Charlotte last year recorded 110 homicides — one of the deadliest years in the city’s history.
City staff this week gave city council a presentation on public safety as part of the city’s holistic approach to fighting crime. Amidst the focus on “quality of life” issues, some council members said the city needs to be more focused on what the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department is doing to curtail murders.
Despite similar raw number totals, Charlotte’s homicide rate is lower than it was in the violent early 1990s— because the city’s population has doubled in size.
But there has been a clear, unsettling rise in murders in recent years, with killings rebounding from a low point in the 2010s.
From 2010 to 2014, Charlotte averaged 53 killings a year. That number rose to an average of 75 over the next five years.
But over the last five years, the city has averaged 106 murders — including 122 one year.
At this week’s city council meeting, city staff talked about things like improved LED street lights, clearing debris-filled empty lots, cracking down on illegal truck parking and stopping street racing.
“The idea of this quality of life approach is that creating safe neighborhoods takes more than law enforcement,” said Rebecca Hefner, the city’s director of Neighborhood and Business Services. “The activities that create safe neighborhoods are more than what we can see in the data and looking at our crime stats.”
The discussion, in a way, mirrored the “Broken Windows” theory of public safety, which says that when small problems are not addressed, they create a sense of lawlessness that leads to violent crime. New York City lowered crime in the 1990s by embracing that theory and aggressively focusing on small offenses.
City council members were generally supportive of staff’s presentation. But some appeared concerned, like Ed Driggs, who wanted to focus on the most violent crimes.
“I think we need to keep sight of the fact that, by far, the biggest quality of life issue is a person’s sense of physical safety,” said council member Malcolm Graham.
CMPD wasn’t part of the discussion.
Some council members gently suggested that the department might need a new approach.
City council member, Dimple Ajmera urged police to look at strategies from cities like Boston, which had just 24 homicides last year — their lowest number since the 1950s. She contrasted that to Charlotte’s homicide surge.
“I read a story in the media where it said a woman did not feel safe standing by the window because she was afraid a stray bullet would hit her,” she said. “And that is concerning.”
Graham floated the idea of police being more aggressive.
That’s a change from the position most council members have taken in recent years, after the Keith Lamont Scott police shooting in northeast Charlotte in 2016 and the nationwide George Floyd protests in 2020. The focus then was on law enforcement using less of a heavy hand.
The number of CMPD arrests for all crimes has gone down significantly even as the number of residents grows — from 32,000 in 2009 to a little more than 15,000 in 2023.
“We really have to begin to be assertive in enforcing the laws that are currently on the books, and in some cases be very aggressive,” he said.
City Manager Marcus Jones has said there will be another discussion next month about violence as a public health crisis. CMPD is also scheduled to present to council members their final 2024 crime stats.
Council members say they hope future discussions include a deeper dive into what police are doing. It’s unclear if it will also include a look at things like the chief magistrate’s bail policy, which CMPD has criticized as being too lenient.
At the end of the discussion, Jones shifted the conversation further away from what is bread-and-butter public safety basics, like the number of murders, rapes and robberies.
Jones made a pitch for a proposed one-cent sales tax for transportation. If voters approve it, the tax would bring more than $100 million a year to Charlotte for things like roads, sidewalks and lighting, he said.
“The things that seem to excite you tonight, a funding source is within the one-cent sales tax,” Jones said.
He suggested that would improve public safety.
