Whoa! Even the Uptown paper of record cannot but heap praise on the Crime in Charlotte blog. Welcome to the party, better late than never.
And how about that Deputy District Attorney Bart Menser on CinC questioning him about repeat offenders.
“She was very reasonable from the start. I thought she asked good questions,” Menser said about the blogger. “I don’t know that we’ve had somebody doing exactly this type of thing before.”
Really? There used to be such a thing, it was called a newspaper. This is no knock on the Tryon Street crowd, they are merely following a trend in journalism that is now at least 20 years old but has really picked up in the last five or so years. That trend pushes hard crime reporting out in favor of more feature-y, human interest stories.
Crime reporting is now almost treated as a spot news phenomenon — a new set of stats are out, a robbery happened last night — rather than a continuing narrative about a key aspect of local governance. Without any kind of overarching perspective, crime just becomes a random series of events without any cause and effect.
What CinC has done in go back and fill in the blanks and provide both the details and the framework to make sense of, well, crime in Charlotte. What those details show is that Menser and his boss Peter Gilchrist have been running a catch-and-release program for violent criminals in recent years.
