Outrage at the Charlotte stabbing is the only acceptable response. And it’s working. | Opinion

National attention can be clumsy, even coarse. It’s also powerful, and in the case of justice for Iryna Zarutska, it was necessary.

For nearly two weeks, her brutal killing aboard a Charlotte light-rail car was met with collective indifference. A 23-year-old woman died a violent, public death — and our city barely noticed.

But when video emerged of the moments leading up to the killing, it set off a firestorm across the country. In that moment, the national spotlight, messy as it may be, forced open eyes that had willfully stayed shut.

What followed proves that outrage, rightly directed, still works. Federal prosecutors brought a serious charge. Federal transit officials demanded concrete fixes. In Raleigh, House Speaker Destin Hall directed staff to map the failures and prepare legislation. City leaders shifted from platitudes to ownership. You can favor some messengers and distrust others — that’s politics — but the sequence is unmistakable: public outcry produced action.

Zarutska’s family has asked for advocates to join them in demanding justice and long-term change — not just condolences. If your first concern is who is doing the talking, you’re missing the point.

Lyles’ journey

Outrage is not an end in itself; it is the spark that assigns responsibility and compels those with authority to act. And it has. You can watch the change in plain English.

Days after Iryna’s killing, the first statement from Mayor Vi Lyles emphasized “safety nets” and mental health, reassured us that Charlotte and CATS are “by and large” safe, and cautioned that we’d never “arrest our way out” of social ills.

After the video, she urged outlets not to share it and said she was “thinking hard about what safety really looks like.”

Only later did she call Zarutska’s death a “tragic failure by the courts and magistrates,” acknowledge the churn of arrest and release that leaves people exposed and commit to a stronger transit-policing model.

That evolution didn’t happen by accident. It happened because citizens refused to be numbed, because the video erased euphemism and because national outrage — loud, insistent, imperfect — wouldn’t let anyone file this under “complex issues.” Outrage moved the center of gravity.

Righteous anger, rightly aimed

I’ve heard the scolding about Republicans “pouncing” and the hand-wringing over “performative outrage.” Some of it surely is performative. What of it? Even imperfect motives can yield necessary outcomes.

If your instinct is to chastise the source of the outrage rather than confront the reasons for it, you are in the wrong. The only moral reaction to this tragedy is to “pounce” to demand change and seek justice. If that happens to break down along party lines, then that’s an indictment of the faction not outraged.

The outcry narrowed the range of excuses. It forced plain speech. It put names and timelines on the table. That is a civic good.

Anger can corrode judgment, and the Christian tradition wisely counsels slowness to wrath. But it also teaches something else: Some anger isn’t just permitted — it’s required.

Righteous anger is governed by reason and aimed at real evil. It refuses cruelty, but it also refuses indifference. In the face of grave injustice, the absence of anger is its own failure of judgment.

Public safety is inherently political

Earlier this week, a longer video emerged showing the stabbing itself and its immediate aftermath. I probably shouldn’t have, but I watched it. For nearly two full minutes, her blood spread across the floor of the car as she reached out her hand. Yet people just stepped around her.

Without the national attention, the city of Charlotte would have metaphorically done the same exact thing.

In Zarutska, I don’t see a stranger. I see my wife in that seat. She was on that train at that hour a week earlier. I see my kids in that seat. My oldest may soon ride that same line to UNC Charlotte.

Seen that way, debates over whether the reaction is “too political” feel very small. Public safety is inherently political.

There’s a common phrase that there’s no such thing as a Democrat pothole or a Republican pothole, and that’s true to some extent. But politics is really just a word for how we get along as a society.

In this case, politics won’t heal a family’s loss. But it can do something narrower and necessary: Jolt institutions to action. We’ve already started to see it.

That is what public outrage can accomplish. It is the only acceptable response.

Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He can be reached at andrew@longleafpol.com.