Charlotte is burning! Not.

NBC News

They start out with a useful description that helps give an accurate picture of Charlotte for people who think Charlotte has an inner city ghetto full of angry welfare recipients

Yes, Charlotte is a major and thriving metropolis of almost a million people. And, yes, the city has good jobs—72 percent of the city’s residents have jobs and they own nice houses — houses with a median value of $170,000.

What is more, more than 80 percent of Charlotteans have graduated from high school and more than 40 percent have a college degree. These are impressive statistics for a city that is only 50 percent white in a nation where it’s the whitest spaces that are the wealthiest and filled with the greatest opportunity.

But then they veer back to the narrative of poverty segregation, etc…. as I’ve mentioned before, I am really unhappy with how segregated the city has become, but I put a lot of that at the feet of the voting rights act and the drawing of the first congressional district, creating a very much “us vs them” mentality with hard boundaries drawn by the government.

Now, with the redrawn 12th district, the city of Charlotte is basically the entire district, but to keep the district from becoming too white, the whitest part of the south side was split off and put into a rural district that stretches all the way to Fayetteville

Another factor here involves the police officer who did the shooting. His father was the first black detective in the Charlotte police department. Charlotte was small enough and the black community close enough, that most people in the community know each other, especially someone as important as his dad. The officer did not move here from Newark to get a better pension. People went to school with him, saw him in church, had contact with him in community outreach programs.

If he does go to trial, I really doubt he would be convicted. I doubt he can even be indicted. I’ll be a little bit more bold now. The apartment complex at the shooting is college housing. A 43 year old sitting in a car while they were preparing to serve a warrant would have looked suspicious. The schools here let out around 2:30 or 3:00. The story that he was waiting for the school bus at 4 PM seems unlikely. His wife saw the shooting, which means he was at her home. Why would dad be at his home to pick up his kid? The logical answer to me is dad doesn’t live with his wife but they tell the school district he does.

The detective sees what outsiders are doing to the Charlotte he grew up in, especially the drug dealers. Mr Scott was probably sized up quickly as an outsider who looked out of place in that apartment complex and maybe a lookout to warn the person they were looking for that there were police in the parking lot. It would be important to know if the police knew who Mr Scott was from prior contact. My guess is they did and pulled up prior contact history on the vehicle as well as the history of when and where the license plate readers had seen the vehicle. The sister making up the story about him reading a book when she wasn’t a witness was not helpful to finding justice.

The resolution will probably be the city will follow the Ferrell model and cut the family a check to make the case go away. The black community will hear he had a gun and a criminal history and lose interest. He may have had a black skin, but he isn’t one of them. If a white officer had killed the undercover black detective just because he had a gun, the city would burn for real, but that is not what happened.