When the National Guard Looks Cheaper Than Teachers: What Charlotte’s Terrible Week Says About Our Priorities
A homicide, a missing teenager, and a letter asking for federal troops walk into City Hall. Meanwhile, we’re cutting teacher positions and subsidizing billionaire entertainment venues. Charlotte had a week.
By Jack Beckett
The body was found in the woods behind Devonshire Park on October 6. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police responded to what they initially logged as an assault call on Barrington Drive, but what they discovered in the wooded area near Devonshire Elementary School was a homicide scene. By the time investigators had cordoned off the area and begun their work, a neighbor was already talking to WSOC-TV about how safe the neighborhood had always felt—past tense now, you’ll notice—and how unsettling it was that someone had been killed in the woods where kids probably play.
The same day, authorities in Iredell County were searching for Neveah Smart, a 16-year-old girl missing from the area near West Iredell High School. She’s 5 feet 2 inches tall, brown hair, brown eyes, last seen in a light blue-gray sweatsuit and Lilo-and-Stitch shoes, often carrying a pink backpack. The details are specific because they have to be. Somewhere, someone knows something.
And somewhere else in Charlotte, the Fraternal Order of Police was finalizing a letter to Mayor Vi Lyles, Governor Josh Stein, and President Donald Trump requesting National Guard assistance to deal with what they characterized as a wave of homicides and an officer staffing crisis that current crime-fighting strategies cannot handle.
Let’s pause here, because this is where Charlotte’s week stopped being about discrete incidents and started being about choices.
The Letter: When You Can’t Staff a Police Force, Call in the Army
The FOP letter, signed by President Daniel Redford, cited recent high-profile killings to make its case: a double homicide, the shooting death of a 16-year-old in uptown Charlotte, and the general sense that the city had lost control of its streets. The letter landed on the desks of three people who could theoretically authorize National Guard deployment, though nobody seriously believes any of them will.
Here’s what the letter doesn’t say but implies: the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has a staffing problem it cannot solve through normal recruitment. Here’s what it also doesn’t say: deploying the National Guard costs somewhere between $30 million and $100 million depending on the size and duration of the deployment, and there is zero evidence that military presence reduces crime rates in American cities.
City Council member Malcolm Graham called the FOP request “window dressing,” which is the kind of diplomatic language elected officials use when they want to say “performative bullshit” without saying performative bullshit. Graham argued—correctly—that the community should focus on local solutions, by which he presumably means the boring, expensive, long-term investments in social infrastructure that actually prevent crime but don’t photograph well.
The FOP letter exists in a particular context that’s worth examining. According to WFAE reporting, Charlotte’s homicides were actually down at mid-year. The problem isn’t the trend line; it’s the headline-grabbing nature of specific incidents: the light-rail stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, the shooting of a 4-year-old boy, a lunch-hour shooting outside Latta Arcade, and the killing of a 16-year-old in a Target parking deck. These are the kinds of killings that make residents feel unsafe even when the overall statistics are improving, because they happen in places where people assume they’re safe—commuter trains, parking decks, downtown at lunchtime.
This is the paradox of urban crime: perception matters more than reality, and high-profile violence in public spaces creates political pressure that statistics cannot relieve. The FOP knows this. The letter is less about actually getting the National Guard deployed and more about creating a public record that says “we asked for help and were denied” if and when the next horrible thing happens.
But here’s the question nobody in the FOP letter addresses: if CMPD cannot recruit enough officers at current salary levels and working conditions, what makes anyone think soldiers—who are trained for combat, not community policing—would be better at preventing crime?
The Teacher Math: How to Solve a Shortage by Eliminating Jobs
The same week Charlotte’s FOP was requesting military assistance, the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association released a statewide survey showing 2,155 teacher vacancies at the start of this school year—31% fewer than a year earlier. On its face, this looks like good news. Schools are finally filling those empty classrooms, right?
Wrong.
According to Executive Director Jack Hoke, the decline in vacancies “largely resulted from the loss of federal pandemic relief money, which caused districts to cut positions.” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools began the year with 67 fewer vacancies than last year, but CMS also eliminated at least 40 vacant positions during the prior budget cycle.
Read that again: we solved the teacher shortage by eliminating teacher positions.
This is the kind of accounting trick that makes sense in a spreadsheet and nowhere else. If you have 100 teaching positions and can only fill 80 of them, you have a 20% vacancy rate. But if you eliminate 20 positions and can still only fill 80 of them, congratulations—you now have a 0% vacancy rate and the same number of teachers serving more students per classroom.
Grades 6-8 saw the largest vacancy drop, which sounds positive until you realize that middle school is where kids most need consistent adult relationships and where teacher burnout is already highest. Exceptional-children positions—the roles serving students with disabilities who are legally entitled to services under federal law—declined more modestly, meaning those positions are still harder to fill and more likely to be left vacant or filled with uncertified staff.
Hoke told WFAE that teacher pay and working conditions remain challenges, which is a professionally diplomatic way of saying “we’re asking people to do an impossible job for inadequate compensation and wondering why they’re not lining up for the privilege.”
Here’s the context that matters: North Carolina ranks 38th in the nation for teacher pay. The average teacher salary in Mecklenburg County is around $58,000, which sounds reasonable until you remember that Charlotte’s median home price is $375,000 and rent for a one-bedroom apartment in a safe neighborhood runs about $1,400 a month. A teacher earning $58,000 gross takes home roughly $3,700 a month after taxes, leaving $2,300 after rent for car payments, student loans, food, and everything else. And that’s before we factor in that most teachers spend $500-$1,000 of their own money annually on classroom supplies.
The pandemic relief money that districts lost funded positions that addressed learning loss, mental health services, and smaller class sizes—exactly the interventions that research shows reduce disciplinary problems and improve outcomes. When that money dried up, districts had a choice: raise taxes to maintain staffing, or cut positions and increase workload for remaining teachers.
They chose the latter, which is the same choice every public institution makes when faced with that decision, because raising taxes requires political courage and cutting positions just requires a spreadsheet.
The Transit Vote: Democracy by Committee Committee
On the same day police were investigating a homicide and the FOP was requesting the National Guard, Charlotte City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee voted 3-2 against recommending the appointment process for a new Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority to the full council.
Let’s unpack what that sentence actually means, because it’s a perfect example of how local government works in practice versus how most people think it works.
Mecklenburg County voters will decide in November whether to approve a one-cent sales tax increase to fund transit improvements. If the referendum passes, the revenue would flow to a new Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority, which would run the local transit system. The City Council needs to appoint people to serve on this authority’s board.
The Transportation and Planning Committee—a subset of the full council—had to decide whether to recommend moving forward with the appointment process. They voted against making that recommendation. This doesn’t kill the authority; it just means the committee isn’t ready to endorse how the appointments would be made.
Applications for the board close October 13. Interviews are scheduled for October 20-31. The full council is expected to vote in November if the referendum passes.
Notice the sequence: applications close before the referendum vote. Interviews happen before voters decide whether the authority will even exist. The full council votes on appointments after we know the referendum result but based on a process that started before.
This is what municipal governance looks like in practice—a series of overlapping timelines and procedural votes that make perfect sense to the people inside the process and no sense to anyone outside it. The committee’s 3-2 vote against recommending the process likely reflects concerns about how board members will be selected, what qualifications they’ll need, and who gets to make those decisions. These are legitimate questions. They’re also the kind of questions that should probably be answered before you start collecting applications.
The broader context here is that Charlotte has been trying to build a functional transit system for approximately 30 years with mixed results. The city has a light rail line that mostly serves uptown and the University area. It has a streetcar that’s more of a tourist attraction than transportation infrastructure. It has a bus system that works well if you work downtown and poorly if you work anywhere else.
The proposed one-cent sales tax would raise an estimated $13.5 billion over 30 years, which sounds like a lot until you realize that building one mile of light rail costs roughly $150 million and the city wants to build several dozen miles. The referendum is structured so that the money can be used for both roads and transit, which is how you build a coalition that includes both people who want more buses and people who think buses are for poor people.
The committee’s resistance to the appointment process might reflect skepticism about whether the authority will actually be independent or whether it’ll just be another board where the same people who already make decisions continue making decisions with a different letterhead.
The Venue: When Billionaires Want to Build Things
Tepper Sports—the entity controlled by David Tepper, who owns the Carolina Panthers and is worth approximately $21 billion—has proposed building a 4,400-seat indoor music venue adjacent to Bank of America Stadium. The project would be privately funded and aims to fill what Tepper Sports describes as a gap between existing 2,500-seat and 8,500-seat venues in Charlotte. The venue could host 80-100 events annually, and construction would likely occur between 2027 and 2030.
Let’s start with what’s genuinely good about this: a privately funded venue that expands Charlotte’s entertainment infrastructure without requiring public subsidy is better than the alternative, which is a publicly funded venue that expands Charlotte’s entertainment infrastructure while requiring public subsidy.
Now let’s talk about what “privately funded” actually means in practice.
When wealthy developers say a project will be privately funded, they typically mean the vertical construction—the building itself—won’t require direct public investment. What they don’t mention is that the horizontal infrastructure—roads, sidewalks, parking, utilities, traffic improvements—often requires public investment, or that the project will generate requests for tax incentives, TIF districts, or other public subsidies that reduce the project’s tax burden.
Bank of America Stadium, where this venue would be built, opened in 1996 with $248 million in total costs. The city contributed $87 million through revenue bonds backed by property taxes. The deal also included infrastructure improvements around the stadium that the city funded separately. That’s the template for how these projects work: private money builds the facility, public money builds everything around the facility, and then everyone agrees to call it a public-private partnership.
Tepper bought the Panthers in 2018 for $2.275 billion, making it the highest price ever paid for an NFL franchise at the time. He’s worth about $21 billion, depending on how the market’s treating his hedge fund on any given day. He does not need Charlotte’s financial assistance to build a 4,400-seat venue.
But here’s what will happen: Tepper Sports will propose the venue as privately funded. The city will study traffic patterns and determine that additional road improvements are necessary to handle events. Those improvements will cost $8-12 million, which the city will fund through bonds or the capital budget. Tepper Sports will request expedited permitting and zoning variances, which the city will grant because economic development. The venue will apply for various tax incentives available to entertainment facilities that create jobs, which will reduce its property tax burden.
Three years after opening, a reporter will calculate the total public investment in infrastructure and foregone tax revenue and determine that the “privately funded” venue actually cost taxpayers $25 million. The city will dispute this calculation. Tepper Sports will decline to comment. And everyone will agree that the venue has been good for Charlotte’s cultural scene, which will be true and also beside the point.
The point is this: when billionaires propose to build things in cities, the cities should be grateful and skeptical in equal measure. Grateful because new venues and amenities expand what’s possible in a city. Skeptical because the accounting around public versus private funding is always more complicated than the press release suggests.
The Excelsior Club: Investing in History (After Letting It Sit Empty for Nine Years)
Charlotte City Council’s Jobs and Economic Development Committee advanced a funding proposal for redeveloping the historic Excelsior Club, which has been closed since 2016. The $8.3 million project would convert the club into an events space. Developer Shawn Kennedy requested $1.5 million each from the city and county—$3 million in public funds for a project that the owner let sit vacant for nine years.
The Excelsior Club opened in 1944 and was a cornerstone of Charlotte’s Black community during segregation. It hosted performances by Ray Charles, James Brown, and other legendary musicians when Black performers couldn’t stay in Charlotte’s whites-only hotels. The club closed in 2016, and the building has been deteriorating since.
Council member Malcolm Graham—who appears to be having quite a week—said the investment is part of corridor revitalization, which is Charlotte’s current buzzword for “we’re going to gentrify this neighborhood but call it something else.”
Here’s how corridor revitalization works: the city identifies a historically Black or working-class neighborhood that’s close to uptown or another desirable area. The city invests public money in infrastructure improvements, streetscaping, and subsidies for developments that promise to preserve the neighborhood’s character. Property values increase. Property taxes increase. Original residents can’t afford the new taxes or rents and move out. New residents move in. Within 10 years, the neighborhood has been transformed from “historic” to “trendy,” and the people who made it culturally significant live somewhere else.
The Excelsior Club redevelopment follows this pattern exactly. The building is historic and culturally important. A private developer wants to convert it to an events space, which will primarily serve people with disposable income to rent event spaces. The city and county will each contribute $1.5 million to make this happen. When the project is complete, the Excelsior Club will exist as a museum piece—a place where rich people rent space for weddings and corporate events while learning about the building’s historic role in the Black community that can no longer afford to gather there.
Graham is right that investment in the corridor is necessary. He’s also probably aware that investment without anti-displacement measures just moves people around. But anti-displacement measures require either rent control (illegal in North Carolina) or massive investments in affordable housing (expensive and politically difficult), so instead we get public subsidies for private developments that promise “to honor the history” of places while fundamentally changing who can afford to be there.
The developer let the building sit vacant for nine years. During that time, the roof deteriorated, water damage accumulated, and the cost of restoration increased. Now the developer wants the city and county to contribute $3 million to fix the building so he can operate it as a for-profit events business. The city will agree because saying no to this project looks like saying no to preserving Black history. The county will agree because the city is agreeing. And in five years, someone will write a think piece about how the Excelsior Club represents both Charlotte’s commitment to preserving its past and its failure to protect the communities that created that past.
The Lotto Winner: Proof That Luck Beats Planning
A Rowan County player won a $1.86 million digital Monopoly Fortune jackpot on October 6, marking the second online jackpot above $1.6 million in North Carolina within a week. After the win, the progressive jackpot reset to $150,000 and had already climbed past $228,000 by the time WSOC reported the story. Winners have 180 days to claim the prize.
Good for them. Genuinely. Someone in Rowan County just won life-changing money, and that’s a better story than most of what happened this week.
But let’s talk about what the lottery actually is: a voluntary tax on people who are bad at math, administered by the state, marketed to people who can’t afford it, and justified by the fiction that the revenue funds education.
North Carolina’s lottery revenue goes to the state’s education budget, which sounds noble until you realize that lottery money doesn’t increase education funding—it replaces it. When the lottery generates $1 billion for schools, the legislature reduces general fund education allocations by roughly $1 billion and redirects that money elsewhere. The total education budget stays roughly the same; the legislature just gets to fund other priorities without raising taxes.
This is the same accounting trick we saw with teacher vacancies: you solve a problem by changing how you count it.
The people who play the lottery most frequently are disproportionately poor, less educated, and more likely to be people of color—the exact populations that North Carolina’s education system is already failing. The state takes money from people who can’t afford it, promises that it funds schools, and then uses the lottery revenue to avoid increasing education funding through general taxation that would ask wealthier residents to contribute more.
The winner in Rowan County beat odds of roughly 1 in 2.3 million. They will pay about 37% in combined federal and state taxes on the winnings, leaving them with approximately $1.17 million. If they take it as a lump sum and invest it conservatively, they might generate $40,000-50,000 in annual income, which is enough to be comfortable but not enough to quit working. If they’re smart, they’ll hire a financial advisor before telling anyone except their spouse. If they’re like most lottery winners, they’ll tell everyone, make a series of poor financial decisions, and be broke within a decade.
But for right now, someone in Rowan County has $1.86 million, which is more than Charlotte is willing to invest annually in the kind of social programs that might prevent homicides or help recruit teachers.
The Panthers: The Only Thing That Worked This Week
The Carolina Panthers rallied from 17 points down to defeat the Miami Dolphins on October 6, tying the largest comeback in franchise history. The Panthers remained 2-0 at home and will host the Dallas Cowboys next Sunday.
This is the only unambiguously good thing that happened in Charlotte all week. The Panthers were down 17 points. They made adjustments. They executed. They won.
They did not request the National Guard to play defense. They did not eliminate player positions and declare they’d solved roster vacancies. They did not wait to win the lottery. They identified what wasn’t working, changed it, and did the work required to win.
It’s almost like having a plan and investing in the people required to execute that plan produces better results than hoping external forces will solve your problems.
The Food Price Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About
The USDA reports that food prices rose 24% from 2020 to 2024. Coffee prices increased 45% year-over-year in August. Consumer Reports advises meal planning, incorporating meatless meals (which could save roughly $1,000 per year), buying generic brands (30-70% cheaper than name brands), storing food properly, and stocking up during sales.
This is excellent advice for people who have time to meal plan, freezer space to stock up during sales, and the cognitive bandwidth to track prices across multiple stores. For everyone else—which is to say, for the people most affected by food inflation—it’s about as useful as telling them to invest in index funds.
Food inflation hits poor families exponentially harder than wealthy ones because poor families spend a much larger percentage of their income on food and have fewer options for absorbing the increase. If your household earns $200,000 a year and food costs go up 24%, you notice and complain but you’re not making meaningful sacrifices. If your household earns $40,000 a year and food costs go up 24%, you’re choosing between groceries and rent.
The advice to incorporate meatless meals assumes people have the time and knowledge to prepare meals from scratch. A box of pasta, a jar of sauce, and some frozen vegetables is cheap. It’s also nutritionally inadequate if that’s what you’re eating most nights because you can’t afford protein. The advice to buy generic brands assumes all products have generic equivalents with comparable quality, which isn’t true for many products. The advice to stock up during sales assumes you have the cash flow to buy 10 cans of beans when they’re on sale instead of buying two cans at regular price because that’s what you can afford this week.
Charlotte is experiencing a food affordability crisis at the same time it’s proposing to spend $1.5 million on an events space and considering a request to deploy the National Guard. The city has food deserts where residents cannot buy fresh produce without driving 30 minutes. It has neighborhoods where the only grocery options are dollar stores that sell shelf-stable processed food. It has public schools where 60% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch because their families’ incomes fall below 185% of the federal poverty level.
Food inflation is not a problem Charlotte can solve alone—it’s driven by national and global factors including supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and corporate consolidation in the food industry. But Charlotte could choose to prioritize food security the way it prioritizes stadium improvements or entertainment venue development. It doesn’t, because food security is boring and doesn’t photograph well.
The Weather: An Interlude
Charlotte experienced patchy fog and sunshine with highs near 80°F this week. A cold front is expected to move in with scattered showers and cooler temperatures, with highs near 70°F and lows in the upper 40s, followed by a dry, pleasant weekend.
This is objectively pleasant fall weather and the only other unambiguously good thing that happened to Charlotte this week besides the Panthers comeback.
The Shooting at Romare Bearden Park: When Everyone Has Guns
Court documents show that 19-year-old Darnell Rashawn Harris opened fire at men in Romare Bearden Park. Harris claimed self-defense, telling police he fired only after the men pulled guns on him. He faces charges for shooting a firearm in the city and marijuana possession.
Let’s think about what this story tells us. A 19-year-old was in a park in uptown Charlotte. He encountered other men. Those men allegedly pulled guns on him. He pulled his gun and fired at them. Nobody died, which is good. But multiple people were carrying firearms in a public park in the middle of uptown, and at least one of them felt justified in firing those weapons.
This is not a story about crime in any traditional sense. It’s a story about what happens when firearms proliferation becomes normalized to the point where a teenager going to a park brings a gun, encounters other people who also brought guns, and everyone’s first response to conflict is to draw weapons.
Harris claims self-defense, which might be legally viable under North Carolina’s Stand Your Ground law. If he reasonably believed the other men were threatening him with deadly force, he’s allowed to use deadly force in response without attempting to retreat. The problem is that Stand Your Ground laws create situations where everyone involved can reasonably claim they acted in self-defense: the men who pulled guns first could claim they felt threatened by Harris’s presence, and Harris can claim he felt threatened by their guns.
This is the gun-rights version of mutually assured destruction: everyone is armed, everyone feels threatened, and everyone shoots first because waiting to see if the other person actually intends to fire gets you killed.
Charlotte has a gun problem that it cannot solve through policing. North Carolina law preempts cities from regulating firearms in any meaningful way. The city cannot ban guns in parks. It cannot require permits for concealed carry. It cannot impose waiting periods or universal background checks. State law allows anyone who can legally own a firearm to carry it concealed without a permit, and federal law allows anyone without a felony conviction to buy a gun.
The result is situations like Romare Bearden Park, where multiple people bring guns to a public space, conflict arises, and guns get fired. The FOP letter asking for the National Guard won’t change this. More police in the park won’t change this. The only thing that would change this is reducing the number of guns in circulation, which is politically impossible in North Carolina.
So instead, we’ll keep having situations where teenagers shoot at each other in public parks, claim self-defense, and face minor charges that probably won’t result in significant jail time because proving criminal intent is difficult when everyone involved had a gun and everyone claims they fired in self-defense.
The Assault After the Crash: When Bad Gets Worse
On September 26 (publicized October 6), after a motor vehicle accident in Boone, several individuals attacked the crash victims, throwing a rock through a windshield and assaulting them before fleeing. The Watauga County Sheriff’s Office is seeking information on the suspects.
This story is bizarre enough that it’s worth examining what it tells us about where we are as a society. Someone was in a car accident. Instead of exchanging insurance information like normal humans, other people attacked them, threw a rock through their windshield, and fled the scene.
This is not rational behavior. It’s not criminal behavior in pursuit of any logical goal. It’s pure violence as response to circumstance, which suggests either that the attackers were dealing with some other issue (drugs, mental health crisis, prior conflict with the victims) or that we’ve reached a point where some people’s immediate response to any conflict is violence.
The Watauga County Sheriff’s Office is seeking information, which means they don’t have suspects, which means this is probably going to be one of those crimes that gets filed in the “unsolved” category unless someone comes forward. And someone might, because attacking people after a car accident while throwing rocks is not the kind of crime that stays secret—people talk, especially if they were there or know someone who was.
But the story sits there in the news cycle as one more example of casual violence that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t have an obvious solution, and just makes everyone feel a little less safe.
The National Context: Because Charlotte Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum
While Charlotte was dealing with homicides, missing teenagers, and requests for federal troops, the federal government was on Day Six of a shutdown. Air traffic controllers—who make about $60,000 a year and are literally responsible for preventing planes from crashing into each other—were calling in sick because they weren’t being paid.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told reporters that the flight delays might “push lawmakers toward a deal,” which is Washington-speak for “maybe when rich people miss their flights to Aspen, we’ll actually do something about this.”
The shutdown is happening because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on spending priorities. Republicans want cuts to social programs and increased military spending. Democrats want to maintain social programs and are willing to increase military spending if that’s what it takes. Neither party wants to be blamed for the shutdown, but both parties believe the other party will get blamed more, so the shutdown continues.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has withheld infrastructure funds from Democratic-led cities including Chicago and New York, citing “race-based contracting” as the justification. This is remarkable for its honesty if nothing else: the administration is openly using federal funds as a weapon to punish cities that don’t vote Republican and wrapping it in language about discrimination against white contractors.
Charlotte has not had its infrastructure funds withheld yet, possibly because North Carolina is a swing state and the Trump administration doesn’t want to antagonize voters here. But the precedent being set is clear: federal funding is no longer distributed based on need or formula; it’s distributed based on political loyalty.
The same week, new court filings revealed that the Trump administration plans to send hundreds of National Guard troops from Illinois and Texas to Chicago. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker condemned the move as “Trump’s invasion,” and Chicago officials warned that federal raids have escalated violence.
This is the context in which Charlotte’s FOP is requesting National Guard deployment. It’s unlikely the request will be granted—Charlotte is not Chicago, and North Carolina is not Illinois—but the FOP letter exists in a moment when deploying federal troops to cities is no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration has demonstrated its willingness to use federal forces against cities it considers insufficiently loyal.
Charlotte’s request will probably be denied, or ignored, or filed away as politically inconvenient. But the fact that the FOP felt comfortable making the request tells you something about how normalized the idea of militarizing American cities has become.
The International Dimension: Gaza, Ukraine, and French Politics
Ukraine reports that Russia fired more than 50 missiles and nearly 500 drones on October 6, killing five people and leaving many without power. Poland deployed fighter jets to secure its airspace. The war continues.
Negotiations in Cairo aim to broker a ceasefire in Gaza. Hamas and Israel have agreed to parts of President Trump’s 20-point plan, which calls for swapping all remaining hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners and eventually withdrawing Israeli forces. Major questions remain about whether both sides will accept all conditions.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu resigned less than a day after forming his cabinet, leaving President Emmanuel Macron to decide whether to call another snap election. The resignation follows mass protests led by trade unions against budget cuts.
These stories matter to Charlotte in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. The war in Ukraine affects global food prices because Ukraine is one of the world’s largest wheat exporters. The conflict in Gaza affects global oil prices because instability in the Middle East always affects oil prices. French political instability affects the European Union’s ability to coordinate on economic policy, which affects global markets, which affects Charlotte’s economy.
But more fundamentally, these stories matter because they’re all about the same thing Charlotte is dealing with: the breakdown of systems that used to work, the failure of institutions to deliver what they promised, and the increasing willingness of people to embrace extreme solutions when the moderate ones stop producing results.
Charlotte wants the National Guard because the police can’t recruit enough officers. France is having political crises because the government can’t fund social programs without either cutting services or raising taxes. Ukraine and Gaza are at war because diplomatic solutions have failed. These are different problems with different causes, but they all reflect a world where the systems we built to prevent worst-case scenarios are failing.
What It All Means: The Cost of Getting Priorities Wrong
Charlotte had a terrible week. A person was killed in the woods behind a park. A teenager is missing. The FOP wants federal troops. We’re cutting teacher positions while proposing public subsidies for private development. We’re debating transit governance while people can’t afford groceries.
None of these problems are unique to Charlotte. Every mid-sized American city is dealing with some version of the same issues: inadequate public safety resources, teacher shortages, infrastructure needs, food insecurity, and the question of how to fund public services without raising taxes on people who don’t want to pay more taxes.
But Charlotte’s week illustrates what happens when a city consistently prioritizes the visible over the effective, the immediate over the sustainable, and the politically popular over the genuinely useful.
Requesting the National Guard is visible and immediate and politically popular with the people who think crime is primarily a law enforcement problem. It’s also expensive and ineffective and doesn’t address any of the root causes of violence.
Cutting teacher positions balances the budget and avoids politically difficult conversations about tax increases. It also increases class sizes, accelerates teacher burnout, and makes it harder to recruit the next generation of teachers, which creates a vicious cycle that gets more expensive to fix the longer you wait.
Building entertainment venues creates ribbon-cutting opportunities and demonstrates that Charlotte is a “world-class city” (whatever that means). It also diverts resources from less glamorous but more essential infrastructure like buses and sidewalks and affordable housing.
Subsidizing the Excelsior Club redevelopment preserves a historic building and generates positive press coverage. It also contributes to the gentrification of the corridor and demonstrates that public money primarily serves private developers.
None of these are necessarily wrong decisions in isolation. Cities need law enforcement. Budgets must balance. Cultural amenities matter. Historic preservation is valuable.
But when you look at them together, a pattern emerges: Charlotte consistently chooses investments that are visible, immediate, and politically safe over investments that are effective, sustainable, and politically difficult. This is not unique to Charlotte; it’s how most American cities work. But that doesn’t make it less destructive.
The FOP letter requesting the National Guard will be denied or ignored. The teacher positions will stay eliminated. The Tepper venue will be built with some amount of public subsidy that everyone will pretend doesn’t count as public subsidy. The Excelsior Club will become an events space for people who can afford to rent events spaces. The transit authority will be formed or not formed, and the referendum will pass or fail, and Charlotte’s transit system will remain inadequate either way.
And next year, we’ll have another week like this one, where the problems we didn’t address come back in slightly different forms, and we’ll have the same conversations about solutions we won’t implement.
The Only Real Solution: Investment That Nobody Wants to Pay For
Here’s what would actually reduce violence in Charlotte: fully staffed schools with small class sizes and robust mental health services. Youth programs that give teenagers something to do besides hang out in parks with guns. Living-wage jobs that give people economic stability. Affordable housing that prevents the financial stress that correlates with every bad outcome we measure. Mental health treatment that’s accessible before someone reaches crisis point. Drug treatment that works better than jail.
Here’s what all of that costs: more than Charlotte currently spends on those things, which means either raising taxes or cutting something else.
Here’s what Charlotte will do instead: request the National Guard, which will be denied; propose new task forces and commissions; have more community conversations; and wait for the next crisis.
The Panthers won because they invested in players, coaches, and systems, then executed the plan. Charlotte keeps losing because it invests in whatever photographs well and hopes that’s enough.
It’s not enough. It never has been. But we keep pretending it might be, because the alternative is admitting that solving these problems requires sustained investment over decades, and American cities don’t do sustained investment over decades. We do photo opportunities and press releases and the occasional ribbon cutting.
Charlotte deserves better. It’s probably not going to get it. But at least the weather will be nice this weekend.
Jack Beckett is a senior writer for The Charlotte Mercury and requires approximately 47 ounces of coffee per weekday to maintain his baseline level of cynicism about municipal governance. He’s tried switching to tea but finds it lacks the necessary bitterness to properly fuel investigative journalism about public-private partnerships and tax increment financing schemes.
For deeper dives into Charlotte’s politics, governance, and the numbers behind the spin, explore our full coverage at cltmercury.com/news and cltmercury.com/politics. Our special 2025 election coverage—we call it Poll Dance 2025because democracy is a contact sport and somebody’s getting stepped on—breaks down what’s actually at stake when you vote for city council, mayor, and the transit tax referendum. We publish weekly, not daily, because some stories need time to marinate in civic frustration before they’re ready to serve. You can always message us on X.com (or Twitter, or as we call it, Twix) where we post updates, behind-the-scenes research, and the occasional thread about zoning law that absolutely nobody asked for but everybody needs to understand.
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This article, “When the National Guard Looks Cheaper Than Teachers: What Charlotte’s Terrible Week Says About Our Priorities,” by Jack Beckett is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0.
“When the National Guard Looks Cheaper Than Teachers: What Charlotte’s Terrible Week Says About Our Priorities”
by Jack Beckett, The Charlotte Mercury (CC BY-ND 4.0)