Officials promise more security on Charlotte trains (09-19-2025--Hour2)

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 thepeakclendarshow 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. Our numero dose underway. Pete calendar here, but you probably knew that already. Seven oh four, five, seven oh eleven ten is the call in number. It's also the WBT text line driven by Saved with me Liberty buick GMC on Twitter at Pete Calendar. There is no D in calendar. There's no C in calendar. It's k A L I N E R. I feel like there's an open mic someplace. Do you hear it? Okay? I can hear something. I hear heavy air. To quote Bob Weir from The Grateful Dead during one of their studio sessions, he wanted heavy air and nobody knew what the heck he was talking about. It was probably the drugs. Actually, all righty. So yeah, it sounds like there's maybe a it sounds like there's a mic open. Oh there it is, boom, all right, good good, good job. All right. So let me start here. There was a piece over at the Charlotte Ledger which I highly recommend people subscribe to I do. This is a piece by Tony Massia about attending the funeral for Arena Zarutska. She was the Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death on the light rail car in Charlotte. The service was held on August twenty seventh, five days after her death. And it's a lengthy piece. I'm just going to give you a couple of the highlights here. Her sister urged people to love each other and to be sure to tell those you love that you do love them. She said it's very important to tell a person once more. Her cousin Vera Faulkner also spoke and said she said that her cousin Arena would hate all of this, the you know, the somberness, the sadness. She would want you to dance or listen to music, and then said, smoke a cigarette. But I cannot advise that. I should not advise that we are on FCC controlled airwave. So I did not say that it's merely a quote. To do something, paint something, kiss a flower. This dance of life is so fragile, and she is way too young for this, and you all know it. We all know it. Do something with your life. She would want that. This actually gets to the last hour's topic of all of the crime. People who lack purpose, people who like there is no purpose to life. Life is of little value. Their life is of little value, and they throw everything away, they destroy. It is evil. I've talked about this in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. There is evil, and you can deny that all you want, and that's fine. It doesn't make it so okay. Evil destroys, that's all it does that. It does not know how to create. It just destroys. Creation is of God, and that's why people glorify God when they create beautiful things. And Irena Zerutzka was a painter. She liked to paint, among other things, creating things, creating beauty. The funeral director John Hill spoke also at the funeral and said she took the hardships of the struggles of the life that she had, and instead of being down and out, she overcame them. She experienced joy, she experienced happiness, she still had a smile, and she'd want you to have that tonight. And what does that speak to one of the other things that we don't teach a lot of our youth nowadays, right, which is that resistance to pressure builds strength. Overcoming challenges and obstacles makes you better. You learn through failures, you become wiser, you learn what not to do and how to be successful. A failure doesn't mean that you are a failure. It means that you failed to account for some element of whatever it was you were trying to do. So identify what it was that you didn't account for, initially address that, and then overcome. And that's how you build self esteem. It's how you become confident and secure, and it's how you become successful. And even if people stand in your way and they try to prevent you from becoming successful, you go around them. Nobody can prevent you from being successful if you keep working. And to quote the philosopher Ashton Kutchner, that success looks an awful lot like hard work. And by the way, this is one of the things that people didn't know about Charlie Kirk. I'm one of them. I did not know this until I was watching Megan Kelly fill in for Charlie Kirk on his radio show, and she had four people who worked with Charlie. This was like his core group, like his comms person, his assistant chief of staff person, like all these people around him. And I did not know this, but he had apparently tried to go to he had applied to go to the I think West Point or Annapolis, I'm not sure which, but he tried to get into the military academy and he did not get in, and that's where he wanted to go. He ended up then being advised not to go to college. Why bother going to college? I did cover that last week. I think it was I think it may have been Victor David Hanson who told him, like, you've already gotten everything that people who go to college, you know, try to be, so why bother? And you can learn all of this stuff outside of a college setting. But he was highly disciplined, highly disciplined. He never drank, he never smoked, He you know, made sure he got his you know, eight hours of sleep every night. No caffeine. Like. He led a very kind of stoic existence, disciplined existence, which makes sense. He had applied to the military academy. He worked out all the time, He went on really long walks that his staff hated because like he would take them with them and they were like, oh, I'm so tired. He read voraciously so and he had this ability to account for like every minute of his day, and so he was always doing something that was of purpose except for one day a week, every Saturday. That was when he unplugged, and that was he honored the Sabbath on Saturdays, and he said, not doing anything, So that's spending time with the family. All the other six days he worked tirelessly. And his explanation for this, I saw in a different interview was that this is biblical because if you work every day, well, you're a slave. And you're not a slave. So don't behave like one this idea that everyone's out to get you. You're just a victim of the system. You know, we used to joke like the man is keeping me down all of that, that's a victim mindset. You've heard me rail against this victim mindset for years and this is something that needs to be told to kids often all the time. You're not a victim here, don't consider yourself to be a victim. Now, this puts me and this idea directly at odds with the modern you know, critical theories, this Marxist idea that everything is power dynamics, everything is oppressor versus oppressed, and all you need to do is find out which oppressed category you fit in, and then you can rage against the oppressor that's not making your life better. You want to make your life better, stop thinking of yourself as oppressed and start looking at yourself as an end with free agency who can succeed, but you have to be willing to try. Meanwhile, Charlotte Area transit system leaders are coming forward with some details on plans to increase security on the light rail system in the wake of Zarutzka's murder. So, when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers and family. But things are different today because of the work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter for twenty five years. This cause means a lot to me. I participate in the annual Walk to end Alzheimer's and I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year, and it's called once again Pete's Pack. You can sign up and you can join the team and walk with us. It's on October eight tenth, that truest field. Sign up at alz dot org slash Walk and then you could search for my team name Pete's Peck. There's also a link at thepetepod dot com. There's also a link in the description of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia Walk on October eleventh, and so you can make a team and join that one too, or make a donation and help me hit my goal of five thousand dollars. If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot org slash walk for all the dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me? For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments. This is why we walk. Update here out of Illinois, a man who Democrat Governor JB. Pritzker posed for a photo with earlier this month at a peacekeeper event like these are the violence Interrupters, has now been charged with murder. Thirty five year old Kellen mcmiller was involved in a highly orcist strated smash and grab burglary at Louis Vuitton store, which left an innocent bystander dead seven hundred thousand dollars worth of merchandise allegedly stolen. Mcmiller was charged with first degree murder, burglary, and retail theft. Just days before the incident, mcmiller was invited to a peacekeeper event where Governor Pritzker met with local peacekeepers to discuss how to limit gun violence in the city. Let's head over to the phones and talk with Larry. Hello, Larry, Welcome to the show. Hey, sir, Hey, appreciate you taking my call, Sir. I was just wanting to comment on the fact that you were talking about how the police don't well the police do their job, but the courts don't do theirs. I have a or. I had a neighbor that broke into my shop numerous times, more times than I can even count, just about everything I had, even to the point to where he broke into my freezer out there and threw hamburger and chicken out there because I had to pit bulls and he didn't want to mess with them. But surprised him when they said, we don't eat raw meat, we wait on him to cook it. So they beat him up pretty good, and I met him. I saw him the next couple of days. He had his hand all banded up, and I said, what happened, Mike, And he said, I burnt my hand on my mama's stove. But he was in his car in his front yard and the police pulled up to make an arrest, and he tried to run, and he literally ran across my driveway and into my fence, and they stopped him, and he was literally beating the hip out of the police officers, and I hollered out from my porch. I said, you don't many call the cops. We are the cops. So whatever happened, So this guy, he doesn't live there anymore? Is he in jail? I don't know. Moved away. Used to keep up with him by there's a thing called the vine, and they're supposed to call me, yeah, anytime he gets released. But he beat these cops. And they asked me after they had put him up in the car, and they said, did you see us hitting him? And I said no, I didn't. I said I saw him hitting you. And they said, okay, well we may need to get back in touch with you, and I said that's fine, and they took off. When I called my wife all excited, I said, they got him this time, beating on a cop. So did he ever go down for. Out sitting on his front porch before my wife got home? For he was already out. He was already out. By the times she got home. Yeah there, Well, there you go, Larry. I appreciate the call. Sorry that happened. I mean, this is the problem is that you've got repeat, repeat, repeat offenders. There is a small portion of the population that is responsible for most of the crime. Cops know who they are, the court system knows who they are. This is not just Charlotte, it's everywhere. It's always the case. They're anti social people. So there is now a story at Queen City News. After the Metropolitan Transit Commission met this week, Charlotte Area Transit System leaders CATS leaders gave some what is described as concrete details, some or more concrete details. I'm not sure it would rise to that level, but okay. The third party security group that CATS uses to patrol and whatnot. The security group is now fully staffed to patrol the blue line. Twenty off duty Charlotte Meckleberg police officers will work with them. I think it's supposed to say, we'll work with them to help increase visibility. Starting next week, CATS leaders will roll out security teams on bikes and utility task vehicles. The assigned officer for the Blue Line there are no vacancies there. Unclear what that means. It may be a misquote as well. The assigned officer for the Blue Line. There are no vacancies there. Okay. That's according to Interim CEO Brent Cagel. In addition to that, we have eight hundred hours a week of additional CMPD officers patrolling the blue line for the frequent riders, saying they haven't noticed any extra security. Cagel hopes this will change all of that. He says, the officers stay mobile, so you may not see them every day, but you will be seeing them routinely. Mecklinberg County leaders also use the meeting to try to push forward the sales tax initiative on the November ballot to fund transportation projects, noting that the revenue may even help with safety. Well yeah, City Manager Marcus Jones said, things have been floated about maybe even cats having its own sworn force. So absolutely, positively, the one cent sales tax provides additional resources for safety. This is always the case, right, This is always the case. Whenever they want to raise taxes, they use as a sales pitch either the increasing or a deprivation of the very thing that they're supposed to be doing in the first place with the money that they already have, but they divert away to pay for other things. Police, fire, right, medic These are the things that you're supposed to be doing first and foremost. And they're like, well, you know, we need the property tax increase if you want that firehouse, or if you want the police force, if you want you know, cops on the beat, And now they're doing it. With the sales tax referendum because they know they know this is this is a very bad look while trying to get people to vote yes on expansion of the sales tax in order to fund an expansion of the transit system when people don't feel safe writing it, and you're not even bothering to make sure people are paying the fares. So they know this, so they're like, well, you know, if you vote yes, then we'll give you that security that you know we should have already been providing. All right, so you've heard me talk about creative video for almost a year. But did you know they also offer a game changing app for businesses that reward their teams with incentive trips. Well they do. It's called Incentive Trip Kit. 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More fun, more memories, more ROI check it out now at incentive tripkit dot com or call Eric at eight eight eight five three three seventy six thirty seven Extension two O seven for the details. Nate Morribeto, reporting for WCNCTV headline light rail riders report fondling armed robbery assaults after Zarutzka's death. So this has all occurred after Arena Zerutzka's death, and after all of that went after the video was published, it went viral, all the national attention, right, this is this is what's been going on. And as I just mentioned in the other report that Kat says, Oh, we've got full staffing now at the private security firm. We're going to add some more CMPD officers and you'll start seeing that next week. So I guess criminals and fondlers better get to it before more officers arrive on the scene. I guess next week. Here's the rundown from WCNC. In the days and weeks after the killing of Arena Zarutzka, Charlotte Mecklemburg Police Department records show other light rail riders reported getting bitten, hit in the face, robbed at gunpoint, and forced to touch a person's genitals on and around the light rail. WCNC Charlotte requested CMPD records since her attack, and those records show just two days after her death, a twenty year old man reported a suspect bit him on both arms the morning of August twenty fourth on a light rail train at the Charlotte Transit Center on East Trade Street. On the afternoon of August thirtieth, six days later, records show and unknown suspect assaulted a victim by spitting or sorry by hitting him in the face on the light rail platform on North Tryon. A police report shows the case was cleared by arrest. In the early hours of September third, a reportedly homeless man said he was robbed at gunpoint and the suspect got away with almost three thousand dollars from his cash app account along East ninth Street. Just days later, on September fifth, along South Boulevard, a fifty two year old woman called nine to one one reporting somebody threatened her and then forced her to touch him in the groin. The reports all list the location of the reported crimes as the light rail slash trolley. They include a handful of reports of theft as well. What does our mayor say about all of this? And in response to this request for a response from WCNC, Mayor vyly Isles said, quote, Charlotte's safety is one of our highest priorities, and no, it should be your highest priority. It is the number one priority there is. This always drives me nuts when I hear people say that, Oh, that's our that's one of our top priorities. No, it's either the top or it's not. That's why it's called a priority. Okay, there is something number one that is the top priority. Number one. It is safety, slash security. Without that, everything else falls apart. Everything else falls apart, all the things you want to build, right, all the tourists you want to attract, All of that crumbles. Nothing works without security, Without public safety, it is not one of your highest priorities, Mayor, it is the highest priority. She goes, want to say, I remain committed to working with anyone who shares that goal. Okay, well, then I guess I'm not interested in working with the mayor on this because it's not one of our highest priorities. It's the highest. And if she doesn't understand that, she shouldn't be mayor. But her responses to all of this stuff on the light rail line has been indicative of her view on these items. I suspect she says, As I've said before, no single organization or level of government can solve the challenges of violent crime on its own. Real progress takes partnership. While we mourn Arena Zerutzka's life, we must also act we are taking steps to ensure the public transit system reflects a safe city for everyone. If we truly want to make lasting progress, both in the immediate future and over the long term, it will require a collaborative effort. Of course, there's no suggestion of what that looks like outside of what hiring more cops. Now. To her credit, I will say, in not her first attempt at a response, and not the second attempt at a respect. But her third attempt at a response in the initial wake of the murder, after, of course, the video went viral and she had to try to make a response, she did identify the court system, and ever since that one sentence in the third attempt at a response, she hasn't said anything else about it. I've seen no public pressure campaigns from her. I've seen no attempt to exert influence that she has. She has influence. She is a Democrat. This is a Democrat controlled city, this is a Democrat controlled county. The courts are Democrat controlled as well. She has influence. Democrats can exert influence to get these magistrates and judges to crack down on career violent criminals. North Carolina Representative Laura Budd she did a a press conference the other day and she said at the press conference over the last several weeks, our country has seen violence ricochet around the nation. What a terrible framing. And you know, you know she wrote that our country. First off, you say our country has seen the violence around the nation. Right, Well, you didn't need to say nation and country twice in the same sentence, first of all, but to use the word ricochet in the way. It just from here in the Queens City with the absolutely horrific murder of Arena Zarutzka, to the senseless and yet sadly familiar school shooting in Denver, Colorado, to a third shooting in a college campus in Utah. With Charlie Kirk She's a Democrat, she said, rising violence in communities across the country highlights the need to address the root causes of crime. All we have heard is blame shifting, threats and what I call cheap political shots. Okay, well, what are the root causes? This is what drives me nuts about Democrats when they talk this way. They did it with Kamala Harris and the illegal immigration problem. Right, Oh, we got to get to the root causes. Well, how about you can do all of the studying of the root causes on your downtime. But first, how about we stop the stuff from happening. How about we start there right, stop the illegal flow of immigration at the border. Oh, we can't possibly do that unless you pass our legislation. Well, Donald Trump proved that one wrong. You can actually do something in the short term. And this lip service about root causes to me sounds like stalling. 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The Crown is yours gambling problem called one eight hundred gambler in New York call eight seven seven eight hope and why or text, hope and why four six seven, three six nine. In Connecticut, help is available for a problem gambling Call eight eight eight seven eight nine seven seven seven seven or visit CCPG dot org. Play Responsibly on behalf of Boothill, Casino and Resort Kansas. Fees may apply in Illinois twenty one plus. Age and eligibility varies by jurisdiction. Void in Ontario. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. See Sportsbook dot DraftKings dot org. Comm Slash promos NFL Sunday Ticket offer for new subscribers only and auto renews until canceled. Digital games and commercial use excluded. Restrictions apply additional NFL Sunday Ticket terms or at YouTube dot com slash go Slash NFL Sunday Ticket slash terms, Limited time offer. David, Welcome to the program. Hello David, Hey Pete, I really enjoy your show. Than thanks, sir, I appreciate it. Yes, sir, pay. A vile as as A. Megan Kelly call Yeah, and City council have shown that they neither have the attitude or the aptitude to make the train safe, and without. Safe trainings, that whole South Corridor Canyon of housing is going to go the heck, yeah, why don't they just sell the whole cat system and be done with the criticism. No, they're not going to do that, and I don't Yeah, entity. Would come in there and make it safe in a day. Well, I do believe that ad entity would make it safe. But I don't think Charlotte wants to give up that authority. Government never gives up this kind of authority, right because it's a revenue. It's a way to raise revenue, like for example, the sales tax to fund the bus system, right, So, and that's like that's always been sort of the trade of It's like, oh, look at the trains. Everybody loves the trains, and meanwhile you're generating revenue to pay for the buses that people otherwise don't want to pay for. But it's isn't it a national headache? And in a point of embarrassment, it just shows their ineptitude? Yes, right now it is nationally Yeah, right now it is. But before the murder of Arena Zarutzka, before that, no, it was people held it up as a model for national transit systems to follow. But you are written in a couple of times and it's not safe. I I yeah, it's not safe. No, I agree, it was. It was. It was poorly designed as an honor system open platform city, and going back and trying to retrofit it now is going to be very difficult and expensive, and they don't plan to do that. They're going to try to, you know, maybe crack down on fair skippers, but we'll see how that goes. The they had an agent on every train. His presence by tickets and making people pay would more than pay for his being there. Yeah, can't they understand that? I would love to see the data run on how how many well, and I guess we may find out if they actually do fair enforcement, we may actually get a glimpse or some understanding of how much money they've been losing by not doing you know, fair verification. Well, well, with those losses. How was it held up as an example of what's what a good train system is, because a good train system is a long island railroad. I mean click and the click click clip, man, he checked your ticket. You are in trouble. Well, okay, so very few rail systems make money, so that's not one of the metrics that they use. They measure by ridership and they because all of them lose money, so they all require subsidies. Right. What makes the Charlotte uh sort of this uh uh this profile in transit is that it was used to spur development along the South Corridor. And that's what is very well absolutely and that was one of the pat McCrory said that that was one of the main reasons to do it at that time, and he was exactly right because the fixed stations then prompt that kind of dense development along the corridor. But the problem is, yeah, if it's not safe to ride now, no one's going to ride it, and what's going to happen to all those buildings. It's a very good point, Dave. I appreciate the call. Have a great weekend. 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 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 dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while i'm gone,