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Less than a year after Estella Patterson held her first press conference as chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, she stood grim-faced in front of a bank of cameras.
Patterson was there to confirm what a local television station had revealed: Seven officers had been trading racist, sexist, and religiously biased texts in a yearslong group thread.
CMPD has not released the texts. But they contained racial slurs “related to use of force and discharging firearms at black residents,” WBTV reported. In one message obtained by another TV station, WCNC, an officer joked that “our texts sound like a clan rally,” viewed as a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
“The allegations against them are serious, they’re deeply troubling and frankly I’m disappointed we’re even having to talk about this today,” Patterson, a Black woman, told the public on October 15.
The chief insisted that a department audit of the officers’ work found no evidence that the unacceptable exchanges resulted in unfair treatment of residents. But in a city with a long record of accusations that police have mistreated Black residents, not everyone is convinced.
Community groups have demanded that the district attorney reopen and review all convictions involving the officers. And after WBTV reported that texts revealed a competition among the officers to see who could pull over the most Black residents, something CMPD denies, activists resumed a push to end such stops.
The Second Chance Federation, a nonprofit that supports North Carolinians after incarceration, is among the groups saying pulling drivers over for minor infractions such as broken rear lights or expired registrations leads to unneeded searches or arrests that disproportionately affect Black drivers.
Aggressively policing non-moving violations also erodes trust in law enforcement, the groups and others have argued for years.
Five years ago, RAND Corporation research documented that Black drivers in Charlotte were much more likely to be stopped than white drivers.
During RAND’s 2015 to 2020 study period, Black drivers were also about 3.2 times as likely to be searched after a traffic stop in the state’s largest city.
Since then, racial disparities have persisted and some have increased, a new analysis by The Assembly found. Between 2021 and 2026, Black drivers were about 4.9 times as likely as white drivers to be searched during stops.
Black drivers are also more likely to be arrested for almost every reason police give for stopping drivers over the past five years, The Assembly analysis shows. Black drivers stopped for speeding, for example, were about 2.6 times as likely to be arrested, compared to 1.8 times as likely during the RAND report study period.
Critics say that imbalance is evidence that the biases that individual officers expressed in texts aren’t the only issues the city needs to confront; there are also systemic problems to address.
“You’re seeing it in the traffic-stop data,” said Robert Dawkins, political director of the civil rights advocacy group Action NC, which has sought police reforms in Charlotte for more than a decade.
Bombshell Text Messages
Investigators weren’t looking for bias when they found the yearslong text thread between the police officers.
The State Bureau of Investigation discovered the texts while investigating former CMPD officer Seth Elliott, who is accused of misusing license plate data collected by Flock Safety roadside surveillance cameras. Elliott identified the license plate number of an undercover officer and gave it to a “target” in a drug investigation in Watauga County, court records allege.
He and six other officers had been part of the text thread, state investigators found when searching Elliott’s phone. Investigators handed the texts over to CMPD’s internal affairs department.
Four of the officers were part of the same graduating class. Another was elected president of his earlier recruit class. One was an employee of the month in January.
Elliott had resigned in August and has surrendered his state law enforcement certification, records show. CMPD cited the six remaining officers—Mateo Juarez, Joseph Kelly, Alexander Larsen, Tredan Maronic, Matthew Osborn, and Jeremiah Todman—for termination. All but Todman have since resigned; he is suspended without pay pending a hearing before the Civil Service Board.
The department audit reviewed body camera footage, traffic stop data, arrests, and complaints, Patterson said. The police department denied a public records request from The Assembly last week seeking the audit results, arguing that personnel files are confidential under state law.
Taken together, the texts and the traffic disparities signal CMPD likely does not have an effective system in place to evaluate officer biases, said Puneet Cheema, project director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Justice in Public Safety Project.
“To actually remedy bias, you need accountability,” Cheema said.
Beyond terminating officers involved in the texting, that could include evaluating whether their supervisors missed warning signs and creating a process to regularly and holistically review policing activities like stop-and-arrest patterns.
“To actually remedy bias, you need accountability.”
Puneet Cheema, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Since 2023, the department has had an early intervention system in place that pulls data on complaints, violations, and calls-for-service data to provide a snapshot of an officer’s activity and signal if they may need more training. But these systems are designed to protect officers and are not disciplinary, Cheema argues.
According to CMPD records, the signals don’t always lead to intervention. CMPD took no action on 55 of the 57 warnings from the early intervention system in 2025, according to an internal affairs report.
CMPD has shared information with Mecklenburg County prosecutors to determine whether defendants in the officers’ past cases must be told about misconduct that could cast doubt on the officers’ testimony, a spokesperson said.
The department has also asked the FBI to examine whether any civil rights violations took place. And Patterson supports the state revoking the officers’ law enforcement certifications so they cannot be hired at another department, she has said.
But the police department has not said it will heed requests to revise when officers pursue traffic stops.
The Assembly shared its findings about the persistence of traffic-stop disparities and the growing racial gap in searches and arrests with CMPD. But department spokesperson Erin Wiggins did not address them.
The Argument for Reducing Traffic Stops
Researchers commonly use traffic stop data to assess racial bias among police departments across the country.
Frank Baumgartner, a UNC Chapel Hill political science professor, in 2018 published the book Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race.
Everywhere he’s looked in North Carolina and no matter what variables he’s controlled for, police are more likely to stop Black drivers than white drivers, particularly young Black men. Charlotte had a particularly high search rate, his research found.
In 2020, Black men were searched about 15% of the time they were stopped, compared to 5% of white men. Statewide, Black men were searched 7% of the time, compared to 3% of stops with white male drivers that year.
Some police departments argue that traffic stops and searches make communities safer, but in reality, they end up alienating people, Baumgartner has concluded.
“Your average voter, your average white middle class citizen of Charlotte, is not affected by these things at all,” he said. “It’s a selective tax, and it’s not paid by the middle class white people.”
The RAND report recommended that the CMPD focus on moving violations like speeding or reckless driving, which pose clear threats to others, rather than more minor issues. Other agencies have done so. The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office has said it ended traffic stops for non-moving violations in 2022.
“Your average voter, your average white middle class citizen of Charlotte, is not affected by these things at all.”
Frank Baumgartner, UNC Chapel Hill
In September 2021, then-CMPD Chief Johnny Jennings shook off city council member concerns about RAND’s findings. “When you overlay the violent crime, we are exactly where we need to be as police officers,” Jennings said.
More data was needed “before we just flat-out say that this is an indication that we are stopping more, that we are targeting Black drivers more than we are other drivers,” he added.
Law enforcement agencies often see good reasons to resist using traffic stop data to judge their work, said Steven Brochu, a retired CMPD deputy chief who is now a police training consultant. There are too many variables that can explain racial disparities to derive any real meaning, he said.
“It’s just remarkably complex,” Brochu said. “The reasons for stops, the types of units at stops, the types of assignments they have, the type of traffic issues we were having at the time, and then in addition to that, the demographics of those particular communities that those officers were working in.”
But both the RAND and The Assembly analyses confirmed disparities even when accounting for neighborhood demographic profiles.
For example, only 12% of residents in the Providence Division south of the city’s center are Black. But 38% of the traffic stops from 2020 to 2024 involved Black drivers. (The Assembly compared division stops from those years because the most recent census estimates available are from 2024.)
And while it’s true that people drive in areas where they don’t live, Baumgartner said, “in order to explain what we observe, you’d have to imagine that Black people do nothing but drive their car all around in every jurisdiction.”
Sandhya Kajeepeta, a senior researcher and statistician at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, agrees. “When you see racial disparities that are so large in magnitude, I think it’s difficult to assume they can be explained by differences in the driving population,” she said.
Wiggins, the CMPD spokesperson, stressed that the RAND analysis found “no evidence that the disparities were attributable to department-wide racial profiling or bias” when researchers studied whether police are more likely to stop Black drivers during daylight—a measure called “the veil of darkness.”
The method examines only stops that happen during the same window of time before and after daylight savings, assuming officers know a driver’s race before stopping them during daylight and don’t know their race after dark.
“You end up with very few observations because you throw out about 90% of the traffic stops because they’re outside the time window that is of interest, which is twilight,” Baumgartner said.
If an officer stops 10 Black people and two white people during daylight one day, and then 10 Black people and two white people when it’s dark the next day at the same time, they pass the “veil of darkness” test, he said.
In addition, that metric also does not account for the disparities in search-and-arrest rates after stops occur.
“It’s a test that is designed to exonerate the police departments,” he contends.
CMPD’s Long, Painful History of Race Relations
Charlotte hired RAND as part of several measures meant to change local policing after high-profile instances where members of the public accused police of mistreatment of Black residents.
In 2016, undercover CMPD officers with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department were delivering a warrant in University City. Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old Black man, was not their target, but he had parked near the undercover officers, rolled a cigarillo with marijuana, and held up a pistol, officials later said.
Officers surrounded Scott’s SUV. When he exited the vehicle and began backing away, they told him repeatedly to drop the gun, officials said. Then one of them shot and killed the husband and father of seven.
Scott’s wife told officers he was unarmed and had a traumatic brain injury. A gun with Scott’s fingerprints was found at the scene.
The public knew few details in the days that followed the fatal shooting, which occurred just two years after Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner of New York City, two unarmed Black men, died during encounters with police. Their deaths elevated suspicions about police treatment of Black Americans across the country.
Protests bloomed across Charlotte, some of them violent. Demonstrators threw rocks at officers, shut down omed across Charlotte, some of them violent. Demonstrators threw rocks at officers, shut down Interstates 277 and 85, and looted stores. Police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds.
R. Andrew Murray, then county district attorney, said state investigators found evidence, including video footage at a convenience store, that Scott was armed. Scott was an imminent threat to officers and the shooting was justified, he concluded.
But public suspicion about the killing—and outraged protests after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis a few years later—initiated a wave of reforms at CMPD.
The department introduced a formal de-escalation policy and a duty-to-intervene mandate. As part of a lawsuit settlement with civil rights groups including the ACLU and NAACP, CMPD revised its protest-response procedures and agreed to stop using tear gas.
Concerns about the misuse of force and the treatment of Black suspects persisted, however. Five officers, including the officer who shot Scott, resigned in October 2020 after another Black man, Harold Easter, died in CMPD custody.
Easter had been arrested on suspicion of dealing drugs and was left alone in an interview room, even though it was clear he’d swallowed a dangerous amount of cocaine, then-chief Jennings said. Easter lay collapsed on the floor for seven minutes before officers checked on him and called for help. He died at a local hospital three days later.
The same month, Charlotte City Council adopted SAFE Charlotte, an initiative intended to improve policing “developed through conversations with residents and community leaders.”
It included expanding an effort to allow clinicians to respond to mental health calls, handing off low-priority calls to specialized civilian units rather than armed officers, and dedicating funds to anti-violence nonprofits.
Critics said then that they feared that Charlotte’s leaders would consider police reform finished, even as disparities persisted. “What I worry the city will say is, ‘Look, y’all got all this unanimously done. We’ve closed the book on it. For now we’re moving on,’” Dawkins told The Charlotte Observer in 2020.
A Range of Strong Views About Policing
Revelations about racist texts reignited protests. Six days after Patterson’s press conference, about 60 demonstrators gathered in Charlotte’s First Ward Park to demand more changes at CMPD.
Signs and speeches referred to more recent events. One was the September police killing of Curtis Massey, a 47-year-old Black man who officers say was an imminent threat because he had “produced a firearm” while he was being chased. Another was Juliana Nzita, a Black 16-year-old found hanging in a churchyard whose death was ruled a suicide without an autopsy being performed.
“I don’t want to hear no more about bad apples,” advocate James Ford told demonstrators Wednesday evening. “I want to talk about bad bunches from bad trees from bad roots. It’s an anti-Black system contaminated with racism that dehumanizes us.”
But not all community leaders view Charlotte’s police as failing to serve residents.
Bart Noonan, a white resident, said he views the texts as isolated incidents. Noonan has led West Blvd Ministry, a group that works to develop close ties between inner city kids and police, for a decade.
Its headquarters, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, hosts monthly BBQ for Blue events to create a dialogue between local families and officers. Police have helped kids pick out Christmas gifts and accompanied them on fishing trips.
“What happened this past couple weeks is disgusting and disgraceful—there’s no place for that anywhere, much less law enforcement,” Noonan said, adding: “I don’t think you can take this brush and stroke it across the whole CMPD.”
Noonan hasn’t always seen Charlotte officers in a positive light. As a young man, he was often at odds with police, involved in run-ins over alcohol and drugs. But in his work since, he’s seen officers show up with empathy and grace. “I know a lot of wonderful men and women that serve in CMPD right now that are getting looked at differently, and that’s very unfortunate,” Noonan said.
“I don’t think you can take this brush and stroke it across the whole CMPD.”
Bart Noonan, West Blvd Ministry
Beverly Knox Davis, a Black woman who leads A Brighter Day Outreach and Ministries in the predominantly Black Thomasboro-Hoskins neighborhood, said she and others didn’t have confidence they could depend on police for help years ago. “I have my own stories growing up in this area,” she said.
As a young girl walking home from school, she had a shotgun pulled on her for taking a shortcut through a grassy field. “You didn’t go to the police,” she said. “We knew that. But I want better for our young people.”
After news of the hateful texts surfaced, both Noonan and Davis invited police officers they knew to speak with kids in their programs “to get in front of all this before it festers,” as Davis put it.
But others believe only sweeping reform will give people faith that local police are serving the public fairly.
In an open letter published last week, nine community groups issued five demands, including that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney reopen all convictions that involved the officers who participated in the text thread.
They want the district attorney to stop prosecuting cases that stem from “pretextual” traffic stops. Those occur when officers stop drivers for minor infractions, such as a broken taillight, but their goal is to find evidence of a more serious crime.
“Racism, specifically anti-Black racism, is a feature, not a bug, of modern-policing,” they wrote. “The entire system enables it, compounds it, and depends on it.”
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