RALEIGH — The local news business is built on the occurrence of out-of-the- ordinary events. If everything runs well, if there are no unusual situations, then there is very little news.
In recent months, the police have very much been in the news in Charlotte, Durham, and Fayetteville. In all three cases, the public and press are interested in already-serious situations worsened by questionable police policies.
Marcus Jackson was a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer for less than a year. He’s now in the Mecklenburg County jail awaiting trial for assaulting women sexually while on duty.
The Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department and Charlotte City Council, meanwhile, are doing their best to avoid discussing why Jackson was hired, and anything having to do with the two suspensions he drew in his short time on the force before he was arrested and subsequently fired. The CMPD has admitted Jackson should never have been hired Jackson and has changed its hiring process.
Still, it’s a story with legs, largely because local officials have created the perception that they’re stonewalling. Police personnel records ordinarily are confidential. Local governments can release records that might bolster public confidence in the police department.
A majority of the Charlotte City Council isn’t interested in even going into closed session to discuss such a move in Jackson’s case, suggesting the council is quite content with the way he was supervised.
In Fayetteville, meanwhile, a serial rapist could be on the prowl. There have been seven cases reported of a masked man breaking into residences and attacking women since July. The police didn’t inform the public of this danger until January, however.
It had been the Fayetteville Police Department’s policy to not disclose the existence of reported rapes except through a public records request. If citizens looked at the department’s Web site, they could track other crime in the city, but not rapes.
That has since changed, as Fayetteville’s mayor and city council rather bluntly told the FPD that it should release the same sort of basic information that other major police departments do in similar circumstances.
“Let’s inform the public,” the Fayetteville Observer quoted Mayor Pro Tem D.J. Haire as saying. “Let’s make people aware.”
The Durham Police Department repeatedly made news in 2009 by paying excessive overtime to the officer who oversaw its program allowing police officers to work private security jobs. Officer Alesha Robinson-Taylor was fired for claiming to have worked 79 hours a week. Deputy Chief B.J. Council was forced into retirement for signing off on most of the overtime payments.
The secondary-employment program that Robinson-Taylor oversaw had issues of its own, though these predated her arrival. Some after-hours security work is more demanding than others.
Police officers typically prefer earning extra dollars on assignments that involve a low probability of making arrests. Directing traffic at a Sunday church service is a highly desired assignment; patrolling the parking lot at a club on a Saturday night, not so much. As a 63-page city audit report demonstrated, a great deal of favoritism was displayed in who got the easy jobs.
For local government officials, crime is not a glamorous topic. There aren’t many ribbon-cutting ceremonies to attend. Elected officials don’t get to hand out grants to well-meaning service organizations.
But unless police departments adopt and enforce coherent policies, they will create news. It may not the kind of news that mayors, county commissioners, and city and county managers want to deal with. And truth be told, it’s not the sort of story that this journalist prefers to write about.
Michael Lowrey is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.