I watched another video on X that has gone viral. Whenever I see something that is deeply wrong, I ask who is responsible. The answer, and the reason I am writing this, is that more than the depraved criminal in the video is responsible for the attack.
The video is of a crime. It was filmed by the perpetrator. You can watch it yourself, but you don't have to hear the cursing and see the violence to know what it portrays.
A man is walking in broad daylight down a sidewalk in Charlotte, cursing and repeating a racial slur, and attacks a woman who is walking by who says nothing to him. Completely unprovoked, he knocks her to the ground and then hits her again in the face as she lays there.
Where did this happen? In Charlotte, blocks from where Iryna Zarutska was murdered on public transportation while bystanders sat around her and did not stop a man who ended her life with a knife.
When did it happen? A few weeks ago.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police arrested the man, Di-Quan Hunt, the same evening the video exploded online, after officers responding to a call were shown a social media account of his that they were already investigating. He was well known to them. Records show at least fifteen prior bookings, arrests stretching back years for assault, assault with a deadly weapon, communicating threats, domestic violence protective order violations, and more, cycling through Mecklenburg County's jail and back onto the same sidewalks over and over.
Charlotte has fallen. Feminists should march until the prosecutors and judges responsible for this are removed and replaced.
A Pattern, Not an Accident
The still image from the video says more than any statistic could. A young woman lies on the pavement, her glasses knocked sideways across her face, a small "Get Back On Your Feet Soon" balloon still clutched in her hand from wherever she had been walking when Hunt decided she was his next target. She is on the ground because a man with a lengthy arrest record hit her hard enough to put her there, and the video shows him getting ready to hit her again.
She survived. Iryna Zarutska did not. Zarutska was a twenty three year old Ukrainian refugee who fled a war zone only to be stabbed to death on a Charlotte light rail train by Decarlos Brown, a man who had been arrested fourteen times since 2007. Passengers on that train did not intervene as she bled on the floor. Brown was captured on video afterward repeating "I got that white girl," and while commentators spent weeks arguing over whether that proved a racial motive, the more basic fact was never in dispute: a man with over a decade of documented violent behavior was free to kill her because the system built to stop him had not.
Now Charlotte has another video, and this time there is no ambiguity about what happened or who did it, because the man filmed it himself. Fifteen bookings. The same face each time, aging slightly from one mugshot to the next, moving through the jail and back onto the same few blocks of the city every time. This is not a man who slipped through the system once. This is a man the system processed again and again and chose, every time, to return to the street.
The Standard Isn't Being Applied Evenly
Watch how differently these stories get covered depending on who is involved. When a white attacker targets a black victim, words like hate crime and domestic terrorism appear quickly. When the races are reversed, as they were in Hunt's video, the coverage flattens: he was "seen assaulting several people," with no mention of the slur, no urgency about motive. That is not a neutral editorial choice. It teaches the public that racial hostility is newsworthy only when it points in one direction, and that some victims get the word hate crime attached to their attacker while others don't.
That inconsistency is what actually produces resentment and division, not the underlying violence itself. The fix is not complicated. Charge the crime that was committed. If a violent attacker uses racial slurs while assaulting someone, prosecutors already have hate crime statutes available, and those statutes should be applied the same way no matter who the attacker or victim is.
Who Is Actually Responsible
Men like Hunt and Brown are a danger to the public because of evil failed policies. They are made this dangerous by years of second chances handed out by prosecutors and magistrates who call it compassion. Mecklenburg County's district attorney's office has built its public identity around declining habitual felony prosecutions. A Charlotte police chief has publicly criticized a judge for slashing a violent repeat offender's bond from two million dollars to fifty thousand, days after he had been charged with kidnapping and rape. Roughly one in five non-violent offenders released under this county's approach go on to be arrested for a violent offense within three years.
None of that is abstract. It is Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on a train floor while bystanders froze. It is a woman on a sidewalk off East Boulevard with her glasses knocked sideways and a balloon still in her hand, because a man with fifteen prior arrests was never kept off the street long enough to stop.
If there is a constituency in this city that should be leading the charge against this, it is the women who are supposed to be able to walk down East Boulevard or ride the Blue Line without wondering whether the man near them has been arrested and released a dozen times already. Prosecutors and judges who keep handing plea deals and low bonds to men with this kind of record are not neutral actors administering justice cautiously. They are making a choice, over and over, about whose safety matters less. That choice has a name attached to it every time a case gets pled down or a bond gets slashed, and voters in Mecklenburg County have the power to end those careers at the ballot box.
It is clear watching the video that the attacker is disturbed. He should spend the rest of his life either sedated in an institution, or in a place where the men he attacks are ready to defend themselves because they are locked up together getting meals and exercise but not allowed the freedom to threaten those who donβt commit felonies.
Charlotte has fallen because the people charged with protecting it decided, case after case, that a violent man's next chance mattered more than a woman's safety on her own sidewalk. That is not justice reform. It is abandonment, and it should end at the ballot box before it ends another life.
From Confusion to Clarity
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