To seem rather than to be on crime

If the North Carolina justice and mental health systems had a dollar for every time a conservative politician vowed to “get tough on crime,” or attempted to blame a terrible incident on “soft on crime” policies, both might actually have long ago garnered enough funding to fulfill their duties.

As, however, has been repeatedly made clear down through the decades (and as even a casual glance in the present moment confirms), neither system comes close to being adequately resourced.

This sad reality has been brought front and center again in recent days in the aftermath of a horrific murder in Charlotte and the subsequent and familiar call from opportunistic politicians to “crack down” on crime (and make political hay) through the enactment of “tough” new laws.

The brutal and seemingly random killing of Iryna Zarutska (a refugee from Russia’s war on Ukraine) allegedly committed by Decarlos Brown, Jr. with a long criminal record and history of mental health problems — captured in a gruesome Charlotte transit system security video — has spurred leaders at the North Carolina legislature to advance a bill they’re dubbing “Iryna’s Law” that they say will help prevent such incidents.

Under the legislation, which the Senate unveiled and passed Monday, state law governing the pre-trial release of people accused of certain crimes would be made more difficult and powers of magistrates would be altered.

The News & Observer reported that Brown, who had previously served a five-year state prison term for armed robbery, was arrested twice in 2024 and once in January of this year for misusing the 911 system to “ask police to investigate a ‘man-made’ material he said controlled when he ate, walked, and talked.”

Sponsors of the bill say the magistrate in front of whom Brown appeared after his most recent arrest should not have released him because of his previous record. The bill would make such releases more difficult — especially for poor defendants who lack the resources to put up money for bail.

Though not likely to be terribly controversial (or impactful), one obvious downside to making pre-trial release more difficult is that many people accused of crimes are innocent. As journalists Jeffrey Billman and Michael Hewlett explained in a Sept. 21 article in The Assembly, Brown himself was acquitted during a 2024 trial in which he was prosecuted for misusing the 911 system.

But more to the point, of course is the obvious and largely unaddressed fact of Brown’s mental illness. As Billman and Hewlett detailed, Brown’s story is a tragic and sadly familiar one of a person with serious mental health problems that have ebbed and flowed and who bounced in and out of treatment and left his family grasping for solutions.

And despite this fact, and the fact that the state’s jails, prisons, courts and mental health facilities have long been overcrowded and understaffed with grossly underpaid employees, the bill sponsors are proposing no new funding to improve these systems (or, God forbid, strengthening state laws to target the tool used in the overwhelming majority of North Carolina homicides: easy-to-access firearms.)

Instead, as NC Newsline reported, they’re advancing provisions to keep people merely accused of crimes in jail longer, proposing to jumpstart the state’s long dormant death penalty (as if the threat of that could somehow have deterred a person as disturbed as Brown), using the murder to boost the U.S. Senate campaign of Trump minion Michael Whatley with demonstrably false accusations against former Gov. Roy Cooper, and perhaps most disturbingly, invoking a tool from President Donald Trump’s race card playbook.

Just a few days after Zarutska’s killing, state Senate Republican leader Phil Berger and Whatley appeared at a press conference to, among other things, all but blame the murder on Cooper’s establishment of a task force in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd charged with addressing racial inequities in the justice system. Attempting to link the task force’s work to the decision of the magistrate’s action in Brown’s case, Berger made the absurd claim that Zarutska’s murder was the result of “atrocious policies pushed by out of touch politicians and court officials” that prioritize a “perverted vision” of equity and social justice.

In other words, Berger, Whatley and company are adhering to the longstanding GOP strategy on crime (occasionally mimicked by cynical Democrats) that traces back to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan of stoking fears of suburban and rural white voters by making bogus connections to “soft” (i.e. urban, Black and liberal) officials and policies rather than tackling real solutions like dramatically improving our justice, social safety net and mental health systems. Never mind that, as The Assembly article documents, the murder rates in Berger’s overwhelming white, rural conservative home county of Rockingham (and 30 others) exceed that in Mecklenburg.

The likely results: little meaningful change of any kind — except for a handful of poor criminal defendants who will likely find it harder avail themselves of the constitutional presumption of innocence, and new confirmation that in a state whose official motto is “to be rather than to seem,” when it comes to crime, it’s clearly the top priority of conservative political leaders to do the precise opposite.