When CNN host Erin Burnett (OutFront, 9/22/16) interviewed Todd Walther, a spokesperson for the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police, Walther made the provocative claim that 70 percent of those arrested protesting the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott were from outside of Charlotte:
If you go back and look at some of the arrests that were made last night, I can about say probably 70 percent of those had out-of-state IDs. They’re not coming from Charlotte.
This figure was not challenged by Burnett, and was later even tweeted out by the CNN host:
Charlotte police sergeant tells me 70% of ppl arrested last night had out of state ID: “these are not protestors, these are criminals”
— Erin Burnett (@ErinBurnett) September 22, 2016
So far it’s been retweeted over 4,000 times, and has served as a source for several right-wing and far-right media outlets, often backing up a trope that Black Charlotte/Mecklenburg Lives Matter is a mercenary goon squad directed by George Soros and the Democrats:
- Who Is Behind The Riots? Charlotte Police Says 70% of Arrested Protesters Had Out-of-State IDs (Zero Hedge, 9/22/16)
- Charlotte/Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police Spox: 70% of Arrested Rioters Have Out-of-State IDs (Breitbart, 9/22/16)
- Charlotte Cop Offers Proof That Riot ‘Instigators’ Aren’t Local: 70% of Arrested Had Out-of-State IDs (IJR, 9/22/16)
- Who’s Behind the Charlotte Riots? Police Say 70% of Arrests Are From Out of State Being Bussed In (Free Thought Project, 9/23/16)
- Charlotte Police: 70% of Rioters Arrested Are Out-of-State “Instigators” (Fox News, 9/23/16)
Popular Fox News host Charles Payne cited the figure when calling for a “database and new punishment for these traveling criminal marauders”:
Reports 70% of arrested protesters in Charlotte had out of state ID
Need database and new punishment for these travelling criminal marauders— Charles V Payne (@cvpayne) September 23, 2016
This case offers a perfect example of why uncritically allowing police union officials to make unsourced assertions on national TV, and then repeating them as facts, is not a good idea.
First, it’s important to note that Burnett even muffs her sourcing; by citing a “Charlotte police sergeant,” she ignores the fact that he’s a union representative, and that union representatives are not operating in their capacity as police officers or spokespeople for the department. By conflating the two, she treated what was effectively advocacy on behalf of an individual officer as an official statement by a police department; while police departments are of course capable of being deceptive themselves, they are at least in theory accountable to a city council and mayor.
The Charlotte Observer (9/23/16) sets the record straight.
The claim, it turns out, is also wildly incorrect. The Charlotte Observer (9/23/16), a local newspaper, engaged in actual journalism by reviewing police records of those detained during Wednesday’s unrest. It found that roughly 21 percent of arrestees were from outside of Charlotte, most of whom were from nearby areas:
Of the 43 people arrested late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, 34—or 79 percent—live in Charlotte, the Observer found. Most of the others live elsewhere in North Carolina, including Albemarle, Gastonia and Greensboro. Three others were arrested Thursday night; of those, two were from Charlotte and the third had not been identified by mid-afternoon Friday….
“I didn’t quote facts,” Todd Walther, spokesman for the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police told the Observer on Friday.
“It’s speculation. That’s all it was.”
In other words, he simply made it up. And Burnett, if she had any sense of history, should have known better. Setting aside the fact that as a rule, police shouldn’t be allowed to assert self-serving figures without follow-up questioning, the “outside agitator” line is a very common trope used by police and anti-protest pundits for decades. The objective is to treat unrest as a foreign invasion unconnected to organic, populist anger at the local government and police force. Indeed, it was routinely used by Jim Clark, the infamous sheriff of Clark County, Alabama, who in 1965 accused the Selma marchers of being mostly “agitators,” and 75 percent “pro-communist” or communist themselves:
#TBT 1965: Sheriff Jim Clark of Alabama talks about MLK’s marches, “outside agitators,” & the large communist presence at protests. pic.twitter.com/E3uqUJ82aT
— Ash J (@AshAgony) September 23, 2016
The irony of the “outside agitator” cliche is that it applies more to the police, who often don’t live in the neighborhoods they ostensibly protect. As AlterNet’s Max Blumenthal noted after the Baltimore unrest in April 2015, over 70 percent of the Baltimore Police Department did not live in Baltimore—making the the police more “outside” than the protestors.
Burnett tweeted out a semi-correction late Friday evening, but only because the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Police officially confirmed the totals after the Charlotte Observer called them on the police union lie. But the damage has already gone viral on right-wing media, cementing an old smear of civil rights activists as brand-new conventional wisdom.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
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I am also hearing that the outside agitators were funded by SOROS…. Just another right wing lie…. How about the numbers of police who actually live in Charlotte? Why did none of the reporters ask about that?
‘How about the numbers of police who actually live in Charlotte?’
Bingo!
That’s the question that the Clinton News Network, or Fox, or the rest will never touch. Urban centers are occupied territories, occupied by ‘foreign’ troops … what Ashton Carter has termed his ‘Northern Command’ … ‘FBI, DoJ, DHS, the intelligence community, and state and local law enforcement’ …
… [19:50] and passim CSPAN: Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Joseph Dunford testified at a hearing on military budget needs…
The cities and states have already made armies of occupation out of local and state police. Cosa Nostras. Their unions back up their ‘good thing’. There is growing class conflict between those who work for the fascist center and the rest of us whose jobs have been exported by the billionaire class, those they prey on.
Certainly the fascist center always comes down on people of color first and disproportionately always. Here’s a link to a graph I made sometime ago from the data at Killed by police. As in Iraq and the Middle East, the fascist center does not do body counts.
“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” is attributed to Jay Gould over one hundred years ago. It’s emblematic of the the billionaire class’ ‘approach’ still today.
Does one’s rights under the Constitution only apply in one’s home state? Is it a crime to cross state lines in order to exercise your 1st amendment rights? I wish we might get some direction from the US Attorney General or the “constitutional law expert” President, so that we law-abiding citizens not allow ourselves to become “traveling criminal marauders.”
I wonder how many of those in attendance at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in 1963, were actually citizens of the District? Why weren’t those hundreds and thousands of traveling criminal marauders taken into custody? Thank God we’ve got people in the media today, who will help prevent any repetition of such blatant criminal communist terror attacks!
And George Soros seems to be putting his social investment funds into the effort to start a new cold war with Russia. And he’s doing a good job of it, too.
The rich orchestrate law enforcement in a way that best protects their secret ability to hoard most of the wealth. As the laboring-class lower-half of society are the only ones not allowed to own land or wealth, they must be kept terrorized to prevent them from organizing a rebellion.
So, him having a gun is totally irrelevant, for just like the stranded laboring man in Tulsa, his contempt by refusing commands crossed a red line and serving jail time was absolute. Then both men refusing arrest crossed the ultimate red line and both were shot dead on the spot.
So, in a few mounts both of the legalized murders will be given back their badge, gun and be free to terrorize the impoverished again and again. For an absolute, otherwise the rich nobility will not rest easy until Tulsa government gets a hair bit more militarized and deadly then ever before.
And not until elections are funded by taxes will it ever end, which would require honest voters elect honest politicians.
What’s more inane
That protests are provoked by “outside agitators”
Or that Soros and the Dems would be behind them?
And red baiting (from reactionaries and liberals alike) only works if “progressives” accept the premise that being a “commie” is one step above (or below) child sex trafficker.
So let’s now just completely discount the time-honored practice of ruling elites supplying both basis for social outrage and flash-point instigation
of exploitable reaction violence incited vis a vis planted agents provocateur. History is full of that manner of social manipulation.
Misinformation may also be spread as a set-up to disqualify political opposition to make them appear foolish or incredible. Here we see Soros being insinuated as unlikely to have done what he’s clearly known to do in engineering and exacerbating social conflict for political ends internationally.
There’s nothing ‘far-right’ about this, so why is it being so characterized by Adam Johnson here at FAIR? No one reporting this made it up. It’s quite easily predictable that given Soros’ history it would quickly find traction with those looking for explanation to purely destructive violence.
FAIR, again, seems anything but.
Government shouldn’t be allowed to assert self-serving figures without follow-up questioning, huh?
We’ll wait for the next BLS unemployment numbers to come out and check back here quickly to note the outrage.
So, people aren’t allowed to come from out of town to stand in solidarity with the people of a particular area? Since when? And why not?
I can’t help but think this is all a smokescreen for the real instigators who were state-sponsored infiltrators tasked with causing mayhem to undermine the protesters and BLM movement. You know, the Police State’s standard M.O.
If you try to view/hear the ‘Northern command’ part of Carter’s spiel before McCain and the other elephants and jackasses on his committee it will come about a minute later than I indicated … in fact I had to download the whole session to listen to it, as my browser chokes after a minute or two of CPAN’s stream. My start time above is what VLC told me on my desktop.
This little piece of misinformation goes clear back to the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests. The PTB’s media always claimed it was “outside agitators” that caused the whole problem. It was a lie then and it’s a lie now.
I have searched the “internet” for any statistics on the death toll by this so-called “race war” in Charlotte, and have found zero. Only an unnamed protestor was falsely reported dead and then the “media” said he was on life support. Then the interest in this story petered off, yet the bigots I know are on edge. What did happen to that protestor? What happened to the police officers who were “injured”. Did they recover? Did they die? Even Paul Ryan doesn’t seem to know as he puts propaganda into my inbox about something that he knows nothing about. So many secrets and so many lies told via social media, too, that those have become part of the Charlotte narrative. Now Governor HB2 will get re-elected because he has his citizens scared now.
Black Lives Matter is an NGO funded by Open Society Foundation which is run and funded by George Soros. And that is a fact. Where the protesters came from you say out of 43, according to you, 9 of them were from outside the area. That is actually quite a lot. One out of every four protesters came from someplace else, and I am sure that if you say it was 9 people, it was more likely 12 people. No wonder the officer noticed that there were a lot of out of towners if every fourth person was from out of town. You would expect maybe one or two people from a group that size to be from out of town. NOT TEN! I think that proves his point.
Note that the false claim spread by CNN was that 70 percent of the protesters arrested came from “out of state.” Actually, 79 percent were from Charlotte; as for the rest, “Most of the others live elsewhere in North Carolina, including Albemarle, Gastonia and Greensboro.”
BLM is NOT an NGO, nor is it directly funded by Soros organizations.
http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/19/no-george-soros-didn-t-give-33-million-to-blacklivesmatter.html
It would behoove you (and all of us) to do your homework before posting your ‘alternative facts.’