Mysterious group targets Wake DA as soft on police who shoot civilians

"I think they’re just demonstrably untrue, and, unfortunately, that’s the sad state of politics these days," Freeman said Thursday.

No contact names, emails or phone numbers are listed on the website, but a news release about the billboard campaign named Matt Ferner as the group's senior adviser. He has worked with national criminal justice reform groups.

"What we are doing is focusing on the prosecutors with the most troubling records, especially in places where there seems to be a gigantic gulf between the approach of the elected prosecutor and the desires of the people whom that prosecutor was elected to serve," Ferner said in a message to WRAL. "The long and short of it is this: Lorrin Freeman needs to be better, do better and try harder."

Freeman said she believes the people behind Raleigh Watch have targeted about a dozen moderate Democratic district attorneys nationwide, including several in California and Virginia.

"There’s been a pattern nationally of special interest groups going in and trying to take over local courthouses," she said. "I think that’s what’s happening here."

Andy Taylor, a political science professor at North Carolina State University, said the groups raise large sums of money from wealthy donors nationwide who are more concerned about a specific issue than individual elected officials.

"They care about the issue. They don't really know too much or care too much about the candidates," Taylor said. "They hook onto these sort of issues that are critical to the national ideological agenda and try to find out whether they can get people, candidates, elected who have said in some way, shape or form that they will be more loyal to that agenda than, say, obviously, an opposing candidate or maybe an incumbent."

The internet and social media makes targeting certain races by obtaining information to craft a message that can be easily disseminated fairly cheap, he said, so the money can be spread among several locales.

"There's often a kind of one-size-fits-all approach," he said. "They have a kind of song sheet, and rather than molding that to the local situation or particular episodes or things that the candidates are saying and doing, they kind of impose this general message."

“To focus on tactics ignores the pain and damage caused by bad police whose misconduct results in the death, beatings and false arrest of human beings in our community," Chetson said in an email to WRAL. “The people of Wake County have been voicing their concerns about police misconduct to the current Wake County district attorney for years, and those concerns have mostly been ignored."

Freeman called officer-involved shootings "difficult cases."

"When the evidence supports, it we have made those decisions to hold people accountable, and we have done that repeatedly," she said. "Our responsibility is to follow the evidence, apply it to the law and make those determinations, and that is what we try to do in every case, regardless of the public pressure involved."

"I believe the people in Wake County know me," she added. "Every day, we work hard to keep our community safe and to do what is right and fair, and I hope [voters] would reject this outside influence."