Jon Levine of the Washington Free Beacon highlights a questionable appointment from former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, now the Democrats’ US Senate candidate.
North Carolina’s Democratic Senate nominee, Roy Cooper, named a former “ranking member” of the Bloods street gang—who was convicted of plotting a drive-by shooting murder—to a controversial “Racial Equity in Criminal Justice” task force he established as the state’s governor.
Cooper created the task force through an executive order in June 2020 during the so-called racial reckoning following the death of George Floyd, when the notion that the criminal justice system was racist against black people was fashionable and Democratic leaders were taking calls to “defund the police” seriously.
Cooper’s task force included a number of state officials, such as then-attorney general Josh Stein (now the state’s Democratic governor), but it also included community activists who advocated for radical criminal justice reforms. One of these activists was a convicted felon named Kerwin Pittman.
In 2007, Pittman, a former “ranking member of the Bloods,” was convicted of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and sentenced to more than 14 years in prison. He ultimately served 11.5 years with over a year in solitary confinement before being released. …
… Since May 2020—the same month of George Floyd’s death—Pittman has been the director of policy and program for Emancipate NC, according to his LinkedIn. He is also a veteran of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Emancipate NC has openly called for abolishing the police.
“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,” a company blog post from February 2023 notes.
Emancipate NC’s executive director, Dawn Blagrove, says policing is “just like slavery.”
