Republicans search for ways to attack Cooper

The NCGOP seems to think it’s found a weakness in what was once Roy Cooper’s greatest strength. Cooper built a statewide profile as a stern supporter of law enforcement and crime control. He was particularly fierce in combating methamphetamine traffickers and child predators. This record was demonstrable and sterling—to the degree that some left critics of law enforcement regarded him somewhat warily. 

The GOP would like to perform an unexpected backflip on Cooper and portray him as a lenient quisling who unwittingly facilitated a crime wave. They’re focusing on a deal Cooper negotiated during the pandemic to allow certain prison inmates to return to the community, in an effort to ameliorate poor conditions in the state’s prisons. This attack dovetails with Republican efforts to blame Cooper for the horror on the Charlotte Lynx line, when a dangerously mentally ill man (inexcusably) released into the community stabbed a young refugee to death. 

I don’t know how effective the “soft-on-crime” attack on Cooper will be. As a Cooper admirer, I would like to think the attack just won’t register as believable. Cooper was a strong and even conservative enforcer of criminal law for 16 years and it may be hard to convince voters that he’s suddenly become a soft lefty. But, on the other hand, individual issues can grow and take over a campaign. See Kamala Harris’s support for transgender surgeries for incarcerated people. Or, to take an example from one North Carolina Senate race, the way Kay Hagan’s failure to attend an Armed Services Committee hearing to raise money while ISIS rampaged across the Middle East. 

It could go either way. But before this issue plays out, I want to contribute some thoughts on why I find aggressive “tough-on-crime” rhetoric so troubling for our civic culture. 

Like everything else in Southern politics, crime messaging becomes wrapped up (or prepackaged) in the region’s great political devil, the racial divide. White Southerners have been paranoid about supposed Black violence since the era of slavery. The Haitian Revolution, which entailed a mass slave revolt to overthrow the Island’s white, French captors, terrorized the white Souths’ collective consciousness and triggered a draconian crackdown on enslaved people. No less an esteemed figure than Thomas Jefferson was convinced a race war would break out if the slaves were freed, comparing the South’s 

dilemma with the sinful institution to a man holding a wolf by the ears. Hold him, and you’re in danger; let him go, and he eats you. 

White Southerners remained haunted, neurotically obsessed, with Black crime after the peculiar institution was abolished. They were particularly obsessed with fears of Black men committing sexual violence against white women. White racist demagogues fixated on this fear, demonizing African American males and minimizing the reality of white plantation masters having engaged in constant sexual abuse of Black women. In North Carolina, the News & Observer printed a cartoon showing a Black man standing in front of a group of white girls at the state school for the blind. The implication was unsubtle. 

The N&O was engaging in racist rhetoric that helped to trigger lynch mobs and Jim Crow laws. While North Carolina’s white political leadership opposed lynching, 152 men and women were lynched in our state during the century or so between the Civil War and 1968. Lynching was only the most horrific outcome of the largely-fabricated crime hysteria. Equally common were racist uproars in the state’s politics that kept Black people solidly oppressed. 

I mentioned that much of the criminality white racists exploited was fabricated. The murder on the Charlotte train was not. And there was a brief uptick in crime and homicide during COVID that mainly resulted from the pandemic’s social disruptions. Conservatives argue that the woke left’s strident critiques of law enforcement also contributed to the crime wave. That may or may not be true, and the uncertainty there is a fair reason to be skeptical of the left’s most radical anti-law-enforcement rhetoric. 

But the COVID crime wave is over. Crime across the country and in North Carolina are going down. According to FBI Unified Crime Report statistics, the crime rate fell by 4.9% in 2024 and fell by another 5.1% in 2023. Crime is lower than it was ten years ago, when the woke left was first gathering steam. Families in our state are safer than they were the year before Cooper took office as governor, and the trend has continued under Cooper’s protege Josh Stein. 

The attacks on Cooper for agreeing to release inmates are an exercise in cherry-picking horrific anecdotes to inflame public fears and misrepresent the reality of falling crime in our state. Given the racist history of the South, this is a dangerous ploy for the Republicans 

to carry out. Crime victims deserve sympathy and justice. North Carolina deserves a political culture that atones for past racism and seeks to build amity among citizens, not tear them apart along old and ugly fault lines