REFRAMING PUBLIC SAFETY
H307 is Not a Public Safety Solution
Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) believes that for too long approaches to public safety have been driven by anecdotal, fact-free notions about crime and punishment. Too often, these opinions are fueled by fear, panic, racism, and misinformation.
Jake Sussman, Chief Counsel for Justice System Reform at SCSJ, spoke recently with NC Newsline about House Bill 307 (H307), “Iryna’s Law,” which North Carolina enacted on October 3, 2025, in the wake of the tragic killing of Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train in Charlotte. At the time of this interview, DeCarlos Brown had been arrested and charged with Zarutska’s murder.
Sussman identifies ways in which H307 fails to address public safety but instead offers a headline-driven response to a high-profile crime. Sussman suggests several policy choices that elected officials can and should pursue, rather than sending more people to jail and prison and speeding up executions.
Problems with H307
Describing H307 as “political theater,” Sussman notes, “there’s no real solution in this. There’s nothing in this bill that will actually increase public safety.”
The death penalty “does not keep people safe, is not a deterrent to crime, and is infected by error.”
For example, the legislation aims to speed up executions, despite evidence and history that show the death penalty “does not keep people safe, is not a deterrent to crime, and is infected by error.”
“We’ve had so many people taken off death row because they were not guilty,” Sussman explains. “Because they were provided lawyering that would make us embarrassed if that person was representing you in a traffic ticket.”
H307 arbitrarily seeks to speed up the review process for capital cases without providing additional resources or protections for those facing the death penalty. The review process for capital cases is necessarily rigorous, because a mistake cannot be reversed. Moreover, the new law opens the door for a firing squad or electric chair to be used to carry out executions. Both of those methods had been abandoned because they are barbaric and torturous.
The new law also changes the way pretrial release and detention operate. When someone is arrested and charged with a crime, they are brought in front of a magistrate or judge who determines whether the person will be held in jail before their court date or allowed to go home.
H307’s Anti-Reform Approach
H307 reverses course on many modest pretrial release reforms that have been proven successful. As Sussman explains, “What we have actually seen over the last 10 years in North Carolina, and again across the nation, is a more thoughtful effort to ensure that when people are in jail before their trial, they’re not just there because they don’t have money to buy their freedom.” For example:
In 2024, the Brennan Center for Justice issued a comprehensive report called “Bail Reform and Public Safety,” confirming what a decade of reform revealed: wealth is not a reliable indicator of risk, and bail reform does not increase crime. Instead, the money used to detain people pre-trial could be devoted to deeply needed services.
H307, however, undermines those successful reforms. It abolishes a “written promise to appear,” an option that ensures people are not jailed simply due to their lack of wealth. “The changes that have been made here,” Sussman notes, “were not done in consultation with stakeholders or based on readily available evidence.”
The law limits the discretion of judges and magistrates, and doubles-down on a wealth-based system of pretrial release. As a result, “more people are going to be held in jail, and it’s not tied to safety.”
The legislation also modifies procedures for involuntarily committing someone found incapable to proceed in their criminal case. “[I]n North Carolina, our mental health system, like so many other core public services and structures, [is] pretty badly underfunded and understaffed,” Sussman explains. Yet the legislative changes fail to provide additional funding for meaningful treatment for people with mental health concerns.
And for all of H307’s focus on the tragedy involving Zarutska, the legislation conspicuously fails to address the basic needs of people leaving North Carolina prisons, who often lack resources to help them reenter society. “We have a crisis in the prisons because they are understaffed and the people who are working in there do not have the resources that they need to assist the people who are living in there.”
If not H307, what would increase public safety?
The arrest of Brown for the murder of Zarutska highlighted critical gaps when it comes to public safety.
According to reporting, months before the killing, Brown had been arrested after repeatedly calling 911 and telling the police that “he believed someone gave him a ‘man-made’ material that controlled when he ate, walked, talked, etc.”
Rather than direct him to mental health clinicians or a psychiatric evaluation, the police simply arrested him. After being released from jail and appearing in court on the misdemeanor charge of misusing 911, his attorney secured an order to have him evaluated to see whether he was competent to stand trial in the first place. According to reporting, that competency evaluation had not occurred before Brown’s arrest for murder, nor was he offered desperately needed mental health stabilization services.
Sussman emphasizes that H307 does nothing to address these gaps. The legislation does not provide direction or support for mental health practitioners to be more involved before serious crimes occur. Yet those programs exist and are proven to improve public safety. Just a few examples include:
HEART (Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams) in Durham, which relies on mental health professionals to help respond to behavioral health and quality-of-life emergencies.
Raleigh CARES (Crisis Alternative Response for Empathy and Support), an alternative crisis response program that connects community members experiencing mental or behavioral health crises, homelessness, or substance use issues to appropriate resources and support.
ACORNS (Addressing Crises through Outreach, Referrals, Networking, and Service), which pairs a law enforcement officer with a social worker for certain calls.
“Making sure that law enforcement has with them, perhaps in a response [to something like misusing 911], a mental health expert or a social worker,” Sussman suggests, “would be a relatively low-cost, high-impact way of addressing what actually happened in Charlotte.”
But nothing in H307 addresses that.
Sussman further notes that Mecklenburg County has a Crisis Intervention Team, which is advertised as a community-based collaboration between law enforcement, mental health agencies, consumers and family members, NAMI-Charlotte, and Central Piedmont Community College. Based on reporting to date, this resource was not tapped by police when they responded to a local area hospital to check on Brown, an interaction which led to Brown’s arrest for misusing 911.
While H307 offers North Carolinians jail, prisons, and executions, Sussman suggests there are better — and proven — alternatives. “[W]hat we know from experts and research and studies and lived experienced is that public safety is brought about by stable housing, access to health care, [and] a safety net.”
“Today, we have nearly 40,000 students who are enrolled in PK to 12th grade across North Carolina experiencing some form of homelessness,” Sussman notes. “That is a public safety crisis. That is a public safety emergency.” “I think everybody would agree that focusing on getting people some sort of shelter and stability would be good for the world,” Sussman argues, “And [that] would actually increase public safety pretty significantly,” as several studies have shown.
H307’s failure to engage, much less wrestle, with the underlying issues of poverty and housing is aggravated by the fact that recent federal legislation promises to cut access to health care and SNAP benefits for North Carolina’s most in need.
“Again, all of the research, all of the studies, all the lived experience shows that when you do that, in fact, crime goes up,” Sussman explains. “When you take resources, bare minimal resources away from people, it creates an instability that can be correlated with crime increases. So not doing those things would be really helpful.”
Sussman also notes the recent decision by the federal government to cut $800 million that had been funding local efforts, in North Carolina and across the nation, to reduce violence and increase public safety. “Those kinds of investments,” Sussman stresses, focus on what happens “before crime occurs, which means that we have fewer people coming to the courthouse at all.”
Sussman points out that Gov. Roy Cooper signed Executive Order 303 during his last year in office, which focused on ways for North Carolina to help facilitate and ease reentry for people leaving North Carolina prisons. Robust support for reentry services, Sussman suggests, “would be a perfect example of what’s needed here. Mr. Brown, [the person charged with killing Zarutska,] went into prison and when he came out, by all reporting I have seen, he came out in worse condition than when he entered. And that's a thing that we need to be responsible for; there are ways to address that through policies, through funding mechanisms to allow the Department of Adult Corrections to work with reentry councils and other groups across the state.”
The More You Know
More information illustrating why H307 does not improve public safety.
Misinformation about crime and safety often leads to bad public policy. Bad public policy can undermine public safety. Undermining public safety results in anxiety and fear. We need to break this cycle and legislate based on facts, not misguided fear. SCSJ breaks this down in our Honest Conversations About Crime & Safety explainer.
North Carolina has not had an execution since August 2006, and during the last 19 years, the rate of violent crime across the state has gone down, according to the NC State Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Statistics. This trend is consistent with numerous studies that show executing people has no effect on crime and does not make communities safer. (See some examples of those studies here, here, and here.)
Federal legislation passed during the summer of 2025 risks draconian cuts to Medicaid, hospitals, and SNAP benefits. One study showed that expanded Medicaid access reduces crime by approximately 3 percent annually. Other research shows that Medicaid can reduce recidivism for violent offenses by as much as 16 percent while also yielding significant reductions in robbery, aggravated assaults, and larceny theft. SNAP benefits also play a role in public safety. A New Orleans study found that individuals facing food insecurity are 13.5 times more likely to be involved in domestic violence than those who were food secure. Another study showed that food insecurity is linked with more gun injuries.
In June 2025, the North Carolina General Assembly voted to cut off millions of dollars for groups like Legal Aid of North Carolina and Pisgah Legal Services, a western North Carolina-focused legal aid nonprofit. These offices provide critical legal assistance to under-resourced communities, including seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, and survivors of domestic violence. Senate Bill 429 directed that millions of readily available dollars generated by the Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts (IOLTA), a program that has funded legal assistance for low-income North Carolinians for decades, should be frozen. As a direct consequence, Legal Aid of North Carolina has closed offices, leaving thousands of low-income North Carolinians unserved.
There is no shortage of approaches to reduce violence and help stabilize communities. For example, researchers from Rutgers University’s Gun Violence Research Center and the University of Washington published a new paper in INQUIRY: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, that helps bring clarity to the growing field of Community Violence Intervention programs. The authors reviewed 101 organizations and reports to map how the various community violence intervention programs take shape in cities across the country. Similarly, Safer Cities provides extensive coverage and analysis on innovative efforts to deliver more safety across the country.
H307 fails to explore, much less invest, in any such approaches. At the federal level, the Trump Administration affirmatively terminated hundreds of grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) aimed at these types of successful interventions. Initially valued at about $820 million, the cuts affected programs that provide federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution, victims’ services, juvenile justice and child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice system enhancements, research and evaluation, and other state- and local-level public safety functions.
In June 2025, SCSJ filed an amicus brief in opposition to the arbitrary and wrongheaded funding cuts ordered by the Trump Administration. The brief was filed on behalf of 12 community-based public safety subgrantees supported by umbrella organizations with DOJ funding cuts, all of which faced potential closure and a loss of staff.