North Carolina mountain town ‘whitewashing’ violence amid crime concerns, says pastor with former gang ties
An Asheville pastor with a self-described gang-affiliated past says city leaders repeatedly rebuffed his decade-long push for a youth gang-prevention programme, a warning he believes went unheeded before a recent wave of retaliatory shootings in the North Carolina tourist city. Dr Ronald Gates argues that local officials have downplayed the violence by framing it as retaliation between groups of friends rather than acknowledging gang involvement, a distinction he calls an attempt to "whitewash the narrative". The dispute matters because it raises questions about whether earlier investment in prevention could have averted the recent bloodshed and whether the city's current messaging obscures the true scale of the problem.
Gates, senior pastor of Greater Works Church of God in Christ and a Buncombe County Sheriff's Office chaplain, first proposed the plan in 2016 after visiting Los Angeles and learning about "Gang Free", a programme teaching children in grades four to six how gangs recruit and the consequences of joining. He has since presented the idea to mayors, city and county managers, and police chiefs, asking them to trial it for a year, alongside mentorship and entrepreneurship opportunities to give young people a legal alternative to gang money. The renewed urgency follows a string of retaliatory shootings that left two dead and seven wounded, though city officials have stopped short of formally labelling the violence gang-related. Gates, who grew up loosely associated with the Vice Lords gang in Grand Rapids, Michigan, credits his father, brother and sports with steering him away from deeper involvement.
- Asheville pastor says city ignored his gang-prevention proposal since 2016
- Recent shootings killed two, wounded seven in the tourist city
- Officials call it "retaliation," pastor says that downplays gang activity
New here? Start with this
North Carolina mountain town ‘whitewashing’ violence amid crime concerns, says pastor with former gang ties
Asheville, a tourist city in the North Carolina mountains, has recently seen a series of shootings that police describe as retaliatory. The dispute centres on how city officials characterise this violence, and whether a long-standing warning from a local pastor should have been acted on sooner.
Dr Ronald Gates is a pastor at Greater Works Church of God in Christ in Asheville and also serves as a chaplain for the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office. He has spent about a decade urging city and county leaders to adopt a gang-prevention programme for young children, modelled on a scheme he learned of in Los Angeles, drawing partly on his own background growing up loosely connected to a gang in Michigan.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Advocates for Dr Gates's position argue that precise, honest language about gang involvement is essential to public safety: if officials soften or reframe gang violence as mere disputes between friends, they risk under-resourcing the specialist interventions – such as targeted youth prevention programmes – that could actually reduce it. They contend that Gates, drawing on lived experience and a decade of unheeded proposals, has special credibility to say that the city's caution amounts to denial, and that transparency about the true nature of the violence is owed to residents and potential victims, however uncomfortable it may be for the city's tourism-dependent image.
The case against
Those defending the city's more cautious framing would argue that officials have a responsibility not to apply the loaded label 'gang-related' without clear evidentiary grounds, since premature or inaccurate characterisations can stigmatise entire neighbourhoods, harden young people's identification with gangs, and complicate prosecutions. They might also note that declining one specific programme a decade ago does not necessarily reflect indifference to youth violence, as officials must weigh competing prevention strategies and budgets, and that measured public language is a reasonable, good-faith choice rather than an attempt to mislead the public.