Uptown's safety image facing an uphill fight

By dusk, the place changes. The workday crowd has come and gone from the Charlotte Transportation Center, filing on buses to be taken out of uptown. A new crowd has replaced it, coming off those same buses to hang out with a menacing, and growing, group.

“Nooooo,” says Christina Cannie, standing with a coworker. “I don’t like to come here later.”
She is waiting for a bus to take her home from a shift at Showmars. She is here most weekdays, usually before dusk but occasionally later. That, Christina says, “is when people just start acting crazier.”

We’re talking about uptown safety again this week, and once again, our lens is pointing toward the transportation center. This time, it’s because of a Memorial Day weekend disturbance that ended with more than 70 arrests and one fatal shooting that Charlotte-Mecklenburg police say appeared gang-related.

City officials, including Police Chief Rodney Monroe and Mayor Anthony Foxx, have tried hard this past week to find the right combination of acknowledging the problem and assuring us it’s not really a problem. The situation was never out of control, they’ve said, and uptown ultimately remains a safe place.

It’s a tricky sell, but it’s important to center city. No one believes uptown is crime-free, but businesses need people to have enough comfort to visit restaurants and museums. For most of us, that comfort comes in knowing where – and where not – to be.

That’s how it works with the places we live. People most uncomfortable with Center City Charlotte are often those who rarely visit and see a unfamiliar, perilous landscape. People who work uptown or live nearby know it’s not nearly that threatening, with the exception of a few places at the wrong times. And even in those places and at those times, people learn what to avoid.

“You just stay in here,” says Christian Stephney, at one of the 20 bays in the open-air transit center. Christian has lived in New York and Philly and says it’s much safer in Charlotte, but when she’s waiting for a bus, she stays far from that crowd of young men outside the center’s northeast corner. “It’s better here,” she says.

Lately, however, the predictable has been less so. Across uptown, Johnson & Wales students were victims of three armed robberies next to campus this spring. Complaints are coming in, too, about safety on light rail trains and stops.

And last Saturday, the unrest that was concentrated around the transit center also spread blocks away. Visitors told stories of having to run – and not knowing where exactly to go. Suddenly, there was no place to be comfortable.

We’re hearing more of those uptown stories, it seems – and seeing more of them in scary Internet videos. CMPD statistics, however, show that safety is getting better, not worse, since 2007 at the transit center and in uptown, which continues to boast some of the lowest raw crime numbers in the county.

And yet we have last weekend’s melee, along with a similar incident five years ago, each of which bleeds into the perception that uptown is turning bad on regular nights, too. And with all of it comes the prospect of more people concluding that, you know, there are some pretty good restaurants in South Park, too.

What’s the answer for uptown? Some officials are talking about strengthening a toothless curfew law that fines parents whose children are out late. Foxx talked this week about parents, ministers and neighbors needing to step up – a sentiment that may be true, but sadly has proven more wishful than probable.

Others would like to move the transportation center and its problems elsewhere, which might satisfy center city business but leaves us facing another question: Are you OK with crime so long as we know that it’s that’s it not where you plan to be? It’s one more uncomfortable thing to consider in an uptown that’s suddenly full of them.