Every Wednesday this month on the 11 o’clock news, WBTV will be doing a feature on our story Ganging Up. It’s the third part of our four-part crime series. Here’s the link to last night’s piece.

Quick heads up: This Thursday at 9 a.m., WFAE’s Charlotte Talks with Mike Collins will devote its hour-long show to our current crime series. Guests on the show will be writer Melissa Hankins, UNCC criminal justice prof Paul Friday, and CMPD officer James Franklin (Franklin played a key role in the story “Cops and Robbers” in the July issue). WFAE is at 90.7 FM and www.wfae.org. The show airs live at 9 a.m. (you can call in) and is rebroadcast at 9 p.m. that day.

A recent news item reminded me of a story we ran a few months ago. The news item was about a shooting at the Fast Food Mart and Beverage Store in the Hidden Valley neighborhood. Apparently, a clerk at the store shot and killed a would-be robber. The store has been robbed 3 times since last July.

The news made me think of Van Miller’s piece in the May issue of Charlotte magazine. In it, he told the story of Ghenet Hailelassie, an Eritrean immigrant who owns and runs Midtown Foodmart near the intersection of Eastway and Shamrock. On New Year’s Eve 2005, her husband was shot and killed in the store by a would-be robber. Ghenet has worked in the store every day since, even though she hates it. “All my hope is gone, all dream is gone,” she told Van. “What kind of dream is the American dream?”

For me, the piece illuminated a part of Charlotte that I never experience. It displayed the desperate lives that many in Charlotte lead, and it showed a different side of the immigration debate. And it showed how crime, or the threat of it, is a constant in many people’s lives. —R.T.

Overall, crime is going down. However, murders are up, as are thefts from vehicles. There have been 38 murders so far this year, compared to 34 at this point last year. Theft from vehicles are up significantly, but as the cops as, that’s one of the most preventable crimes there is.

Overall, this is good news, of course. Let’s not get too excited, though. Think of it like this: Going from a C- to a C or C+ is indeed progress, but we haven’t exactly made the honor roll.

Here’s the link to the release on the CMPD site.

And here’s a link to the Observer article on the new stats.

As of yesterday, there have been 232 murders in Philadelphia this year. Since 2001, there have been more than 10,000 gunshot victims in Philly. That’s astounding, and that’s sad. CBS’s The Early Show is doing a series on the problems in Philly. Here’s the link. It includes several stories and video, and it’s fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

People have asked me why we at Charlotte magazine are doing a series on crime in Charlotte. (Plenty of people have thanked us, too.) One reason: we don’t want to become like Philly. As a city, Charlotte is different from Philly in many ways–people are choosing to move here and live here, and Charlotte has a prevailing sense of optimism. Philly has neither. That leads to desperation, which leads to crime. But Charlotte is also growing very quickly. As our series is demonstrating, we have problems with gangs, juvenile crime, and clogged courts. Our police department has some good ideas on how to combat crime (in fact, we seem to be much advanced beyond Philly’s department), but it may not be executing them properly. In short, we have a chance to make changes now to save us a lot of trouble and heartache later. I don’t think we’ll ever become like the Philadelphia of 2007, but let’s hope we never come close. —R.T.

One of the most troubling aspects of Charlotte’s crime problem has to do with the area’s youth.  There are lots of kids living here.  And lots of them are getting into trouble.  During a series of community meetings sponsored by CMPD in February and March, city residents from every district around town complained about the fact that teens and middle-school aged children roamed their neighborhoods unsupervised during school hours and beyond.  The residents accused these kids of dealing and using drugs and alcohol and worse—robberies, vandalism, gunfire.  At the meetings, the residents asked police for help in curbing the problem.  And the police asked for their help, too.  A 1995 ordinance says that parents in Charlotte-Mecklenburg can be charged with a misdemeanor if their child breaks curfew (unaccompanied juveniles under 16 years old are supposed to be restricted from public areas like sidewalks and restaurants on Sundays through Thursdays from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.; on Fridays and Saturdays, they have an extra hour).  It’s not exactly a law that’s been rigorously enforced.  But police say that’s about to change. 

            Reasons why include what they heard at those forums, and also stats that show unsupervised juveniles are responsible for a growing number of crimes.  In the first four months of this year, for example, the number of arrests for burglary of those 17 years old and younger increased 30.8 % from the same period in 2006.  Vehicle theft jumped 50%.

            They’re getting into trouble in school, too.  In the first semester of CMS’s year, there were seven sexual assaults, 25 assaults on school personnel, and five assaults with a weapon.  Twenty-two kids were caught with guns.  There were 157 incidents of possession of weapon.  Police say that there is a gang presence in every middle and high school in the region.

In our August issue, the third installment of our series will look at how Charlotte’s growing gang problem is affecting its youth. 

Stories like this one on charlotte.com are why we decided to do a series on crime. Is it me, or does it seem like there are more and more stories like this one, with bulleted (no pun intended) lists of crimes committed the previous night. A few days ago, it was a spate of carjackings. Now, a spate of robberies..

We’ve received a lot of feedback to our series so far. Over the next few days, we’ll be posting about that feedback (look for letters printed in the August through November issues, too). Here’s a short letter that typifies much of what we’ve heard from readers. Feel free to share your own thoughts through the comments link below.

Thank you so much for printing Melissa Hankins’s article “Charlotte Has a Problem With Crime” in your June 2007 magazine. Last week, I became a victim of a felony for the second time in six months. I was held at gun point in my South Charlotte apartment complex at 8:30 in the morning.

Charlotte has a serious crime problem and trust me, it is not confined to certain neighborhoods. I commend Ms. Hankins for drawing attention to this important issue. It seems as though our public officials are more concerned with building a light-rail system and a baseball stadium in downtown rather than the safety of the citizens of this gorgeous city. Why in the world would we want to attract more people here without getting our crime under control? Why would we want to give criminals a quicker exit on the light-rail without first considering the danger we currently live in? Your magazine continually impresses me. Thank you for shedding light on what so many already know but nothing is being done about.

Kris Taylor
Charlotte

Melissa Hankins, who’s writing our four-part series on crime, will be a guest on WBT 1110 AM’s The Jeff Katz Show today (Tuesday) at 4 p.m. She’ll be discussing part two of the series, which appears in the current July issue. In the article, she writes about the apparent disconnect in our police force. Chief Darrel Stephens espouses a popular brand of community policing called Problem-oriented Policing, but CMPD doesn’t recruit for it and may not be training adequately for it, either. And many local cops simply don’t believe in it (although, if you read the story closely, you’ll see that some cops are practicing it without even realizing it).

That’s what Mark Twain said. One reader took exception to the crime stats we pulled out in the first article of our series (you can now read the article here). Here’s his letter, followed by our response:

After reading the article in the most recent Charlotte Magazine about the crime “problem” in Charlotte, one would think the solution to this “problem” is throwing resources (read: people) at the problem by infusing the criminal justice system with cash. However, most sociological studies around crime and the justice systems have shown that the justice system itself rarely plays a role in the prevention of crime on a large-scale. The only thing that has been consistently tied to crime is poverty, and addressing the poverty situation is much more likely to result in positive outcomes that can be sustained as the city continues to grow. Putting more cops on the street is not a deterrent to violent crime, just as the death penalty is not a deterrent for murder. For more details on the death penalty and its lack of deterring murder, see Thorsten Sellin’s research from 1959, Zimring & Hawkins’ research in 1986 and Bailey & Peterson’s work from 1997. All replications of these studies have found that capital punishment plays no part in the decision to take another person’s life.

Furthermore, the magazine’s lame attempt at using comparative data is misleading to readers. Cherry-picking two cities — Austin and San Jose — that fit with a pre-conceived theme for the article is not exactly responsible research. Attached is data directly from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (all of the data is 2005 data), and you can see that Charlotte is very near the middle of U.S. cities with population between 550,000 and 911,000 (where San Jose is). The median size and average size of these peers are very close to Charlotte’s population. Using a data set of this size and scope would at least be a little more responsible.

Jacob Crawford
Charlotte, NC

I can’t figure out how to get Mr. Crawford’s Excel sheet into this blog post, but here are the bottom line numbers: As he said, the population range for cities he included was 550,000 to 911,000. Charlotte was at 677,00, or much closer to the smallest than the largest. Here are the median crime numbers for those cities in 2005, with Charlotte’s figures in parantheses: violent crime 6010 (7933), homicide 91 (85), rape 268 (323), robbery 2440 (3649), burglary 7146 (12,783), vehicle theft 6,631 (7098), murder rate 12.8 (12.6).

So Charlotte is at the bottom end of the population range, but over the median number in all stats except murder, and well over the median in all but vehicle theft. Don’t we deserve a safer city than that? —R.T.