For Charlotte’s sake, sheriff Garry McFadden should resign | Opinion

In 1995, after a 36-year-old Oregon woman was murdered while in town for business, her husband and father came to Charlotte to identify her body and begin making sense of a life cut short.

Before they flew home, one of their last visitors was a CMPD homicide investigator named Garry McFadden. He stopped by to return the victim’s wedding ring. As he reached out to say goodbye, the two men hugged him. “Thank you,” the husband told him. “We’ll never forget what you did for us.”

That is the McFadden Charlotte once knew and admired. A homicide detective remarkably effective at catching killers, and human enough to recognize that a closed case still leaves heartache. He kept a collection of notes from victims’ families to remind himself why he took the job.

All that is largely forgotten now, crowded out by controversy and a loss of confidence that deepens with each episode. McFadden has become the story, and the institution is paying the price.

More than a cop

By the time McFadden first ran for office in 2018, he was already more than a cop. He was a public figure. Over three decades with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, McFadden had worked more than 800 homicides with a clearance rate north of 90 percent. In 2016, he starred in Investigation Discovery’s TV show “I Am Homicide.” In a job where most candidates struggle to introduce themselves, he entered the sheriff’s race as a familiar face.

Still, the warning signs were evident even then. The sheriff’s job is not detective work, and it is not television. It is administration. A sheriff runs a large, complex organization, and from the beginning, there were real doubts about whether McFadden was built for that part of the role.

In the same moment voters were gravitating toward McFadden’s visibility, the Observer editorial voice gave a slight edge to Antoine Ensley for one reason that now looks prophetic. Ensley had the administrative background to smoothly run the roughly 1,200-person department, along with a more precise plan to improve it.

McFadden’s pitch was bigger and more inspirational. He promised to use the sheriff’s office as a more visible tool, and he campaigned as an activist. The 2018 primary became a referendum on the jail’s partnership with federal immigration officials, and McFadden made ending it central to his pitch, arguing it damaged relationships between law enforcement and the community.

That platform fit liberal politics of the time, and it carried him to a decisive win. He took 52.52% of the vote, crushing both the incumbent and another challenger in the Democratic primary. No Republican opposed him.

Few friends left

Within months, McFadden sparked a controversy in Cornelius with a traffic crackdown he said was aimed at “privilege” as much as speeding. That early instinct to pick fights never really stopped, and over time he made more enemies than allies, until now he has few friends left.

Earlier this month, that resulted in something Mecklenburg almost never sees. State Rep. Carla Cunningham and four former sheriff’s department employees have filed a petition to remove McFadden from office, and District Attorney Spencer Merriweather asked the State Bureau of Investigation to investigate the claims before deciding whether to move forward.

A judge dismissed that petition Thursday morning, but what once might have been dismissed as employee drama had ballooned into something larger and harder to ignore. It is a grim milestone for any county, because it means public confidence has fallen so far that people are reaching for extraordinary tools.

This is an election season, and in most cases voters should be the ones to decide whether McFadden deserves another term. Absentee-by-mail ballots are already going out for the March primary, and that is the cleaner, more legitimate way to settle this.

But at a certain point, the question stops being whether any single allegation is proven. It becomes why the sheriff’s office keeps finding itself in the same place, over and over, with the same cloud hanging over it.

McFadden can keep fighting, and the office can keep bleeding credibility while the process plays out. A better path is for him to step aside.

If McFadden stays, this story likely ends with a grinding, public unraveling that leaves the office weaker and his reputation narrower, defined by the final chapter instead of the full career.

If he steps aside, he gives the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Department a chance to rebuild, and he gives himself a chance to be remembered as more than the controversy of the moment. He saves the institution, and he salvages his own name.

It’s time for Garry McFadden to step aside, for Charlotte’s sake and for his own.

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.

This story was originally published January 15, 2026 at 5:00 AM.