Democrat DA Pushed Racial Equity As Crime Spiked Before Horrific Train Stabbing

Crime in Charlotte, North Carolina, spiked under a left-leaning district attorney before the August stabbing death of a woman on a public train thrust the city into the national spotlight.

Violent crime in Charlotte was 13% higher in 2024 than in 2018, despite decreases after a COVID-19-era crime surge, according to FBI data that records homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Left-wing officials such as Democratic Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather, who has focused on promoting racial equity in the justice system, are now under renewed scrutiny since the Aug. 22 arrest of a mentally ill suspect with a lengthy criminal history in the murder of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska.

Surveillance camera footage released on Friday showed Zaruska boarding a light rail train in Charlotte at night, sitting in front of a hooded man — identified as Decarlos Brown — who stood up and raised his arm to stab her three times. Brown had been arrested 14 other times, racking up charges since 2011 that included felony larceny, robbery with a dangerous weapon, and communicating threats, The New York Post reported.

The August stabbing reflects the larger problem of violent crime under left-leaning officials in Mecklenburg County who have prioritized addressing supposed racial bias in the justice system.

After Merriweather took office in 2017, violent crime rose to an all-time high in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the height of anti-police advocacy tied to the Black Lives Matter movement, according to WCNC Charlotte.

The district attorney’s office announced in 2019 that he had started a “Diversity and Inclusion Team” made up of assistant district attorneys and legal assistants, teaching prosecutors to look at trials “through an equity lens.” The team also planned to build connections to Race Matters for Juvenile Justice, an organization working “to reduce disproportionality and disparate outcomes for children and families of color” in criminal justice, according to its website.

Merriweather has also pushed racial bias training for his prosecutors, leading to “actual changes in the courtroom, where prosecutors are now commonly observed explicitly raising issues of race in jury selection,” according to his campaign website.

In 2022, Merriweather noted a 20% decrease in his county’s use of a “habitual felon” law that enhances punishments for repeat offenders, saying it reflects the “thoughtfulness” of his approach, Bolts Magazine reported. “When people talk about me being reformed minded, I take that as a compliment,” he told North Carolina Lawyers Weekly in 2023.

North Carolina’s now-defunct Task Force on Racial Equity in the Criminal Justice System, created in June 2020, commended Merriweather’s office as a model for the rest of the state, his campaign website says. The state later passed multiple reform laws based on the task force’s recommendations, including one banning or restricting criminal penalties for numerous local ordinances.

Merriweather’s office did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

The left-wing MacArthur Foundation also awarded $2 million in 2016 to Mecklenburg County for its “Safety and Justice Challenge,” a nationwide program aimed at reducing “over-incarceration” and racial disparities, according to the foundation’s website. Merriweather’s office was one of several local agencies involved in the partnership.

The county decreased its incarceration rate from 741 per 100,000 residents in 2012 to 489 in 2020, according to the Vera Institute. The MacArthur Foundation then gave the county a $228,000 “capstone award” in 2023 to continue its “progress,” its website says.

The MacArthur Foundation did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

As of 2024, Charlotte’s violent crime rate was 5% higher than in 2019 and 13% higher than in 2018, according to data that local police reported to the FBI. The percentage decreased in 2021 and 2022, remained the same in 2023 and rose by 3% in 2024.

Zaruska’s murder has prompted both Merriweather and Democratic Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles — who faces a primary election against four challengers on Tuesday — to advocate for tougher approaches to crime. “We need a bipartisan solution to address repeat offenders who do not face consequences for their actions and those who cannot get treatment for their mental illness and are allowed to be on the streets,” Lyles said in a Monday statement. She also announced increased police patrols across Charlotte’s transit system.

The mayor’s office did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Merriweather said after the killing that courts can make it hard for prosecutors to lock up the mentally ill, Axios reported. A judge released Brown from custody on a “written promise to appear” in January after he was arrested for allegedly misusing the 911 system, according to WSOC-TV. Brown was diagnosed with schizophrenia and allegedly called 911 to say that a substance was controlling when he talked, walked and ate.

He also touted his support for the Pretrial Integrity Act, a 2023 state law that he said addresses repeat offenders by transferring pretrial detention authority from magistrates to judges in various cases, Axios reported. Merriweather also suggested considering tighter punishments for fare evasion after transit officials reported that Brown may have boarded the train without paying.

Lyles initially responded to Zaruska’s murder in August by arguing that “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health” and encouraging members of the public to have compassion toward mentally ill criminals as they would cancer patients.

The Democratic mayor, who took office in 2017, signed a proclamation in June 2020 declaring racism a “public health crisis” and arguing that “criminal justice practices have caused deep disparities, harm and mistrust.”

The White House chimed in to conservatives’ criticism of Charlotte’s leadership, calling Zaruska’s murder a failure of “woke policies” in a Monday statement. The White House pointed to the MacArthur Foundation program and other initiatives as evidence that soft-on-crime policies set the stage for Zaruska to die at the hands of a repeat offender.

“There are evil people. We have to be able to handle that,” President Donald Trump said Monday in response to the murder. “If we don’t handle that, we don’t have a country.”

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