The Reckoning — Roy Cooper’s Legacy of Lawlessness

Final installment of “Roy Cooper’s Equity Experiment”

If governor Roy Cooper wanted to make history, he has.

Five years after launching his Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, North Carolina has become a case study in what happens when ideology trumps law enforcement.

Cooper promised to eliminate racial disparities. What he built instead was a system that zero accountability, and citizens are living with the consequences.

The Political Reckoning

Cooper’s policies are no longer just local controversies — they’re national ammunition for the GOP.

In September Sen. Tom Cotton launched a brutal ad campaign tying Cooper to the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee killed on a Charlotte light rail train.

The spot accuses Cooper of being “dangerously soft on crime” and of creating the conditions that let violent offenders walk free.

The ad frames Charlotte’s violence not as a series of isolated incidents but as a direct result of Cooper’s 2020 Task Force and its reforms — bail elimination, decarceration, and “restorative justice.”

Cooper’s campaign hit back, calling the attack “grossly misleading,” insisting that his record as a former attorney general proved he was no radical.

But the attack landed. As Fox News reported, the murder — and the soft-on-crime narrative attached to it — has become “front and center in one of the most crucial Senate races of 2026.”

The same crime wave that rocked Durham and Asheville is now rocking Cooper’s political fortunes. He built his brand on “compassion.” His critics say he governed with complacency.

“We release violent men to prove compassion,” one former Charlotte prosecutor told me, “and send families to funerals to prove consistency.”

Even some Democrats in Raleigh now concede that the governor’s equity agenda “went too far.” The bipartisan Iryna’s Law , which tightened bail standards and limited judges’ and magistrates’ discretion to free repeat violent offenders, were legislative reversals of Cooper’s signature reforms.

The Institutional Reckoning

The Task Force’s impact runs deeper than headlines. It has reshaped the machinery of justice itself.

Anita Earls, now on the state Supreme Court, still presses for DEI “equity audits” from the bench. Josh Stein, her co-chair and Cooper’s heir apparent, campaigns for governor on the same language of “reimagining public safety.”

On the ground, Task Force alumni like Sheriffs Clarence Birkhead and Quentin Miller continue to treat criminal justice as a therapeutic exercise. Their jurisdictions — Durham and Asheville — now struggle with record homicide rates and juvenile crime spikes. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s Chief Johnny Jennings presides over a department with a vote of no confidence and a force haunted by its own hesitation.

The purpose of these institutions is to uphold justice. But under Democratic leadership, they perform virtue by coddling violent criminals.

The Moral Reckoning

The Task Force began with noble language — “reimagining justice” and “ending mass incarceration.” But the dream of compassion became a nightmare of impunity.

Mary Collins, a young woman with a developmental disability, was murdered by offenders released on bond under the county’s bail reform model.

Four-year-old Jayce Edwards died when career criminals sprayed bullets into his Charlotte home.

Nine-year-old Z’yon Person was slain in Durham by gang members who should never have been free.

These names — Mary, Jayce, Z’yon — are the moral ledger of Cooper’s “racial equity” experiment.

They were not failed by society. Society was failed by those who refused to hold killers accountable.

The Political Future

Despite the controversy, Cooper is no spent force. His Senate campaign is a fundraising machine: $14.5 million in a single quarter, a record-breaking haul that shocked even party insiders.

As The Telegraph profiled him this month, Cooper is being sold to Washington as the “Southern centrist who can flip a Senate seat and heal a divided nation.”

But many North Carolinians see something else: a career built on leniency, packaged as leadership.

Cooper’s war chest is fueled not by vision but by a network of progressive donors who admire his willingness to turn North Carolina into a testing ground for DEI criminal justice programs.

He is a front-runner in Washington. But in his own state, he is a man running from his record.