that punched.
Speaker 1: Your ticket, right, correct, Yeah, they're l double R employee
And that's what they're talking about doing. And this new
guy they brought in four or five months ago, Osness,
the new director of security for CATS. They created this position.
He's former he was a former New York Metropolitan Transit
Authority UH employee. He's former FBI. He's now in charge
of security for CATS. He's been on the job like
four months, UH, and he's he said, like, they're going
to be splitting there, decoupling the UH security from the
fair collection and so the fair collectors or the validators
or whoever is going to be walking around, they'll be
cat's employees. And that's what most systems do.
Speaker 2: Right, right, And to go back one more step, did
this man have a record also, Yes, lengthy in a
violent record. Yes, isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he had been he had been in prison, you
take it. Yeah, he had been in prison for like
five years or something. He had gotten out. When back
home to his parents, he began acting crazy and agressive
and that's why they finally kicked him out. And then
he had another meet up with law enforcement. And that's
what you know. When he was at the hospital, they
did a wellness check on him because he was talking crazy,
and he said that you know, that man made materials
had been injected into his body that direct when he
walks and talks and all this other stuff. And he
got angry with the cops when they were like, well,
that sounds like a medical issue, not a law enforcement issue.
So then he calls nine to one one to get
more cops out there, and they're like, okay, now you're
abusing the nine one one system. And then they brought
him into custody and then he was taken before a
judge and the judge and his own public defender said like,
this guy needs a mental evaluation, and they had ordered
that and then released him.
Speaker 2: And you and you're right about that, and I mean
and that is sad and that is hard. You know,
we have terrorist watch lists for people that may do
harm the masses. When you're convicted of a violent clime,
you should not be allowed to be on public transit
for a period. There should be a type of watch
list for violent people.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you would police that facial recognition software. Maybe,
I don't know. Ai. I'm not sure, Vane. I appreciate
the call, and I think that's you may get into
some double jeopardy kinds of implications there. I'm not sure
the system on the light rail did not work for
the woman that died, says Stanley. Hopefully a strong Republican
candidate for Charlotte Mayer will emerge. Well, I'll tell you
what after the news. I will tell you how this
story and how the crime issue is now making its
way through the election for mayor, which is just a
couple weeks away. 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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