Letter: Pick leaders who choose safety over ideology

Graphic by Lori Deaton

As Asheville approaches the November elections, we face a crucial choice about our community’s future. Council member Kim Roney, endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, seeks reelection, advocating far-left ideologies over practical community solutions.

The most recent point of concern is her opposition to placing school resource officers in our schools, a stance officially recorded in the minutes of the Asheville City Council’s March 12 meeting. Her resistance to this measure, which aims to protect our students, emphasizes her preference for ideological priorities over effective, community-focused policies. This decision goes beyond individual preferences; it’s about ensuring fundamental security in our schools.

This election is an opportunity for Asheville to choose governance that balances safety, fiscal responsibility and community welfare. We must critically assess the potential impact of electing officials who might favor radical changes, potentially leading to instability and discord.

We need leaders who support realistic and inclusive solutions that address the needs and aspirations of all Asheville citizens. Let’s prioritize candidates who propose practical policies to ensure our city remains a safe, thriving place.

As the election nears, I urge my fellow residents to consider the kind of leadership that will truly represent our community. Let’s vote for a future that enhances Asheville’s safety, prosperity and unity.

— Jim Fulton
Arden

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10 thoughts on “Letter: Pick leaders who choose safety over ideology

    • indy499

      Haha—the aclu propaganda piece you cite is a joke. Basically says police officers “cause” more crime because they are actually on site and catch students committing crime. Non loonies would consider that a +

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      • luther blissett

        That’s not true. How about you try again and this time not lie? (Hint: the thing you’re lying about is the vagueness of the NC “disorderly conduct” statute.)

  1. Robert McGee

    I hope this letter writer will spend some of his time contacting our state and federal officials to help bring about some common sense gun legislation that better protects school children.

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  2. luther blissett

    “Her resistance to this measure, which aims to protect our students, emphasizes her preference for ideological priorities over effective, community-focused policies.”

    Let’s analyze this sentence. The SRO policy apparently “aims to protect” students. Lots of policies could “aim to protect” students: making them wear full-body kevlar suits, dividing classrooms into sealed individual learning pods, etc. Do SROs protect students? Well, we now have a long enough history of cops in schools to have some data. They don’t stop mass shootings. Adding SROs to a school system maps to an increase of suspensions, expulsions and arrests. There is a disparity in the treatment of Black students which seems connected to broader issues of institutional prejudice towards Black boys and young men. Some research has suggested that SROs in majority-White schools treat misbehavior as part of growing up, while SROs in schools with a large non-white population treat misbehavior as a sign of a “bad upbringing” or “a bad community” and inherent criminality. There’s the question of whether SROs will receive proper training for school environments and whether school administration will have the authority to dictate the terms of SROs’ duties.

    Protect them… from what?

    So “effective” is at best a vague assertion and “community-focused” is just waffle.

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  3. Voirdire

    right, the SRO’s whom they pay 24k per year at best… and then equip them with a hand me down glock. If they don’t run for cover with the first burst from an AR-15 ..as they more than often do (..are you throwing your life away for a minimum wage gig?) you might maybe have at least something resembling a minimum deterrent for the dreaded moment …again, maybe. Sounds to me like you had better come up with a plan B. …maybe Kim Roney has one …I have no idea. sigh.

    • luther blissett

      I mean, the problem here is that if you put a cop in a school then the cop is going to end up doing cop stuff to justify their presence. If you assigned a dedicated cop to patrol Beaver Lake you’d probably get a couple of weeks of “nothing to report” and then the cop would get bored and start looking for expired tags and rich white people smoking weed on the porch.

      As that ACLU report says, the NC statute on “disorderly conduct” in schools is super-vague and likely to be interpreted in very different ways by teachers (who just want an orderly environment at their schools) and cops (who think in terms of law enforcement). And a bunch of research suggests that white cops see misbehavior from white kids as a momentary thing that can be corrected by teachers and parents — after all, they might have kids of their own who misbehave but they don’t want them arrested for it — but see misbehavior from Black and brown kids as something endemic that needs to be addressed through the criminal justice system.

  4. Soothsayer

    While I appreciate and favor Councilwoman Roney’s push to safer and more adequate pedestrian and bicycle traffic; it remains difficult for me to offset that with her anti-police stance during the looting and downtown troubles a few short years ago. We need more commonsense and less political placating if we are to remain a safe and healthy city.

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  5. WNC

    That’s like not walking a drug dog through a school because it might cause some students to break the law.
    Wonder why schools choose to almost never walk a drug dog into a school as students vape themselves to death.

  6. Firstly, Roney is opposing reactionary change, since School resource officers are new, especially to the Asheville schools and didn’t exist in the MAGA vaunted Eisenhower era, which also had a 91% top tax rate, which fostered economic unity and therefore political unity. Secondly, it is outside agitators like Fulton that threaten the unity of Asheville’s urban values.

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