Durham Police replacing cops with crackheads? | Duke Health still transing kids, despite ban | Feds buy Wake School policy for $1,247 a head
No. 85 — Aug. 11-Aug. 17, 2024
Durham police-alternative "violence interrupter" charged for helping murderer flee
Anti-violence worker charged in connection to teen's murder - WRAL
STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA VS RAYMOND D HARWELL - eCourts
Raymond Harwell, a "violence interrupter" with Bull City United (BCU) has been charged with accessory after the fact for allegedly helping the killer escape the scene of a 2023 murder.
BCU operates under the Department of Durham County’s Community Intervention and Support Services; since it's founding in 2016 it has received millions in funding from the county and city of Durham, including $6 million in the 2022 county budget for a new headquarters.
BCU was profiled by radical anti-police activist publication The Appeal as an example of the type of "community violence intervention" effort which as attracted "hundreds of millions of dollars" in funding across the nation since 2021.
According to WRAL, "BCU is known for employing people described as 'credible messengers,' who have a history of gang affiliation or criminal histories".
Perhaps this explains why Harwell is the fifth BCU employee whose arrest WRAL has reported on; in April, another employee was arrested after a high-speed chase in which he allegedly drove the wrong way on multiple highways, threw cocaine out the window, and attempted to assault officers.
(Perhaps Durham is taking Sen. Kennedy's exhortation for the anti-police crowd to "call a crackhead" when they're in trouble a little too literally?)
While we are on the subject of funding police "alternatives", I ran the numbers to give y'all an idea of whether the Durham Police had actually be "defunded".
In real dollars, between Fiscal Years 2020 and 2024, the police budget for the City of Durham went down by $2 million (2020 dollars). When we also adjust for the expanding population, that's a decrease of over 5% in per-capita expenditure:
(I know I rag on mainstream media quite a bit, but i do want to take a moment in situations like this to acknowledge the good work by WRAL and their investigative reporter Sarah Krueger on this ongoing story)
ICYMI:
INVESTIGATION: Does Johnston County use unlawful internet-connected voting equipment?
In the post-2020 era, election fraud concern is a politically polarized topic; major North Carolina media outlets are more likely to frame any election integrity interest as "putting new burdens on election officials" or associate it with "the violent Jan 6, 2021 attack"
How Duke Health is transing kids despite state ban
Families in states with bans on trans care are finding hope across state lines - Harvard Public Health
An article published in Harvard Public Health this week highlights how Duke's Deanna Adkins is working to continue aiding in the medical "gender transition" of children in the face of the General Assembly's ban last August.
Adkins, the co-founder and director of the the Duke Child and Adolescent Gender Care Clinic, is previously on record as treating "transgender patients as young as 2".
"Adkins has seen about 700 patients with gender dysphoria", according to the article, though it's not clear what proportion of those are under the age of 18, like the transgender-identifying 15-year-old girl "Leo" highlighted in the story.
Although the article is certainly framed from a left-wing ideology, I find it nonetheless useful in illuminating how the ban on medically transitioning minors is both effective, and ineffective.
Although Adkins is now unable to provide hormone treatments to any new child "patients", she has developed a system to streamline the process of referring the children to doctors and pharmacies in Virginia, where "pediatric gender-affirming care" is still legal.
Duke University (and it's associated health system), as the only non-governmental school out of the three universities after which the Research Triangle was named is also perhaps the most institutionally left-leaning: Duke Health employees were reportedly offered a "safe space" to "share [their] thoughts and feelings" in response to the above-mentioned ban.
More recently, in the same vein, we reported on an academic article by six Duke authors on an experimental hormone treatment to allow a 50-year-old transgender-identifying man to "breastfeed" his infant grandchild:
How much are the feds paying to buy Wake School Board policy?
Recently revealed remarks by GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson got me interested in poking around the Wake County Public School System budget:
“If I had my way about it,” Robinson responded, “they’d send the check and I’d say, ‘Oh, no, you can have it. I don’t want your money. Your money comes with too many rotten obligations. We don’t want it.’”
“Honestly, come on. There should be no federal department of education,” Robinson said.
Source: WRAL
Founded in 1979, the federal Department of Education plays a massive role in applying pressure to state and local policy with the strings attached to the nearly $80 billion it distributes annually.
Just last month, the Democrat majority on the Wake County Board of Education cited federal funding in adopting new "gender identity" policies. As board chair Chris Heagarty told ABC11: "They have a big stick in this, which is, technically they can withhold all of our federal funding. And for the Wake County School System that's millions and millions of dollars."
However, just how many millions of dollars is that, for WCPSS? Well, According the board's proposed 2025 budget (which is relatively close to what was adopted), the federal per pupil funding of $1,247 makes up approximately 9% of the district's "operating budget":
It may be tempting to think of federal spending as "our tax dollars" being used to push the Democrat agenda, but I will take this moment to remind everyone that the federal tax revenue makes up less than 3/4 of the federal expenditures, with the rest being funded by a ~$1.6 trillion annual deficit.
The cumulative deficit spending has added up to a US National Debt of the nearly unimaginable amount of $35 trillion, as of the publication of this article. For a more understandable number, that's $104,280 of borrowed money for every American citizen.
Great journalism Steve