A year and a half ago, downtown Raleigh business owners showed up en masse to a city council committee meeting with numerous concerns about the state of downtown. They spoke of experiencing harassment, receiving threats, and witnessing drug use outside of their storefronts, especially in the area surrounding Moore Square and the GoRaleigh bus station and along Glenwood South.
Fast forward to Tuesday of this week and Raleigh’s assistant city manager, Michael Moore, and the city’s new police chief, Rico Boyce, are painting a different picture.
Violent crime is down 3 percent from year to date, Boyce told the council, and property crime, including theft and car break-ins, is down 29 percent. Two officers have served 100 warrants on “individuals that have committed some very serious offenses” in 56 days, Boyce said.
“[Crime is down] because of the great work that the officers are doing downtown as well as our collaboration with organizations like the [nonprofit advocacy group] Downtown Raleigh Alliance,” Boyce told the council.
The Raleigh Police Department has taken a number of steps to “get those numbers,” Boyce said.
These steps include deploying officers on E-bikes to patrol downtown to respond more quickly in areas of the central business district; fully staffing the social worker co-response ACORNS unit; serving more warrants; increasing the number of officers on foot patrol, and increasing the number of business registered with CONNECTRaleigh, which allows businesses to share footage from their security cameras more easily with RPD.
Boyce said all of these efforts will ramp up over the summer, and in the fall, RPD will reevaluate and make any changes. He said he also plans to review Raleigh’s current practice of contracting with private security companies with the city manager.
The use of private security has been of concern to critics of RPD’s tactics, including Dawn Blagrove, the executive director of Emancipate North Carolina which works to dismantle structural racism and mass incarceration across the state.
“The use of unaccountable individuals acting as an arm of law enforcement is deeply troubling,” Blagrove wrote in an email to the INDY this week. “Coupled with the fast moving legislation to allow concealed carry without a permit, these [private security officers] can quickly become vigilantes, without proper accountability and oversight.”
Blagrove says the city should support downtown businesses, “but not at the expense of supporting its residents and people.”
Serving warrants, Blagrove says, could displace transient people. She questions the city’s efforts “to offer assistance without getting folks unnecessarily entangled more deeply in the criminal justice system,” and says she has concerns about placing more cameras in Black communities. Blagrove also wants to see investment in Raleigh CARES, the independently operating crisis response unit, over ACORNS, which is housed in the police department.
“The request for investing in ACORNS signals a reticence by RPD to support Raleigh CARES,” Blagrove wrote. “In order to truly create safety, law enforcement has got to be willing to extract itself from situations, like a mental health crisis, where they often exacerbate the incident and further destabilize the person in need.”
Moore, the city’s assistant manager, highlighted some findings from the Downtown Raleigh Alliance (DRA).
In 2024, 76 businesses opened downtown, including 10 new businesses on Fayetteville Street. Food and beverage sales were up 10.7 percent over 2023, and Glenwood South and Fayetteville Street saw increases in foot traffic over 2023 of 4.1 percent and 2.9 percent respectively. Overall, downtown saw a 1 percent increase in visitors, bringing it to 94 percent of pre-pandemic levels.
Moore said to expect to continue to see improvements with the free two-hour parking pilot extended, new events, and $140,000 in local storefront upfit grants awarded.
The city and DRA are also making changes to downtown’s City Plaza to improve its usability, with mobile shades expected to arrive in the plaza before the summer as well as more tables, chairs, and planters. Work on the long-term Fayetteville Street streetscape plan is also underway to expand outdoor dining and other public spaces.
Finally, DRA and the city have worked to improve security at the GoRaleigh bus station, hiring the city’s first GoRaleigh safety director and conducting de-escalation training with GoRaleigh bus drivers and supervisors.
“That helps head off some of those issues before they become issues,” Moore said.
Moore added that the city will need to invest in new parking deck cameras to replace antiquated technology and to allow RPD to more easily share camera footage from city decks with the Downtown Raleigh Alliance.
Council member Jonathan Lambert Melton noted that downtown Raleigh is showing a net positive in new storefront and restaurant openings versus closings. He said he personally feels safer walking around downtown though says there’s still more work to be done, especially around security at the bus station.
“While we still have our challenges, we have a very safe downtown comparatively, to our peer cities,” Lambert Melton said, “and we are doing work to make it even better.”
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