Charlotte opted not to build more jails, now complains of overcrowding (12-09-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream I daily show prep with all the links. Become a patron, go to dpeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. Every Tuesday at noon, we chat with Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of the long Leaf Politics website and newsletter On substack over there, I think it's substack. I think I ask you this all the time, Andrew. How are you? I'm doing well? How are you? I'm good? Is it it is substack as well? Right? It is? Okay, it's on the substack platform. I've been thinking about changing, but uh oh, that's where it is. Why are you going to change from substack. That's where all the cool kids are. I thought it is. They charge their fees are pretty darn high. Though, really oh well yeah, yeah, that would be a problem. I've got I do Patreon. They're pretty reasonable, but I don't know if that offers you the same sort of newslettering stuff that you do, but you also are a contributing columnist at the Charlotte Observer, where I want to thank you for publishing the piece and getting it published over at the Observer, because I suspect that your argument here about Mecklenburg County officials crying poor in the wake of the implementation of Arena's Law, I suspect readers of the Charlotte Observer have probably never been exposed to this idea that you outline in your piece, Mecklenberg's jail crisis is self inflicted, and you point out that local leaders have treated construction of a new jail as something, as you call it, that's been treated as optional through all of the growth pains that we've been experiencing. And I'm trying to think, I believe the last jail expansion. I think the new jail was started construction like ninety seven, and then there was like a tower that was added, I want to say, in like O two and that's the last of it. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, in fact, Mecklenberg County has closed. Down jails since then. You know, even as our you know, the Chamber of Commerce loves to remind us that one hundred and fifty new people are moving here every single day. I mean, we talk a lot about. Adding new roads, adding new housing, but when's the last time we ever had a conversation about adding new jail space. It's never happened. And we have a whole vacant jail up in the northern part of the county that's just completely unused. And you know, I started looking into this because, you know, two weeks ago now, Sheriff McFadden and some of the county leaders had a information session where it had just turned into a bunch of whining and complaining about IRENA's Law and how it was going to increase jail populations. And as I started looking into it, it really struck me how unusual that was. I mean, nobody else in the entire state is taking this position and complaining about IRENA's Law and what impacts it will have. And when you look around the state, you know, wait, counties building a new jail right now, Henderson's building a new one. You know, all around the state, counties are planning for this and planning to be able to keep violent people behind bars. But it's only here in Mecklenburg County where that seems to be a problem. Yeah, right, And in that meeting, I played the clip from that meeting County Commissioner Laura Meyer. I think you may have quoted her in the Yeah you did. You quoted the same quote that I pulled where she said our priorities are going to be cut into because of this. And my response is, yes, precisely. You spend more money on parks and rec budget than you do on public safety in Mecklenburg County and the state is telling you basically that your priorities are out of whack. It seems to me, right exactly. I mean, how is this not the priority? I mean, what other priorities could the county commissioners have that even come close to how important this is? And you know, I'm sure you've talked about the latest stabbing on the light rail, but I have to think that without IRENA's Law, that guy would be out on the street today. Yeah, because he didn't kill the twenty four year old victim. The guy did. Survive, right, you know, thank god? Right, And he's the guy that has been arrested. He is being held with no bond, but he's also an illegal alien who came into the country three times. He was deported twice. And then I note there are people that are shocked that he didn't pay the fare to get on the train. It's like the dude crossed into the country three times illegally. I don't think he's the kind of guy that is following the rules on entry to their as things. But also then McFadden did another press conference yesterday. Did you happen to catch any of that. I read some of the news coverage of it. It's just really hard for me to listen to that sort of thing. It just makes me my blood boil, so I try to avoid it. Yeah, well I do it so others don't have to. I don't know. I was blessed with this high tolerance for dumb assory, so I can sit through these this news conference where much of it was exactly the same stuff he was talking about in that county commissioner's meeting where I think it was Lee Altman County commissioner who said, you know, oh, our top priority is public safety, and that is decidedly not true, Like it is obviously not. So just look at the expenditures and look at the way the criminal justice system has been treated. And I think you were you rightfully point out that these were these were conscious decisions that were made to save money. So it is obviously not a priority because you cut budgets and close Jail North when you needed to plug budget deficits. Right. And it's also it's not a Democrat and Republican thing. I mean CMPDS City Council is run by Democrats, you know are our district attorney is a Democrat, and they are not on the same side as the sheriff and the county commissioners on this. So it's it's not a partisan thing at all. It's just a skewed priority thing. So all right, So how much of this is sort of the underlying philosophy of decarceration. I know there's the former a c l U representative for North in North Carolina, Christy Puckett Williams, who does a lot of this this decarceration work. I had my run in with her and actually led to her getting fired by the ACLU as a lobbyist for the up and Raleigh. But you know, McFadden has had his picture taken with her. He celebrates their relationship together, and there is definitely a strain, And I would even connect it to McFadden's campaign promise in twenty eighteen to stop cooperating with ICE via the two eighty seven G program. Like to me, there is a philosophical connection between these types of actions and this approach at the jail. And I suspect he's not the only one. We covered the MacArthur Foundation their grant money that's gone to the Mecklimberg County court system to train people with this very same sort of notion diversity, equity and inclusion models and such to try to make sure people get turned loose very early. So how much of it is that kind of a philosophy, not just from the sheriff, but from the Border County Commissioners members, do you think? Yeah? I mean, I think that's a exactly what it is. And I think it shows up on the extreme end, does the defund the police movement, But it's the same philosophical undercurrent. And I think, you know, for a lot of folks in Charlotte who aren't paying as close of attention, you know, they hear sort of the SOB stories that get put out, you know, kind of the picture that's being painted is, oh, you know, we've got folks who are you know, stealing a sandwich from Walmart to feel their feed their families or whatnot, and we shouldn't be locking them up for years and years. And that's just really not what's happening. And I think what we've seen in Charlotte over the last couple of months is really a wake up call for people that, you know, this is what happens when you let these policies go on for as long. As we have, right And the reason why I think we're seeing the policy or we're seeing these stories, these cases now that are generating the outrage is because, like you said, it takes years for somebody to run through that catch and release turnstile of the court system before they escalate to the most serious cases that now we are seeing, right, Like, the groundwork was laid for this stuff years ago and we're seeing it play out now. Yeah, go ahead. And it's not a surprise that, you know, repeat offenders are an issue. I mean ten, twenty thirty years ago, this was the same sort of issue, and the city council used to have, you know, the policy of the top one hundred frequent flyers. You know, we're going to crack down on repeat offenders because it's a small, relatively small group of people who are committing a disproportionate number of the crimes. And that's just completely gone away. Yeah, did you happen to catch that? The City of Charlotte last night at the city council meeting, they they had a three million dollar item on the consent agenda, so it went through without discussion. I assume because it's a consent agenda item, I want to spend three million dollars on a pub relations campaign to get people to ride the light rail. Yeah, I did see that. You're just pushing all my buttons today. That's another thing that makes me. So angry when the conversation turns to the perception of crime or the perception of. Things not being safe. And I think I seem to remember a quote from the former police chief who said, you know, I don't think I can take that approach anymore. I can't sing that same line of you know, it's just a perception problem because it's truly not. Yeah. Yeah, and look, I understand this contract was probably in the works and just happened to land on the Council agenda last night, just coincidentally, you know, three days after another light rail stabbing. But man, the optics on that look terrible, just terrible. And yeah, I don't know if a PR campaign is going to outweigh the news reports that people are seeing and their own experiences when they get on the train, when they ride the train, they see the type of behavior that's allowed. Any thoughts real quick on this latest stabbing and the CATS was trying to figure out whether or not there was a security guard on the train at the time or not, and now it turns out there there was not, which is actually I think probably the better result, because if there was a security guard on the train, I think that would be a way worse story for CATS. It could be. I mean, there was also some reporting that they might have kicked this guy off way earlier because apparently he was being disruptive and hassling people for a long period of time before that. But you know, to your question, I think it might be time for to get Dave Bollock back in town and looking at you know, they promised that they were increasing security. All right, let's pull the let's pull the time sheets and see where they're at. Yeah. No, it's a great point. Andrew Dunn. You can read his piece on this at the Charlotte Observer. Mecklenberg's jail crisis quote unquote is self inflicted. You can also subscribe to his newsletter and check out his website, long Leave Politics. That's long leafpol dot com. Andrew, thank you, sir, appreciate it. Keep up the good work. Thank you all right, take care. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduates, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. So Bill has a suggestion for the UH for the marketing campaign, the three point two or whatever it is, million dollar ad campaign that taxpayers will be funding for the Charlotte transit system to get people to perceive that they are safe. I guess Bill suggests Charlotte Transit where every stop might be the end of the line. Love it. So Andrew Dunn's piece at the Charlotte Observer. He says, despite the and by the way, I was very happy and I was waiting to hear if Andrew had heard my comments on this. I think I was going because this is what I was arguing a week ago, right when they did this big meeting and I was playing all of the audio from this this cry fest unfunded mandate. Eh, I don't have any money. Oh, it's gonna impact us. I don't have enough jail space. Like dude, you have a whole empty jail. Jail North. You shut that thing down several years ago. Oh I gotta higher staff. I can't. I'm fishing in the same pool as all of the other law enforcement agencies. Yes, figure it out. You asked for the job, Gary, not my fault, McFadden. You asked for the job of sheriff. And maybe if you ran a better operation, I don't know, maybe more people would want to work for you. But just seems like a lot of people don't want to work for you. They quit in very public fashion. They write scathing letters about how you're a narcissist and you are a micromanager and a tyrant. So maybe if you I don't know how to better management culture over there, more people would want to work with you. Despite the region's growth, Mecklenburg actually has less jail capacity than it did a decade ago, even as counties across the state are building new jails right now. This is not an accident, he says, this was a strategic decision. So when county leaders now describe the newly implemented Arena's law as a burden, it's hard to take it seriously. The law did not create Mecklenberg's jail problem. It exposed it. He's exactly right, exactly right. Sheriff McFadden has leaned in on this script. He talked about unfunded mandates, transportation costs, staffing shortages, mandatory overtime. But he points out Mecklenburg County is basically alone in talking this way. I have not seen any other stories from across the state, from any other sheriff's office that is saying this kind of stuff. It's just here. Eddie Caldwell is quoted in Andrew's piece. He is the executive vice president and general counsel of the North Carolina Sheriff's Association. And Andrew asked how implementation has gone so far across the state, and he said, quote, I have not been contacted by any sheriffs with concerns, so ninety nine other sheriffs are figuring it out somehow. Far from being blindsided. The association backed the arena's law, backed the bill, and spent long days and nights working with legislators. Every change that we asked for in the bill the legislature agreed to make, he said to sheriffs. And by the way, McFadden made a comment about this at his press conference yesterday, where he was like, oh, I like Eddie called well, I respect him and all of that, but I should have been at the table. I should have been asked to participate. I go up to Raleigh and they never want to meet with me. Yet, Well, gee, I wonder why you're the one sheriff in the entire state. Apparently that can't figure this out because you have different priorities. You're going to hear this because at his press conference he made some comments that indicate the underlying philosophy, which is he doesn't want to see anybody in jail, which is an odd thing to say for somebody who asked for the job of running the jail. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Ashville is your connection. 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Call or text eight two eight, three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabins offashville dot com and may memories that'll last a lifetime. A message from Melissa on Twitter. It's a pete tweet, Melissa says, regarding the pr campaign to get people to you know, ride the transit system. Despite all of the stabbings, how about just recycling that whole think Again campaign. It worked so well the first time. Yeah, remember that. I'm old enough to remember this highly successful campaign to convince felons not to get guns which they are legally prohibited from doing in the first place, and then using said guns in more violent activity. And there were billboards, had billboards that were like think again, and that was it, So like, that's the right that's going to do it, that's going to convince the the violent defenders to not commit violent defenses because they were going to do it, but then they thought again, and then they were like, yeah, I'm totally going to go do this. Think Again. Very successful campaign. Andrew Dunn at the Charlotte Observer, writing, at its peak, Mecklemburg County had do you know what, so, do you know how many beds we have? What capacity we have right now for jail space in Mecklinburg County The number was somewhere around I think nineteen hundred and the current jail is somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen to seventeen hundred inmates sorry residents, as the sheriff likes to call them, residents of the jail. So we're running according to the sheriff last week or so, he said, we're it about like five percent. He said there was operational capacity, but then functional capacity and whatever. So we're somewhere around eighty to ninety percent capacity, right, So that's what we are at. But we were at three thousand. We had just over three thousand jail beds at one point in Mecklimberg County. But Dunn says as the Great Recession raged, county leaders made a choice. They did not modernize and plan for the next surge in population growth. They shut things down. A proposed jail annex was mothballed. Jail North, a full scale jail with hundreds of beds. They stopped housing inmates at all, and today it sits unused as a detention facility. To make that work, the county leaned heavily on diversion and looser pre trial release, all in an effort to drive the daily head count down instead of building for the future. Of course, this means more people. When you have, you know, more people coming to town, that's going to mean more people in jail. In a county that chose to close one jail and let another one sit empty, of course, it'll stress a detention staff that's been allowed to hollow out. But these are not acts of God. They are the foreseeable results of local decisions. The staffing situation that's something Mecklumberg County has allowed to happen over years of budgets and hiring decisions. Right, these are the results. These are the consequences of Democrat policies. Every year when the Mecklimberg County Commissioners do their budget and they don't give money to public safety. They don't throw a bunch of mone money to the sheriff's office, they don't throw a bunch of money at the court system. They don't throw a bunch of money towards building a new jail, or they don't ask for a bond referendum to build a new jail. No, instead, we want more parks and green ways and that sort of stuff. I broke down these numbers. They spend more on government facilities than they do on public safety, and then they have the audacity to criticize the state legislature, which spends more a higher percentage of its budget Somewhere around twelve to thirteen percent of its budget goes for public safety, whereas the Mecklenberg County budget. I want to say, I've got the stat in the stack of stuff here from last week. I think it was like eight percent. So as a percentage of the budget, the state spends more than the county does, and the county leaders are complaining that the state isn't giving them more money, but they are prioritizing. Oh no, we are prioritizing public safety and it's our top priority. Except it's not, and it hasn't been. You scrap the plans for the annex, and you mothball Jail North. You cut over a thousand beds from your system while we are growing, while we are, you know, rolling out the mat with all of these services and all of the you know, the goodies, the as Keith Larson used to say here on WBT, all of the shiny things, right. You keep making us more and more attractive for more and more people to move here, but you never expand the jail capacity. Why common sense would dictate that if you're going to grow your population by one hundred percent over thirty years, then you're going to need more jail space because not everybody who moves here is a law abiding citizen, which brings us to the latest stabbing on the light rail line. This was an illegal alien came into the country three different times. He got deported twice as a string of criminal offenses to his name. I've got a press release here, hang on from Customs and Border Protection and from the DHS Homeland Security. Oscar Gerardo Solorzano Garcias Garcia rather an illegal alien from Honduras charged with attempted first to be murder for stabbing the man on the light rail line. ICE lodged a detainer against him now to ensure that this criminal alien is not released back into North Carolina neighborhoods. And this is from the DHS Assistant Secretary Trisha McLaughlin. She says, Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the county will honor the detainer since they have a history of not cooperating with ICE. She's not wrong, all right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why. Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground news it's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature you're description then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent and Reminder. Thursday, starting at midnight, we're gonna be flipping over the FM to one oh seven point nine FM, so you can listen to us Crispin, Clean and Clear over on one oh seven point nine FM. A massive footprint. So also, by the way, heads up, we're probably going to start hearing from a bunch of new listeners people who have no idea the am band exists and they will now be exposed to all of our brilliance. So you really, like y'all are going to have to like bring your a game, you know, like first impressions here people on Thursday. Okay, let me jump over and get Jeff on the program. Hello, Jeff, welcome to the show. Hat Pee, Thanks for taking my call. Sure, I appreciate you covering all this about the lot rail stuff. I just have one question. It seems like this guy's latest or or interaction with law enforcement was he got banned from the light rail. How does that work? Who documents that? Or is that police interaction or what? What can you tell me about that? No, that's a that's a good question. That would be a Charlotte Area transit system ban, right, So I would assume that they would tell local law enforcement. So like, if this guy is on the train and you got a CMPD officer, who's you know, on the train or on the platform or something like, they should have a list of the banned people or something. But I don't know, or is that just something that you would encounter if you go up and question the person and then search their name through a cat's ban database or something. I don't know, but it would seem to indicate that there was some kind of interaction between this guy and and CATS some right, at some point, because he got banned by CATS, So there had to have been something that precipitated that. Yeah, do we know when that happened, when wealthy, the date of it. I've not seen any information regarding when that band was put on him. That's a very good question. My basic thought is is that, Okay, if he's had an interaction with law enforcement, they should have ide'd him as an illegal alien with a criminal background. Would that not be enough to yeah, hold him for further. It just seems like, okay, they wrote him, they wrote him a note that says, don't get back on the train and then just let him go. Right And if he you know, coming back into the country after you've been deported, that's a felony. And we know he did that and was immediately deported. He obviously wasn't wasn't charged with that felony at at his second re entry, but then his third re entry, right, that's also a felony. But when you know, we don't know when that occurred. We don't know when he re entered. It would have been sometime after twenty twenty one, but we don't know when it occurred or where it occurred. And then we don't know what interaction he had with law enforcement or with cats that got him banned. But one would think that if he's already been deported twice, then that would have been something that they should have picked him up for and held him for. ICE. Right, Well, you know, last yesterday during Gary McFadden's interview, he said that, you know, immigration enforcement is for the federal boys. So maybe federal laws aren't enforced by local law enforcement. You know, they don't want the police getting involved in felonies. Maybe this's the same thing. I don't know. Yeah, well, yeah, so he's he's trying to walk this line where, you know, I'm not part of the bad guys, the bad guys or Trump's you know, gestapo. It's you know, I'm not I'm not doing this, it's it's Trump. And so he's walking this line while you know, trying to trying to claim that he is cooperative with ICE and that he's following the law and he's not obstructing their efforts and all of this while at the same time trashing them for doing the things that he says he's cooperating with them on, but he's not doing anything with them on. It's right. If it sounds like a muddled mess, it's because it is right, because that's because what he's doing is attempting to nullify. This is all of the immigration enforcement obstruction that Democrats are engaged in. It is a form of nullification. They're saying, we are not going to UH to UH enforce or help you enforce federal law. They're trying to the law without getting it repealed. And that's a yeah, it's very dangerous. Yeah, Jeff, it's a great question. I appreciate the call, sir. Let me get to this timeline here that I got from DHS. So this again is from a Solarzano Garcia. He was previously removed in twenty eighteen and in twenty twenty one, and illegally re entered for a third time at an unknown date end location. His criminal history includes March fifth, two thousand and nine, arrest by the Passaic PD. I'm assuming that's in New Jersey, simple assault and resisting arrest. Three years later, arrested by the Union City PD for robbery in Flick's bodily injury. He was convicted in twenty thirteen in the Hudson County Drug Court. Then in twenty sixteen, four years later, he was arrested by the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office of Florida for aggravated back deadly weapon and evidence destroying. In twenty seventeen, he was arrested by the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office of Florida for resisting arrest, false ID given to law enforcement, fugitive and loitering or prowling. And then on June second, twenty seventeen, about six months later, he was re sentenced for robbery by the Hudson County Superior Court, sentenced to three years of incarceration. So that's what DHS has on this guy. We don't know when he came back into the country, but Jeff, I think and honestly, I've not thought of this, and I haven't seen anybody reference this question that Jeff just raised, which is, how did he get banned from cats? What precipitated that? Was there some sort of an offense, Was there some sort of criminal complaint? Did police arrest him. McFadden says he has never been through the Mecklamurg jail that he knows of. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.