The citizens of Charlotte possess no right to protest. Rather, their ability to demonstrate is granted by the police as a matter of grace. And depriving people of this liberty is as easy as 1-2-3. That’s the take-away from a presentation made last week to City Council by Jessica Battle, a city attorney who has […]
Charlotte Councilman Larken Egleston is pushing CMPD’s lies about its brutality — while working to block any independent review of the police department’s spending or operations. Much of the work to thwart real reform of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department occurs in the city’s Safe Communities Committee, which is chaired by Egleston and is charged […]
City Council thinks it has a problem. Not, mind you, an ethics problem. But an image problem. A public relations problem. An optics problem. The recent flurry of ethics complaints against Charlotte’s elected officials looks bad, and that, perhaps unlike corruption, is intolerable. “I think what we need to do now is to stop the […]
The sergeant was giddy about the brutality to be unleashed. It was the night of June 2. Citizens were winding their way through uptown Charlotte to protest the recent murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. Around 9:30 p.m., demonstrators began walking up 4th Street, traveling from College Street toward Tryon Street. As […]
The most important thing to know about Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden is that his favorite word is “my.” The jail is “my building,” he explained this week, and its lobby is “my lobby.” Female inmates at the jail are, to use McFadden’s creepy, sexist moniker, “my queens.” Fatalities in the jail are “my deaths,” according […]
As COVID-19 runs rampant at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte has a simple message for the students who will soon live and learn in the school’s human petri dishes: “We care.” That’s been the thrust of UNCC’s public relations efforts in the lead-up to thousands of students returning to campus next […]
Tariq Bokhari’s corruption will go on — with an assist from the city’s attorney. Charlotte City Attorney Patrick Baker informed City Council this weekend that a 17-page, 5,000-word complaint detailing Councilman Bokhari’s long-standing merger of his public office with his private financial interests fails to meet the “minimum technical requirements” necessary to warrant an independent […]
What’s most remarkable about Tariq Bokhari’s corruption is how long it went unnoticed. While the media and other elected officials only recently began to scrutinize the Charlotte city councilman’s merger of his private-sector work with his public duties, Bokhari’s entire time in office has been one, long advertisement for himself, his industry in general, and […]
My elementary school handed out good citizenship awards at quarterly, school-wide assemblies. The yellow cardstock certificates commemorated the recipients’ exhibition of those behaviors the school deemed proper for responsible young people: obedience, respect for authority, and adherence to the rules. In other words, to be a good citizen was to be compliant. At no time […]
Law enforcement’s primary tactic for deflecting criticism and resisting reform made a recent appearance when City Council debated whether to temporarily halt Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s purchase of chemical weapons. While expressing support for CMPD’s right to continue gassing his own constituents, one councilman read a letter signed by the spouses of hundreds of officers, lamenting […]
