I tried to fall asleep around 9 PM last night to wake up at 6 AM for jury duty, so I was unaware of the events last night until my Uber driver mentioned it and Parrott warned me.
This shooting was a black officer shooting an apparently armed black man. It is not a crime for a black man to possess a hand gun. The CMPD is probably 1/3 black officers and they tend to generally have the black officers patrolling black neighborhoods.
So as word spread, a crowd spilled onto I-85 and threw rocks at a Walmart. There is a protest underway right now about 3 blocks from the courthouse. Now that I know this, it explains a couple jurors getting thrown off for venting anger at police. FWIW, the judge and défendent were both black, so that was probably counterproductive.
So someone was shot dead at the protest Uptown this evening. Police say it wasn’t them. However, they were shooting rubber bullets. Nobody would be stupid enough to load rubber bullets into a regular firearm without clearing the real bullet in the chamber first – right?
Well, the mayor has a problem now. The police chief is black, the majority of city council is black. She is the whitest person in the room. If she demands the police chief resign, she must be a racist. If she does nothing, she hates block people. She is in a lose-lose situation. Nobody is talking tonight about transgender bathrooms.
At 3 PM, when I was leaving the courthouse, I observed it was surrounded by satellite trucks. I observed that it couldn’t be because of the trial I was there for. The jurors would have been dumping out on the street just about when the teargas started firing. Several of the jurors had things to do on Friday. That may be a problem
Another detail about the original shooting – the officer was undercover and not in uniform. The whole story is starting to sound very odd
A year or two ago, Detroit was getting more press than usual with the bankruptcy and the downtown comeback (and even Flint). Now, Charlotte seems to be the center of the media, with the shootings and protests, N.C. being the tipping point state of the election, etc. Was thinking about you today and checking for updates from you!
Thank you for your concern. I don’t think the national media will succeed in spiraling things out of control. The city is not burning down. The CMPD has invested a lot of effort in building trust among the local people.
But longer term, it could put Charlotte on the same trajectory as Detroit. Middle class white people get scared and move out of the city, fueled by real estate people breaking down neighborhoods. Then the black middle class follows (like Southfield in Detroit), then the tax base erodes, schools go broke and the spiral starts.
At least for now, there are too many important employers here and not a ton of freeways, so people moving out of the city face ugly commutes. The demonstration was at Trade & Tryon, which is symbolically important – it is the heart of Uptown with all the high rise apartment / condo buildings packed full of Yankee transplants and carless millennials. There are also some high end hotels for sports teams and conventions and the like.
One of the very many things I love about our country is the way states can choose to operate differently. Fred, I would appreciate your comments on how a Republican governor and a Democrat attorney general can effectively work together and serve the people of a state. At first blush, it would seem to be untenable on so many levels.
And the attorney general is running for governor. Attorney General is an elected position and the Republicans didn’t nail down the AG election, so he has undercut most of what the legislature has tried to do, refusing to aggressively defend the state in the Federal Court.
But the bigger dysfunction is between Pat McCrory and the Legislature. The anti Obama reaction shifted both houses into a veto proof Republican majority, but that has backfired – the legislature is far more aggressive than McCrory and he has vetoed several of their more extreme ideas only to have the Republican Legislature override a Republican Governor veto, only to have Federal courts throw out the laws.
McCrory is not a lawyer. His mentor in college was Professor Silverburg, who taught PoliSci. I never took his classes but had a fair amount of contact with him. Even then, McCrory knew he was going into politics. Back then, the state was heavily Democrats, and Professor Silverberg was a hard core progressive. McCrory learned a lot from challenging the professor, and while I guess on one level having a student become governor is an accomplishment, having one that destroys what you spent your life building has to be a bitter pill.
I don’t remember McCrory as being a religious guy, and he doesn’t seem to use religion as why we should or shouldn’t do things. He focuses mainly on developing a stronger economy and getting business to move here, not wanting a statue of the 10 commandments in the State Rotunda.
Thanks Fred, I remember you filling us in on McCrory when he first ran for governor. Seems like a pretty reasonable guy.
North Carolina is the battleground state most trending Democratic since the 2012 election (followed closely by Virginia). See the chart in this article. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-clintons-electoral-map-isnt-as-good-as-obamas/
The multinational, multiethnic changes in NC have been going on for quite awhile. I remember a whole bunch of the Indian graduates of my MBA program moving to NC in the early nineties, mostly going to Sara Lee and Nationsbank.
There are a lot of things changing North Carolina. One that was deliberate was the destruction of a lot of the tobacco industry – that wiped out the tobacco farmers and the cigarette makers. Farmland was switched to raising hogs – and slaughtering hogs is very labor intensive – work Americans won’t do. So much of the old tobacco belt was back filled with Mexicans. If you look over the list of radio stations in NC, you’ll see many over in the Raleigh Durham area.
The other big change was the demise of the textile business from Asian imports. When I was in college, we took a tour of the huge local factory that churned out polyester fiber 24 hours a day – mostly for car tires, and for making into leisure suits and poly wool blends. We also visited a factory that made denim. The process is a bit different than the typical “b roll” footage you see on TV. A loom room was an awesome thing.
One of the things I noticed the first time I thought seriously about moving back was that in Statesville, Asian restaurants had showed up in the downtown area. A fair amount of the people and the businesses were still like the 1970s. I don’t know what the draw would have been for asians to move there, other than inexpensive housing and quality of life.
My sense is a lot of what has driven change is drugs – meth, heroin, OxyContin etc. I think a lot of the people of my generation probably are dead, or they moved to Texas. Long haul trucking also used to be a major employer, and I sense a lot of that has moved to transmodal containers, where the only trucking is the last mile back and forth to container terminals – local work where you go home every night.
I was wondering when you were going to post your thoughts on the Charlotte situation. Let us hope this thing will dwindle down, however with the current narrative and BLM heavily involved it looks dim. Take care of yourself. It seems this is the new reality, and it’s not going away until we remove this feckless administration.
State of Emergency has been declared, national guard troops are on standby.
The three biggest employers in Uptown told their employees to stay home. That is a big mistake. When a bear charges, you don’t turn around and start running. Commicating fear just increases the danger.
The Uptown are is extremely defensible – it is surrounded by the inner belt that is either elevated or a ditch. Shutting down a handful of streets could block all access to the central core. On the west side, you have the Norfolk Southern train tracks that are elevated.
It does raise the question since I’m a chess player – if the Uptown is secured by the national guard, where would the protestors go next. The answer to that depends on their access to transportation. Uptown is the center of the public transit system. Johnson C Smith is within walking distance (about two miles). My hunch is South Park mall would be a target if the objective is to terrorize rich white people. Myers park is another potential target – the old money white neighborhood close to uptown. I think I might have even mentioned about two years ago a conversation at the buffet place where an angry young black man was telling his family that Myers Park would be a target if trouble broke out.
We have TV in our elevator. Donald Trump was on CNN echoing your comment about drugs affecting a lot of people’s behavior today.
One of the details reported initially but has vanished is what caused this in the first place. The original story was it was an attempt to execute a warrant on the driver of the parked car, but that the warrant turned out to be for a different person, nothing related to the people at the apartment complex.
My suspicion is this case had something to do with the drug trafficking – this area is very close to I-85. I drove through the area a few weeks ago, and my impression was the area was overbuilt with apartments, unlike most of Charlotte. Desperate landlords might look the other way. This is not saying the dead guy had anything to do with drugs, but could explain the presence of an undercover policeman.
Another factor is that because he was undercover, he wasn’t wearing body armor, leaving him more vulnerable to being shot. The video apparently doesn’t support the claim of a gun being pointed.
Since police recovered a gun, that suggests two main possibilities – there was no gun and the police used a “drop” weapon to fabricate the story, or he did have a gun, but did not point it at the officer. Telling a person who is legally carrying a gun “drop your gun!” is by itself dangerous. My gun pal in Chicago points out that the act of dropping a gun has a chance of causing the gun to fire from hitting the ground. Of course, a gun shot would draw an immediate lethal attack.
Black men are allowed to possess guns. “Black man with a gun” is neither a crime nor reasonable suspicion that a crime has or will be committed.
The details are trickling out. After 48 hours the CMPD still cannot say if the gun was loaded or if the gun was legally owned.
He was 43, married with seven children. Police are indicating he had a police record, but police did not know that when they approached him. He is reported to have been wearing an ankle holster. That is not any different legally than any other type of holster.
His most recent serious brush with the law charged him with a felony, but was plea bargained to a misdemeanor, which doesn’t bar access to possess a handgun, or applying for a conceal carry permit. The rules about people convicted of felonies in other states are a bit convoluted, and there is a process to have gun rights restored. More than likely, he was not allowed to have a gun, but you’re back to “what did the police know at the time they did what they did?”, not rationalizing their actions with information learned after the fact.
A few corrections… they were present to serve a warrant to someone else in the complex. It was completely unrelated, except while they were in the parking lot, they noticed he had a gun. At least two of the three officers were wearing bright red vests. The undercover officer was as well according to police, which is probably true.
The prior shooting of the ex football player suggests a pattern that is entirely rational. If police are in a situation where they are concerned about a black suspect, call for the designated black officer – who can be the one to pull the trigger if necessary.
I hate that for the state of NC. It was all we talked about here in southwest Virginia.
Going to NC , getting on I-77 and drive south till you smell money ‘Charlotte’
Getting a job with RJR, Piedmont airlines.
Burlington Industries plants all across the state. Furniture plants. Alcoa had a plant in Baden NC. So many industries are gone now Norfolk Southern is wanting to reduce their mainline from Knoxville to Asheville, Hickory, Conover Statesville to Barber junction, then left to Winston-Salem or straight to Salisbury. They want to drop it to 25 mph and even trying to sell it to a shortline operator .
sad. Nafta
Parrott
Back around 1971ish, my family rode the passenger service from Asheville to Statesville. The Southern RR initially refused to turn its service over to Amtrak. The train went to Salisbury, but because of union rules could not continue to Charlotte or Greensboro without changing crews. Going East from Asheville, the tracks make a very convoluted journey down the mountain to Marion. It was all single track and quite remote.
The Clinchfield RR (now owned by CSX) has been cut back to only local service. The push for all Class 1 railroads to install Positive Train Control on all mainline track is pushing abandonment, selling routes to short lines or reducing traffic to end their status as “mainline” tracks is driving most of this. The loss of coal traffic is just icing on the cake.
A black writer for the Washington Post makes the same point, that black and white gun owners are treated very differently
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-america-gun-rights-are-for-whites-only/2016/09/22/3990d370-80f2-11e6-8327-f141a7beb626_story.html
The end game here is if you accept the premise that a policeman can demand a black man drop his gun without a reasonable suspicion a crime has been committed, the same standard will eventually have to apply to everyone. If blacks cannot open carry or conceal carry, whites will soon be told the same thing and tye gun grabbers win