Anthony Foxx’s Katrina Moment
Ever since my youngest ratted me out for dropping the F-Bomb in the car on the road trip home from an extended Memorial Day weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power and importance of words. How and when they’re used. What impact they can have. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the link I found anchoring my inbox on returning. It was to an article from the uptown paper. The article is headlined Fatal shooting in night of uptown Charlotte trouble.
I’d be hard pressed to craft a more disingenuously tepid and wholly misleading headline, given the story about the little spat of trouble: shots fired uptown, one dead, one wounded, 70 arrested during “a night of disorderly conduct by large numbers of people in Charlotte’s uptown.”
Large numbers of people – “trouble-makers” according to police and the uptown paper – flashing gang signs and engaging in wholesale mayhem, up to and including murder. That, by most accounts, would make the “large numbers of people” gangbangers. Which in turn would call for a logical and truthful headline: Gang Riot Erupts Uptown.
The paper came closer with its follow-up, headlined Uptown chaos leaves 1 dead:
One person was fatally shot and another wounded early Sunday after several hours of trouble in uptown Charlotte that ended with police trying to break up crowds and making 70 arrests.
The shootings took place shortly after 1 a.m. across 3rd Street from the Hilton hotel, two hours after Food Lion Speed Street had closed. Antwan Terrell Smith, 22, was shot in the head and died at the scene. Durante Kavon James, also 22, was shot in the leg and taken to Carolinas Medical Center, where he was in stable condition late Sunday.
The gunfire followed reports of unrest – which police say could be gang-related – centered largely around the Charlotte Transit Center between 4th and Trade streets. The charges were one of the city’s largest mass arrests in memory.
Which brings us whole circle to the importance of words and the impact they can have. Here is hizzoner’s quotes on the uptown “trouble/chaos/unrest”:
Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx called the incidents “very unfortunate” and the shootings “horrible,” but said it would have no impact on the DNC.
“That’s an entirely different event with a lot of other players involved in security,” Foxx said. “I think people understand a city is a city. And we move forward, and we are always trying to improve the model of safety for people who live in this community.
“I think our track record in terms of overall crime statistics suggests we are working hard to get there.”
Foxx, too, said the city is up to the task of securing the convention. “It’s a continual effort,” he said. “I think our city’s going to do just fine.”
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was a photo of George W. Bush looking out a window of Air Force One as it flew over the deadly devastation and wreckage left in the storm’s wake. Rightly or wrongly, it portrayed a president who was totally disconnected from reality, aloof, ignorant, and impotent to deal with the crisis at hand. It was an image from which Bush never fully recovered.
Foxx: “I think people understand a city is a city.”
If GOP mayoral contender Scott Stone has an iota of cutthroat political sense, his campaign is already prepping for a press conference and full-on media blitz, pointing out that, unlike the incumbent Democrat mayor, most Charlotteans don’t accept the premise that deadly shootings amidst an uptown gang riot that results in 70 arrests is understandable, because “a city is a city.” Not when your city’s uptown and transportation hub were turned overnight into a de facto war zone.
It probably wouldn’t hurt for Stone to also mention that the mayor should be more concerned about Char-Meck’s revolving-door criminal justice system (both shooting victims in uptown’s latest gang riot were repeat offenders with extensive rap sheets), than with whether “our city’s going to do just fine” with DNC 2012.
Here’s a new flash, mayor: our city’s not doing just fine now, and it’s happening under your watch.
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