Our last issue of 2019 focused on 19 people who’d been consequential to the Triangle last year. Some readers didn’t approve of Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin’s inclusion on our list.
“I see you are reporting to fit your false narrative, even reinventing history with your claim that MAB was surprised to get your endorsement, though you let slip she secretly interviewed with you prior to announcing her decision to run for mayor,” wrote anonymous commenter NO NAME REQUIRED.
Two things: 1) The story said Baldwin was surprised to get The News & Observer’s endorsement. 2) We broke the news of her mayoral announcement, which made an advance interview necessary.
“Let’s do some math,” adds ALLEN. “Sixty-nine percent of the people who voted for Raleigh mayor voted against her! She has no mandate. Her arbitrary rule that you can’t say the chief of police’s name is shocking and shouldn’t go unchallenged. Why are the INDY-approved councilors sitting there and doing nothing?” (As we reported last week, the council was set to revise those rules on Tuesday, after this newspaper goes to press.)
Also on the list was Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry, a justice reform advocate to whom CARTER takes exception: “Every one of us in Durham—white, black, Latinx, Asian, and any other combination thereof—is in grave danger as long as Deberry and the People’s Alliance have a stranglehold over criminal justice. Deberry has refused to prosecute habitual criminals, and by admitting that she will not prosecute nonviolent crimes, she simply opens the door to all manner of chaos, which eventually does escalate into violent crime. This city has seen 40 homicides this year and an untold number of shootings, robberies, and property crime, yet Deberry (and the city council) refuses to even offer token relief, such as actually prosecuting criminals or hiring additional police officers. The very idea of criminal justice reform is misguided if the motivation is simply to reduce the number of black people in jail. If the people in jail are criminals, then they should be in jail. It’s a slap in the face to actual law-abiding black people (yes, there are some!) to assume that they just simply can’t help being criminals because they are black (and maybe even poor).”
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