Axios: MAGA Seizes On Grisly Charlotte Murder

This is Axios’ takeaway

From the article

MAGA influencers are drawing repeated attention to violent attacks to elevate the issue of urban crime — and accuse mainstream media of under-covering shocking cases.

Shocking video of the fatal Aug. 22 knife attack on 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a light-rail car in Charlotte, North Carolina, dominated weekend conversation on Trump-friendly social media.

The big picture: The rising number of surveillance cameras in public spaces, including on Charlotte’s light rail, has become a big accelerant in these cases.

The video is easily shared or leaked, and can instantly pollinate across social media — a visual counterpoint to statistics showing crime decreases.

How dare people share the grisly video! MAGA people! Really, people of all political stripes were commenting, especially from the Charlotte area. This is Axios’ big picture, that a video can be shared. Not that a career criminal brutally murdered a young woman from Ukraine for no reason.

Axios goes on to mention that Trump will comment when he knows more, and a whole bunch of other Republicans tweeted about it.

The suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, was charged with first-degree murder. His criminal record includes charges of armed robbery, felony larceny, breaking and entering, and shoplifting, according to jail records cited by WBTV.

Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather, in an interview with Axios Charlotte last week, didn’t comment directly on the case but acknowledged the limitations and complexities of holding defendants with mental health issues accountable.

The guy is 34 with a rap sheet that includes all that: why is he not in jail?

(NY Post) He even served five years in prison for armed robbery, only to be arrested for assaulting his sister just months after he was released in September 2020, the Daily Mail reported.

In NC, the maximum jail sentence is 17 years for armed robbery. He was surely out on release in 2020, and should have been sent back to the slammer. The dude was nuts and homeless, being kicked out of his house by his mom because of his violent tendencies. Make asylums great again.

Between the lines: Influential conservative social media accounts accused major national news outlets of not covering the racial dynamics of the Charlotte killing — a white victim and a Black suspect — with the same intensity as they did in the case of Daniel Penny.

Um, Axios’ only mention before their Republicans Pounce article was “Mecklenburg’s DA acknowledges criminal justice system gaps following light rail killing.” It’s barely being mentioned in the local Charlotte or Raleigh news. It was barely mentioned in the nation news.

What’s next: Trump won’t just discuss this case once, his team says. He’s going to keep highlighting crime because it’s important to him — and he believes it moves voters as the GOP tries to keep control of Congress in next year’s midterms.

“Crime is not a data thing — it’s a feeling thing,” the Trump adviser said. “Politicians don’t understand that it’s about how you feel when you walk on the subway platform.”

Crime is still mostly above the pre-pandemic level, and people feel it. They’ve seen it. Is it down? Many cities, like Seattle and Portland, have a much worse crime ranking now then at the start of COVID and BLM. They were both in the mid to upper 20s. Now they are 1 and 2 (100 is best). And the media wants to downplay what we see for their political purposes.