Pat McCrory is not a fan of TV crime procedurals.
At a debate in Atlantic Beach today, the Republican gubernatorial nominee said that his wife is "hooked" on reruns of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "Law & Order."
"I have a very tough time watching those two shows because on 'CSI,' they have a crime lab which within minutes — or at the most even hours — they get the results back of DNA tests," he said. "In North Carolina, they're waiting month after month after month after month while cases are held up and our county prisons continue to be full."
He said that "Law & Order" prosecutors dress "as though they can afford to shop at Neiman Marcus," courts have no backlog and judges have new laptops and , while real-life attorneys have a hard time paying their bills and victims wait in packed hallways.
"In North Carolina, we have judges and DAs who are working out of cardboard boxes, as though it's the 1920s and 1930s," he said.
He also claimed that plea bargains are becoming "non-existent" in North Carolina because defense attorneys are advising clients to plead not guilty because of a long wait for trials and a lack of jail space.
Trivia Check: Neiman Marcus has one North Carolina store — in Charlotte's pricey SouthPark Mall.
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Re: No 'Law & Order: Charlotte' for McCrory
Mayor McCrory is wise not to watch TV but it bothers me that he would assume that just because a TV show can solve a crime in 45 minutes plus commercials that a real crime can be solved in a short amount of time. Law enforcement, (local, state and federal) are bogged down because of the shortage of resources that has traditionally NOT been given to Public Servants. Crime Labs all over the country are struggling with the "CSI Effect" as jurors expect forensic scientists to produce the same results they see on the "boob tube". The reality is not even close to the same. These great public servants work long hours producing non-biased analytical evidence. Unfortunately, for a myriad of reasons, sometimes there just isn't any evidence to collect or the evidence collected is in such poor condition that any scientific analysis is just not possible. As far as the turn around time from our crime laboratories, there are a multitude of valid reasons. The legislature or county commissioners can allocate money for new positions but it takes time to hire and train a new person. I'm talking months or years, not days or weeks. Our "instant gratification" society expects instant results, but the reality is it just doesn't work that way. Another reason is crime rates are increasing across the state as a whole. Sure, you see decreases in geographic regions or a city here or county there, but overall as crime increases it produces more work for staffs that are already either undermanned or in training. Finally, because of the "CSI Effect", Law enforcement in general is much smarter about how to process a crime scene. Where 15 years ago a murder investigation would produce 15 -20 items to be submitted to the crime laboratories, now an average crime scene produces 75 -100 items. Forensic Scientists are smarter now too. With the average scientist sporting a Master's degree in chemistry or forensic science, they have doubled their repertoire of analytical tricks of the trade for processing evidence. But there is a trade off Mayor McCrory, Time! It takes time to process all of that evidence through the myriad of analytical steps. I suspect if you pick up the phone and call our crime laboratories within the state and across the nation, you would find they are holding their own and providing an invaluable service with turn around times approaching "incredible" compared to years past. Just some thoughts from someone tire of the rhetoric of attacking our hard working Public Servants.