News-Record.com

Saturday's lead editorial.

As North Carolina’s top cop, Roy Cooper made national headlines in 2007 when he stepped into the infamous Duke lacrosse case and dropped all charges.

Cooper was scathing in his assessment of former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong’s shameful and willful mishandling of the case of three Duke athletes falsely accused of rape by an exotic dancer.

Small wonder that Cooper, a Democrat running for a third term as attorney general, reran the moment in his first campaign commercial. As sad an occasion as it was for Nifong, it was one of Cooper’s finest, the culmination of a thorough, 12-week investigation that his office handled coolly and professionally.

But his record in office neither begins nor ends with the lacrosse case.

Cooper’s Republican challenger, lawyer Bob Crumley, 51, blames Cooper for “clogged courts,” an “explosion of gang violence” and “backlogged crime labs.”

That’s debatable. Cooper, 51, actually worked with local law enforcement to establish an SBI crime lab for the Triad in Greensboro. The 10,000-square-foot lab opened in July, serves 12 counties and is expected to handle 6,000 cases per year.

Crumley argues that the lab should have been equipped to process DNA evidence, which is still sent to Raleigh.

But Cooper says that would have significantly delayed the local facility’s opening and he leaves open the possibility for DNA analysis there in the future.

Cooper also has done a good job stemming the epidemic of meth labs in the state, a cause he aggressively took on several years ago.

He has added his office to a national electronic database of information about gangs.

He has taken an aggressive look at charges of price-gouging by gas stations throughout the state.

And he has increased arrests of online sexual predators.

Crumley, who ran unsuccessfully for state Senate in 2002, has built a thriving law practice and has served in previous jobs as Randolph County manager and county attorney.
He says he won’t use the office as a political stepping-stone, as others have done.

He also advocates “a more common-sense approach to reviewing and implementing regulatory practices which affect our business community.”

There’s no doubting Crumley’s impressive resume in business and government.
But Cooper is the clear choice based on the breadth of his experience and the quality of his record.