By Chris Fitzsimon
It’s not like House and Senate leaders scrambling to resolve differences between the two chambers’ budgets needed a reminder that they are operating in a highly charged political year, but they received one anyway this weekend with the first gubernatorial debate between Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue and Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory before members of the North Carolina Bar Association.
The pundits reporting on the debate seemed impressed with McCrory, describing him as everything from folksy and comfortable to tanned, relaxed and funny. Perdue was judged to be anxious and uncomfortable as well as genuine and approachable.
Sounds like McCrory would have the edge if they were running for student council, but they are both interested in a job much more important than that, though it was hard to tell from some of the accounts of the substance of each candidate’s remarks.
Neither covered much new ground, Perdue talking about education and children, McCrory talking a lot about crime, which was reported as playing to the audience of judges, defense lawyers and prosecutors.
But talking about crime is a key part of McCrory’s campaign pitch, which at first glance may seem like an unusual choice given the polls about what issues people in the state want their elected officials to address.
Even surveys from the right-wing Pope Civitas Institute that McCrory’s top campaign consultant used to run confirm that. The group’s May poll found that improving public education is overwhelmingly the top issue on voters minds, with 21 percent of people listing it as most important, more than twice as many as the economy, which ranked second at 11 percent.
Crime, even when grouped together with anything people said about gangs, tied for the 10th-most important issue at two percent, and that’s only if you don’t count the percentages of people who said they weren’t sure, seven percent, and voters who volunteered an issue that was lumped together as “other,†five percent.
There’s a reason crime doesn’t come quickly to mind as a top issue. It has decreased in North Carolina in the last 10 years, though you’d never know it from the headlines and lead stories of many television news programs or from McCrory’s rhetoric at the debate on Saturday.
He attacked what he called the status quo in Raleigh that he says has “not been tough on crime,†and said that gas stations in Rocky Mount have metal bars, “not a good sign we’re living in a safe state.â€
None of the accounts of the debate mentioned the statistics from the State Bureau of Investigation that show crime in Rocky Mount and across North Carolina is lower than it was 10 years ago in every category, violent and nonviolent.
There have been occasional upticks from one year to the next, and any crime is too much crime, but the state murder rate was lower in 2007 than it was in 1998. So was the robbery rate, the assault rate, the burglary rate and the motor vehicle theft rate.
It is not clear if the Raleigh status quo deserves the credit, but nobody can blame state leaders for a growing crime rate because the numbers show it’s falling.
The numbers never seem to make it into McCrory’s speeches, and not many of the news stories about his campaign appearances either. Perdue didn’t put McCrory’s comments in context in the debate, instead following the advice of her political consultants and pledging to “get tough on criminals†herself as governor.
North Carolina has a lot of work to do fighting crime, including more investments in the court system and programs that divert nonviolent offenders into alternative programs where they can pay restitution to their victims and receive treatment that can turn their lives around.
What we don’t need are politicians who try to scare us about crime because they have no real ideas about education or health care, the issues people are worried about, or politicians afraid to confront the misinformation and set the record straight to force a more honest debate about the state’s future.