Is crime getting worse in Charlotte? It’s a simple question that’s trickier to answer than one might think.
On the whole, no, crime rates in North Carolina’s largest city are down compared to last year. But homicides in Uptown Charlotte, the city’s central business district which includes banking headquarters, sports arenas, night clubs and transit hubs, is at its highest point since at least 2015.
The city has faced extreme scrutiny in the months since Iryna Zarutska’s murder on Charlotte’s light rail transit system in August, which has since escalated into calls for deployment of the National Guard to assist with policing.
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Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, became a rallying point for Republicans concerned about crime in America’s cities, President Donald Trump among them, whose administration is fighting multiple legal battles over his deployment of National Guard troops to Portland and Chicago to support immigration crackdowns in those cities.
National Guardsmen were also activated in Memphis and Washington, D.C., earlier this year specifically to address crime.
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein has dismissed the calls to activate the National Guard in Charlotte, which is, at least for now, enough to keep them out of the city.
“Local, well-trained law enforcement officers who live in and know their communities are best equipped to keep North Carolina neighborhoods safe, not military servicemembers,” Stein’s office said in a statement circulated to reporters.
Some pockets of Charlotte were also shaken this weekend by the U.S. Border Patrol, who made arrests across the city in an operation which the federal government said was targeted at undocumented migrants with criminal histories.
Immigration sweeps preceded the National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland.
Some seek National Guard deployment
It’s worth looking at how Charlotte got to this point, but sorting out the politics from the reality on the ground is difficult.
The firestorm surrounding Zarutska’s murder, compounded with an increase in homicides in Uptown (10 in 2025, compared to four last year), has created a narrative that the city is experiencing a “growing violence crisis,” as described in a Nov. 5 letter penned by Republican Congressmen Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan and Chuck Edwards, requesting that Stein dispatch the National Guard to assist CMPD with policing. Harrigan’s and Edwards’ districts do not include any of Charlotte, while Harris’ mostly rural district includes small portions of eastern Charlotte.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police, a union that represents 1,690 CMPD officers, made the same request a month earlier in a letter addressed to Stein, Trump and Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles, a Democrat.
FOP President Daniel Redford attributed the uptick of violent crimes in Uptown to a “severe staffing crisis” within the department.
FOP has pressured the Charlotte City Council for years to increase pay and fund additional CMPD officer positions. According to Redford, the department has about 1,800 of 1,936 sworn officer positions filled, or about a 7% vacancy rate.
In an interview with Carolina Public Press, he defended FOP’s request for the National Guard from criticism that it was purely a political maneuver.
“If keeping our officers safe by having an adequate number of police officers and support personnel out there, I mean, if that’s a political issue, then I think people need to revisit their view of politics,” he said.
“Because keeping our citizens safe and keeping police officers safe should not be a partisan issue.”
Prosecutors in Charlotte are also stretched thin, District Attorney Spencer Merriweather told CPP. The state legislature’s crime bill passed in the wake of Zarutska’s death funded 10 additional assistant district attorney positions for Mecklenburg County, but that still only brings the number of full-time prosecutors to half of what Merriweather thinks should be sufficient for a county of Mecklenburg’s size.
Too few prosecutors means that court calendars become backlogged and older criminal cases fall apart, allowing perpetrators to fall between the cracks.
“The issues that we face within our court system are problems of scale,” Merriweather said.
“Our job is to make sure that we’re not falling behind and that we’re meeting the public safety needs of our community, and as grateful as we are for the help that we’ve gotten, we’ve still got a long way to go.”
Addressing crime in Uptown Charlotte
Overall, crime is down in the city compared to last year, murders included, which CMPD celebrated in its most recent quarterly crime statistics report. But the data since 2020 shows a less positive picture, never consistently decreasing and instead remaining somewhere in the ballpark of 100 annually. To date, there’s been 83 homicides reported this year.
Most recently, CMPD announced it was investigating the death of 31-year-old Tanarus Tajuan Henry, who was shot and killed in Uptown Charlotte shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday.
The department has signaled that it is listening to the public’s concerns about crime, specifically in Uptown.
In October, the agency announced two new initiatives focused on policing in Charlotte’s city center. The first was the re-establishment of the department’s defunct Entertainment District Unit, which is tasked with policing the areas around bars and nightclubs from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m.
The other is what the department calls the CROWN Culture Initiative (an acronym for Center City’s Restoration of Order, Wellness and Nonviolence), which empowers officers to make arrests for what CMPD Captain Christian Wagner calls “quality of life” crimes: public urination, open alcohol containers and disorderly conduct.
As the top officer in CMPD’s Central Division, Wagner has overseen the implementation of these initiatives in Uptown Charlotte. So far, he said, they’ve been met with positive reception from the public.
The CROWN Culture Initiative strictly applies to a half-mile radius around Independence Square in the heart of the city, where Wagner said incidents involving police and resident complaints were most common.
“Whatever the numbers say, the feeling that people have, their perception of crime, is really, really important,” Wagner said.
“What we wanted to do is enhance the perception of safety and quality of life in Uptown by strictly enforcing statutes and ordinances that directly contribute to that sense of unlawful disorder.”
He added that officers are trained to connect individuals experiencing homelessness or mental health crises – those who might be disproportionately arrested for such offenses under this initiative – with the appropriate resources.
Border Patrol operation muddies the picture
An extra layer of complexity is the commencement of U.S. Border Patrol operations in the city this past weekend.
Gregory Bovino, a senior official in the Border Patrol who led previous large-scale immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles and Chicago this year, said on the social media platform X that his team arrested 81 undocumented immigrants in Charlotte on Saturday, many of whom had criminal histories.
Because of the lack of transparency by the federal government about its immigration operations, the supposed criminal histories of those arrested is difficult to verify.
Merriweather told CPP that while he doesn’t have comprehensive numbers, his prosecutor’s office does handle a “significant number” of criminal cases involving undocumented migrants, sometimes as perpetrators and sometimes as victims.
“What we try to look at is really just about the crime that’s been committed and what the impact on public safety is and meet that where it is,” he said.
Border Patrol is a separate agency from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly abbreviated as ICE, although both are federal-level agencies within the Department of Homeland Security.
ICE has operated in Charlotte and elsewhere across the state long before this weekend, but Border Patrol’s presence so far away from a national border is unusual. Neither CMPD nor the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office were a part of the planning or operations with Border Patrol, those agencies said.
Protests against federal immigration enforcement operations in several major cities across the country were the impetus for the federalization of the National Guard in those cities earlier this year.
City and state leaders in those places have sued the Trump Administration over those deployments, arguing that they were illegal, and federal judges so far have ruled in the local leaders’ favor. But the president has since appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has yet to weigh in on the matter.
UNC School of Law Professor Rick Su, who specializes in immigration law, told CPP that what happens in Charlotte could ultimately rely on how the Supreme Court rules.
“If violent protest ramps up in Charlotte, the administration will likely point to that in justifying deployment,” he said.
“But I suspect it wouldn’t be really that big of a deal what happens in Charlotte as the major question on authority is what the Supreme Court will say.”
In a video message Sunday, Stein said he had been in regular contact with local law enforcement as Border Patrol operated in the city this weekend.
“Public safety is our top priority, and our well-trained local officers know their communities and are here for the long haul,” he said.
He commended Charlotteans for remaining peaceful while accusing the federal government of “stoking fear” rather than fixing a “broken” immigration system.
“Rather than fix it, the federal government continues to play politics with it,” he added.
Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated.
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