It’s time for a fact check of North Carolina politics. This week, we take a closer look at President Donald Trump’s campaign rally last week in Gastonia, where he appeared in support of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley.
Trump and Whatley repeatedly attacked Democratic U.S. Senate candidate and former Gov. Roy Cooper over crime. Paul Specht of WRAL joins WFAE’s Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: There are a lot of claims to get to, so let’s do something of a lightning round here. Let’s start with this one by Trump. The President said, “Cooper let DeCarlos Brown out.” For some context, that’s the man arrested in the fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on the light rail in Charlotte just over a year ago. Is that accurate, what the President said?
Paul Specht: No, it's not. We've looked at this from a couple different angles. One claim that Whatley has made is that a task force that Cooper assembled put out a bunch of recommendations, and those were responsible for Brown getting out of jail or prison early. To date, we have found no link between that task force's report and Brown getting out early.
The other argument that Trump and Whatley have made is that DeCarlos Brown was among the 3,500 people released from prison early in 2021 as part of a legal settlement. If you'll recall, civil rights groups sued the Cooper administration in 2020. Those civil rights groups were concerned about the health and safety of inmates amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Cooper administration fought that lawsuit. A judge then ruled in the summer of 2020 that the plaintiffs were likely to win their case.
So Cooper in February of 2021 agreed to a settlement to release 3,500 inmates. That's been well covered. Whatley has run many ads about this. DeCarlos Brown is on the list because he had a post-release hearing around that time. However, Brown was already out of prison at the time the settlement was reached.
Terry: Trump also said “nobody used to think of North Carolina as a dangerous state, criminally dangerous….And now it's one of the most violent and one of the worst in the whole nation.” Is that true?
Specht: That's a bit misleading. State and federal authorities haven't released complete data for North Carolina’s crime from last year. We can look at recent federal data from 2025 and compare it to North Carolina's from 2024. But no, North Carolina has a higher homicide rate and rate of violent crime than the U.S. average.
However, we're still not among the worst states. A couple of groups, one called the Council of State Governments and the other called the U.S. News and World Report, have analyzed federal data and they found that North Carolina is 32nd in the nation for its crime.
Terry: Let’s move on to Whatley. He claimed Cooper, as governor, “vetoed legislation to tell our sheriffs that they have to honor ICE detainers and get violent, criminal, illegal aliens the hell out of North Carolina.” What did you find there?
Specht: That's true. For years, sheriffs in North Carolina were allowed to decide whether or not they want to cooperate with federal immigration officials. They had that flexibility. For years, Republican legislators who controlled North Carolina's General Assembly tried to change that law. They passed bills in 2019 and 2022 that would have required sheriffs to work with ICE. Cooper vetoed those bills and effectively blocked them from becoming law up until 2024. That year, Republicans had enough support in the legislature to override Cooper's veto. So now, yes, every sheriff in North Carolina must cooperate with federal immigration officials.
Terry: One more from Whatley, this one about protests in 2020 when Cooper was governor. Whatley said, “Did he call in the National Guard to put down those riots? No." What protests is he talking about, and is it true what he said?
Specht: People probably remember back in 2020, there was a man named George Floyd who was murdered on camera by a Minnesota police officer that led to protests and riots across the country, including here in Charlotte, Raleigh, and other North Carolina cities. It's misleading for Whatley to say that Cooper never called in the National Guard because he did. That was on May 31, 2020. We reached out to Whatley's campaign after he made that statement in Gastonia that night. Credit to them for getting back to us in short order. A spokesman for the campaign said, ‘Yes, Cooper did call the National Guard, but it was only after there was a riot in Raleigh.’ Whatley's campaign says it should have happened sooner.
These fact checks are a collaboration between PolitiFact and WRAL.
