The Power of Pride - OP/ED

This is an opinion/editorial from the desk of Shelly Green, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau.

It's been a busy two days. My email and phone lines burned up yesterday and today with people upset about the front page article about Durham in yesterday's The Daily Tarheel.

Indignation, disgust, disappointment, outrage...you name it, I heard it all.

So my first reaction was that I needed to assemble and distribute data and educate the author about the REAL facts about Durham!  Our organization has plenty of data on our website for the media and the public alike. If you want to know how Durham's crime compares to benchmark cities in the state and country, take a look.  But Chapel Hill isn't a peer city. The two are as different as apples and lug nuts.

This story evoked such deep, visceral negative reactions not because it reported on Durham's crime.  Durham isn't perfect and its crime rate is average - in fact, it's currently at a 23-year low.  The reaction came so swiftly and with such vigor because Durhamites felt disrespected and insulted by the tone.  Judging from the comments on the story, many Chapel Hillians did, too.  Many question the quality of the journalism, but that's an assessment and debate I'll leave to the academics.

The thing is, if this happened at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, an uproar like this from residents of nearby Des Moines would be unlikely.  It just wouldn't be on their radar.

But Durham is different.  The level of Durham residents' pride has been measured for nearly 20 years, and although it's always been very high, it's off-the-chart compared to other communities.  Orange County residents, by and large, think highly of Durham, too.  That's also been measured for the same two decades.

Am I upset?  A little, but my emotions are tempered by the fact that so many stepped up to Durham's defense so swiftly.  I did, however, send a letter to the writer, Chelsey Dulaney early this morning.  I haven't heard back yet, but  if you are curious about what I said to her and her editor, read it here.

A Bell Can't Be Un-Rung - A Letter to the Sheriff's Office

In my capacity as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, addressing Durham's image comes with the territory.  Below is letter sent to Sheriff Worth Hill explaining DCVB's position with regard to comments made by Major Paul Martin, a Deputy with the Durham County Sheriff's office.

Durham has fought image issues related to crime for many, many years. Here are just a few of the kinds of comments I see daily in my position.

“I imagine Durham is pretty dangerous…I don’t read the Durham paper, and if there was anything [good] in the Raleigh paper, I don’t know that I’d pay attention to it.”

“Come to Durham and visit the crime capital of NC! Murder and drugs are just a couple of wonderful things to look forward to when visiting!”

“Top cities to visit while wearing a bullet-proof vest maybe...”

Headline: “Cary shines in safest cities rankings; Durham doesn’t.” Triangle Business Journal, November 22, 2010. (Durham was ranked safer than Fayetteville, Winston-Salem, Greensboro and Charlotte.)

Despite fighting these stereotypes and negative water cooler comments for years, Durham has been named one of 41destinations in the WORLD to visit in 2011 (as per the New York Times.) The 6.31 million visitors to Durham last year brought in more than $37 million dollars in tax revenue to this community…the kind of tax revenue that helps funds law enforcement among other things.

If the Department believes there are indeed credible threats of ethnic “wars” in the immediate future, by all means let us know. I couldn’t in good conscience continue to tell visitors to come here.

If this is the rhetoric of one individual, please use your influence to help him understand these comments made publicly do a grave injustice to our community and serve only to further perpetuate the myth that Durham is nothing more than a wasteland of gang violence.

I offer these comments sincerely. We have a strong desire to put crime statistics in perspective, not to ignore, apologize, cover up or offer excuses for crime. This, however, seems way over the top.

I don't presume to know what public safety professionals encounter every day.  But I sit on the Durham Crime Cabinet and expect that law enforcement agencies would alert the public in an appropriate way if there was merit to the theories presented in Major Martin's paper. 

Once the bell has been rung, the vibrations ripple far and wide.

A Typical Case of “Community” Identity Theft

On a normal day marketing is merely a multi-faceted and highly complex process.  Other days, however, it's an all-out scramble to keep alot of balls in the air. 

What follows is a post about a major aspect of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau's work.  It's typically referred to as "defending the brand."  Sometimes it seems the effort is akin to whispering in a hurricane or asking a mouse to pull a freight train.  But delivered consistently, week after week, year after year, the efforts do pay off.  Here is a blog post written by DCVB's President Emeritus, considered an expert in community image and brand.

A Typical Case of "Community" Identity TheftBull City Mutterings
Reyn Bowman

If you ever wonder why “36 Hours” in the NYTs tried to cover Durham as part of two huge metro areas lumped together (an impossibility by the way) but gave tiny Sun Valley in the center of my homestate of Idaho an issue all its own, look no further than this announcement related to the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards, R.I.P.

It is information like this, distributed either directly by Raleigh-based WRAL to publications like USA Today and others or relayed via the Raleigh-based office of Associated Press for North Carolina that pollutes and distorts, some say deliberately, Durham’s identity.

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