Iryna's law prompts re-opening of vacant jail facility | Hour 2

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 in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.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. Last I'm going to move on here, but just to put a final bow on this, From the last hour, we were talking about Tyler Robinson standing trial. There's enough evidence. With the enhancements to try Tyler Robinson as a death penalty case in the murder of Charlie Kirk. And just wanted to let Candy Crusher know that Kevin, the fake Republican, also agrees that it was Israel, thereby confirming the horseshoe theory of politics for you. So you're in. Well, I was going to say good company, but anyway. All right. Closer to home, Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary, not my fault, McFadden, moved closer to reopening the shuttered Jail North yesterday as local leaders signed off on a funding plan for the project. Yes, Jail North, which has been closed for several years because the Mecklenburg County commissioners refused to I mean, that's really what this comes down to. The county commissioners do not prioritize public safety. And they. Shrunk his budget several years ago. And so he closed down Jail North. Jail North was at the time a juvenile detention facility. And local activists... advocates. They have been wanting it reopened. And the state has said, yeah, we agree. We would like it to, to be open to why don't you sell us the building? So we'll run the juvenile detention facility. And McFadden has said, no, he does not want to sell it. The state has said, okay, well then how about you lease it to us? And he has said, no. And then he said, why don't you actually close down the one in Cabarrus County and and transfer all of those people into my employee. And the state's like, uh, no, we can't do that either. They would, we can't just transfer people as a state employee over to a County employee. Um, so that's where it stood for all this time. McFadden is trying to get a whole bunch of money so he can hire a whole bunch of people because you'll recall, he has been bleeding personnel, right? Um, employees have been leaving the sheriff's office for basically his entire time. But that is not his fault, people. We always point this out. That's why we call him Gary Not My Fault McFadden. Not cooperating with ICE, not his fault, right? Somebody who's released, even though there's an ICE detainer put out on them, and then they go out to reoffend or do something, not his fault. None of this is his fault. Even though he was the one that ran a campaign to not cooperate with ICE, none of this is his fault. County commissioners, so they withhold the funding or they cut his funding a couple years ago. He cannot. Maintain the staffing levels at Jail North and at Jail Central, which is the big jail. And so he closes Jail North. And then the state legislature, in the wake of the murder of Irina Zarutska on our light rail line, the state legislature passes Irina's law. And one of the things that it did was it eliminated cashless bail, right? So people that were just being allowed to walk out of the jail, not Gary's fault. That's not his fault. Nothing is his fault. So that's not his fault. That's the judges and the magistrates who were just letting people walk. We heard stories during hearings about how police officers would make an arrest. They would bring somebody in for processing at the detention center. And they would still be filling out the paperwork when the criminals would be then released back out on their own recognizance. No cash bail. So that's why we were able to not build any new jail beds in Mecklenburg County despite the explosive growth in our population for the last roughly 20 years. I believe it's been 25. I think it's been about 25 years, right, since the. Jail Central opened? Yeah, 2001. Yeah, 2001. So 25 years ago was when Jail Central opened, and we've not built any new facilities in Mecklenburg County. And so what do you do if you have a constantly growing population? And I have pointed this out. I feel like it's a pretty obvious point, but it doesn't seem like anybody acknowledges it, that if you are growing in populations, a certain percentage, very small, let's say, you know, 1%, less than 1%, or maybe more, I don't know, but there is a percentage of the population growth that will be. Criminals, right? Because that's just math. So if we are growing at a rate of, say, 5% a year in population, then chances are, at some point, you're going to need more jail space. Or you could just not keep people in the jail. And that seems to have been the way that they went, which aligns perfectly with the 2020 summer of fiery but mostly peaceful rioting in honor of St. George Floyd. This all culminated all at the same time during COVID, right? And then they were releasing people and it closed down Jail North. But now county commissioners, they now are saying, hey, you know what? Because Arena's law got rid of the cashless bail, now we have overcrowding at the jail. Surprise, surprise. So we need more bed space. What to do? Well, you do have the facility at Jail North that is basically mothballed right now. So why don't we open that back up for overflow, right? Good idea. County commissioners don't want to pay for it, though, and that's why they approved it, because they're not going to have to pay for it. Basically, of the $ 3. 2 million price tag, virtually all of that is going to come from federal and state funds. So as long as they don't have to prioritize public safety, county commissioners are willing to allow the opening of Jail North. That's really what this comes down to. They have deprioritized public safety. I've gone over this data before. When you look at their budget, they fund parks and rec to a higher level. Like they do not prioritize public safety. That's not to say I want not my fault McFadden to get a bunch more money. However, like if we are growing in population and we are having these problems, then it seems to me like you probably do need to account for the larger population. So it's $ 3. 2 million to reopen the facility to help alleviate overcrowding at the county's main jail in Uptown. The board also passed a procedural vote to approve a health plan for the facility. Located off Statesville Road north of Uptown, Jail North previously served as a juvenile detention center from 2020 through 2022 before it shuttered amid staffing problems. This is from Mary Ramsey's piece at the Charlotte Observer. The bulk of the money to reopen it will come from state and federal sources, according to McFadden's presentation to the commissioners. In addition to revenue collected by the sheriff's office through. Do you want to guess? Do you want to guess what they're tapping? What revenue stream do you think McFadden is tapping to pay for the jail expansion? No, it's not the recording studio. No, no, no, no, no. And I don't know if they're going to open up. Another recording studio if you want to record a rap album at Jail North. Maybe they... I don't know. Maybe they'll bus people to Jail Central to use the recording studio if they want to lay down some tracks or something. But what revenue stream do you think they're going to tap into to help pay for this reopening? If you guessed the... Concealed carry permit fees. You would be correct. Yeah, the permit fees that law abiding citizens pay for concealed carry permits that will help to reopen jail north. All right. For over a year now, you've heard me talking about create a video. Great local company in Mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos. VHS tapes, film reels, and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now, Creative Video is helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. Introducing group travel videos, perfect for family reunions, church mission trips, group vacations, destination weddings, student trips, senior adult. Groups, sports teams. I mean, really any gathering of people that you care about that's traveling together. Group Travel Videos gives your traveling pack a private app where everyone can share photos during the trip, send messages, share schedules and important documents, even a traveler safety logo feature that works only during the trip. And family members and friends back home can follow along and enjoy the experience in real time. No social media, no ads. It's totally private. No emails, phone numbers, account setups or hassles. With group travel videos, you'll capture today's moments on your special trip while they're happening. Then, after the trip or gathering, they'll professionally turn your shared moments into a beautiful storytelling video that your whole group can stream and download and treasure for years. Check out GroupTravelVideos.com. That's GroupTravelVideos.com. Or call 704-846-7870, extension 206. And when you do that, ask for Katie. But Pete, can I just email? Well, yes, you can. You can email Katie. katie at grouptravelvideos.com. Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. From the text line, Ian says, I heard the news reports about Not My Fault McFadden and was actually surprised you did not lead with this story. Well, I was not intending to spend the whole first hour on the Tyler Robinson trial. But, you know, when the people want to discuss a topic, then I pivot and I let the people have their say. And so I started this hour with it. That's how that happened. I'm breezy. So let's see. Patrick says, how does a clown have any say in how the building gets used? Who gets to buy it or sell it or whatever? He's an employee of the county. He doesn't own the jail. Correct. If the county commissioners wanted to force a solution on new jail construction, on reopening the juvenile detention facility at jail North, right? If the County commissioners wanted to effectuate a solution, they could do so. They do not want to, they don't want any of this on them. They are happy to leave this all under the purview of not my fault, McFadden and his mismanagement, his maladministration, which by the way, now that I say maladministration, that is one of the things that you can remove from, somebody from office for where, whatever happened to that, whatever happened to that lawsuit, right? Aren't, are we still, what are we like, what are we waiting on? We're still waiting on the SBI investigation into the maladministration. What's the deal? Why is this taking so long? Could it have something to do with the SBI being under the authority of Jeff Jackson, the attorney general, AKA baby Jesus, right? I'm just asking questions. No, I don't know. People have asked me, hey, whatever happened to that SBI probe based on the complaint to get McFadden removed from office? And don't know. I have not heard anything from the SBI on it. Still investigating. It's been almost a year. Think about that. All of that stuff came out, right? Right before the election. Right before McFadden's election happened. Was that 25? Was that, Oh no, it was right before the primary this year. So, okay. So it's been, I think they dropped it in like January this year. Okay. So it's been now what? Nine months. Um, but yeah, the County commissioners can, they can do something on this if they wish. They obviously do not wish to do so, but they are going to take the state and federal money and, and reopened Jail North to help house inmates because Jail Central is overcrowded. The sheriff attributes the overcrowding in part to Irina's law. The sweeping criminal justice bill that changed some pretrial release rules, the Charlotte Observer said, some pretrial release rules. Such as. We don't know. They don't say. They don't tell us. That's not information that is provided to the reader for some reason. Since it took effect, Mecklenburg has recorded its highest average daily jail population since fiscal year 2008. The sheriff's office said in a statement ahead of Tuesday's meeting. Over at WSOC-TV, House Bill 307, also known as Arena's Law, ended cashless bail and tightened pretrial release restrictions. In other words, you could not get out without bail for new crimes, basically. They added crimes into the category that was like, you have to pay bail or this can't be cashless bail, whatever. Like, they elevated a bunch of the.... Mandatory bail requirements. McFadden said the increase in the jail population is not solely because of the law, though. Get this. The rapid rise of crime in our city. That's what he said. The rapid rise of crime in our city. Well, wait a minute. Haven't we been hearing reports that all the violent crime and all the crime is all down in the city over the last year or two? They've been touting this. We've covered it. But McFadden is blaming the rapid rise of crime as to why the jail is overpopulated. I don't know who to believe. This from the text line. Jennifer texts in and says, if a resident records a successful rap album at the jail's recording studio, does Gary Not My Fault McFadden get a cut? That's a very good question. I don't know. I don't know. Do they have their own record label? Like pre-trial records or something? Like, do they have, I don't know. I don't know if they get a cut. Um, Patrick says it's even crazier that they couldn't solve the problem by just voting him out of office in the first place. That would have been the easier, um, easier route to go with the sheriff, but you know, remember during the primary, you had three challengers. One of whom was like one of McFadden's part of his leadership team. And then you had the other guy, Rodney Collins, or sorry, that was Rodney Collins. Ricky Robbins was the former CMPD officer and, who ran against him and for some reason never really laid into McFadden on stuff. And then we find out after the election that he's taken a job with McFadden and he is there now with him. So it's almost as if he didn't really want to beat McFadden, but was there to maybe splinter up the anti-McFadden vote. Because a majority of the voters in the Democrat primary did not vote for McFadden. So had there only been one challenger, chances are McFadden would have lost. But you put three people up against him, they split the vote, and McFadden gets in with 40%. All right, now let's move to the U.S. Senate race. Former Governor Roy Cooper, my good friend Ray, Michael Whatley, the Republican. The Senate Leadership Fund... That's on the Republican side. They have launched, this is according to Danielle Battaglia at the Charlotte Observer, the Senate Leadership Fund launched a heart-wrenching ad this month connecting former Governor Roy Cooper and the release of 3,500 North Carolina inmates, and they have linked that release to the fatal shooting of a Waxhaw woman. The problem is, which I'm not really sure that's a problem, but according to the reporter, the problem is the homicide took place in South Carolina and the suspect has no connection to North Carolina's prison system. Okay, but the victim does, number one. Her family still lives in North Carolina. But also, when you watch the ad, it doesn't say Roy Cooper's release... of a criminal led to her death. It says, the agenda. Roy Cooper's agenda. That's the point. It's the agenda. Keep that in mind as we proceed through the article. According to Chris Gustafson, the communications director for the SLF, quote, obviously if you watch it, you can definitely read into it as if it occurred in North Carolina, he admitted. But he defended the ad connecting Cooper's actions and the unrelated killing. See, again, she keeps framing it with these adjectives. adjectives unrelated killing okay it's unrelated to the release of 3,500 criminals right it's unrelated to that specific incident that collusive agreement with these left-wing groups that sued in order to get 3,500 inmates released okay It's unrelated to that. But what the ad says quite clearly and what the father of the victim, what he says that this is part of Roy Cooper's agenda. This is the agenda. And so it is not unrelated. And you're going to. Have a really good connection from the Washington Free Beacon here in a moment, too. Gustafson defended the ad. He said at the end of the day, it's a North Carolina dad who is an advocate for stopping these kinds of policies. Cooper's team says this ad is false. Republicans have repeatedly tried to tie Cooper to various crimes due to a court ordered settlement. No, no, no. Republicans aren't trying to tie Cooper to various crimes. The settlement released criminals, released these inmates who then went on to reoffend. There's a dozen North Carolinians who are dead because of the inmates that got released. So Republicans aren't trying to tie him to these things. These are the results of the thing he did. But this homicide has no connection to North Carolina other than the victim being from Union County. Again, that's false. That is a lie that the Observer is printing. The homicide has another connection to North Carolina as well as other states. And it is the agenda. It is the policy preferences of the Democrats. Stephen Federico, whose daughter was murdered... He says she was a casualty of an agenda. But that's not the focus of the piece. I mean, at least credit where it's due to Danielle Bataglia for at least mentioning it like halfway through the story. That's the point. It's part of the larger agenda. But this is how they do you. If you're a Republican, this is how they do it. This is how they, quote, fact check you. Right. They take the larger point you're making, they carve off one little part of it, they focus on it, and they're like, ah, that part's not true. We rate this false. Later on, they say, the ACLU sued the South Carolina governor, McMaster, a Republican, and other South Carolina officials to release prisoners during the pandemic, just like they did in North Carolina, but a judge dismissed that case. Right? So, again, it's not the lawsuit. It's the agenda. And you citing the South Carolina action is proof that this was part of a larger agenda. This was happening all across the country during COVID. People who are advocates for decarceration used COVID to decarcerate. And Democrats and Republicans, some of them went along. Some Republicans did not. Roy Cooper did. So let's talk about the agenda that Mr. Federico was citing that was in the ad, the agenda of decarceration, soft on crime, don't work with ICE, abolish the police, defund the police, abolish ICE, like all of these policies that came from the left. The Washington Free Beacon with a story, the North Carolina Democratic Senate Committee said, our Senate nominee, rather, Roy Cooper, named a former ranking member of the Bloods street gang who was convicted of plotting a drive-by shooting murder, appointed this guy to a controversial racial equity and criminal justice task force that he established as the state's governor. Cooper created this thing through an executive order in June of 2020 during the so-called racial reckoning following the death of St. George Floyd. When the notion that the criminal justice system was systemically, institutionally, inherently racist, right? When this was all the latest rage and in fashion and Democrat leaders were taking calls to defund the police seriously. They're walking all of that stuff back, pretending they didn't say it. Cooper's task force included a number of state officials, such as then Attorney General Josh Stein, now the governor, also Supreme Court Judge Anita Earls, who's running for re-election, but it also included community activists who advocated for radical criminal justice reforms, and one of those was a convicted felon named Kerwin Pittman. In 07, Pittman was convicted of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and sentenced to more than 14 years in prison. He served 11 and a half with over a year in solitary confinement before being released. His conviction involved the murder of a 19-year-old guy named Jamel Amiens Jeffries, who was murdered in that drive-by shooting in Raleigh in 2006. In 2004 and in 2006, Pittman had also been arrested on assault and drug possession charges, but he got probation for both of those charges. Once again, part of an agenda. Since May of 2020, Pittman has been the director of policy and program for Emancipate NC. He is also a veteran of George Soros' Open Society Foundations. Emancipate NC has openly called for abolishing the police. Quote, maintaining white supremacy has always been the goal of policing. This simple truth is the reason policing cannot be reformed. Modern policing must be abolished, creating space for new systems of safety to rise from its ashes. That's what they were saying in 2023. Their executive director, Dawn Blagrove, says policing is, quote, just like slavery. Emancipate NC was founded on the knowledge that mass incarceration and structural racism harm all of us. Prison is state-sponsored violence, she said in 2020 during the height of the BLM mania. In April of 2020, Emancipate NC was one of five organizations that sued Roy Cooper's administration over COVID-19 in prisons, ultimately securing the release of 3,500 state prisoners. It's the agenda. A fundraising letter, late 2020, co-signed by Mr. Pittman, the former president, ranking member of the Bloods, declared that he was practicing abolition, quote unquote, by speaking truth to power on the Racial Equity Task Force. Once again, appointed by Roy Cooper. Around the same time, and by the way, why, if you're Roy Cooper and you're tough on crime, why would you bring in representatives of Emancipate NC? Why would you put them on the task force? What do you think they're going to help create as their recommendations? Around the same time, end of 2020, the task force came out with a long list of formal recommendations, which are basically straight from the BLM playbook. They included sharply curbing cash bail, having social workers respond to some 911 calls instead of the police, favoring tickets over arrests, mandatory implicit bias and structural racism training for police, reviewing death sentences for possible racism, decriminalizing smaller amounts of marijuana, and downgrading school resource officers or school security guards. When the recommendations came out, Cooper lauded the Racial Equity Task Force as a, quote, tremendous success and said he looked forward to implementing its recommendations. When asked about all of this, the Cooper campaign said that Roy has spent his career putting violent criminals behind bars, tough on crime laws as a governor, blah, blah, blah. And then they, of course, attack Michael Watley over Harvey West. This is all they have. Michael Watley spent his time appointing a convicted child sex predator who served six years in prison and spent over a decade as a registered sex offender to a top role within the North Carolina Republican Party and gave him access to events with children. They keep talking about this, this Harvey West case. So here's the Harvey West, what the attacks leave out. He was in the North Carolina Republican Party years before Whatley was. And he was there since 2011. Whatley became state chairman in 2019. Whatley did not make Harvey West the district chairman. When the first congressional district chairmanship opened, the district's executive committee elected the guy. Fellow Republicans later reelected him. That was not Michael Watley. So get this. So at the same time, Roy. Cooper is saying that ad is false about the, you know, the agenda, the soft on crime, like that's all lies. And what about Harvey West? And then they accuse Michael Watley of these things, but these are lies too. West was not hired by Michael Watley. He was not an employee. Watley did not recruit him. Watley did not hire him. In fact, West says Watley opposed him. Harvey West told PolitiFact that Watley was not supportive when West first became district chairman, saying, quote, he didn't want me there. So the guy was already in the party. He was already hosting these barbecue events down east someplace. His own district members put him to the position of chairman. Whatley opposed that. Yet this is what the Cooper campaign keeps talking about. And as a cherry on top, Cooper was doing fundraisers with Chad Severance Turner, I believe his last name is. And like that guy, is also on the child sex offender registry for messing with boys at some summer camp. Like, so you're accusing Watley of the very thing that you're, like, you're palling around with the same kind of guy. Every accusation is a confession. 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 at You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepeatcalinershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.