Durham’s 2 mayoral candidates with vastly different backgrounds target crime problem

After the first week of election filings, two people have filed to run for Durham mayor, including an outspoken, conservative candidate and a retired Superior Court judge.

Jahnmaud Lane, a Republican political commentator, filed as a candidate on Monday to replace Steve Schewel, who announced in May that he wouldn’t seek a third term.

Elaine O’Neal, the former judge and recent chair of the City Council Racial Equity Task Force, also officially filed. She announced she was running for mayor in January, The N&O previously reported.

The filing period for mayor and the City Council’s three ward seats runs through noon Aug. 13.

If O’Neal is elected, she would be the first African American woman Durham has chosen as mayor.

Both have made addressing violent crime part of their campaigns but have different approaches to addressing it. Over 300 people were shot last year in Durham, 33 of them fatally, and city leaders have debated and disagreed on how best to make the city safer.

Durham’s municipal elections are nonpartisan, but Lane’s politics are in sharp contrast to those of Schewel and other council members. He is a pro-Trump supporter who attended the Jan. 6 rally outside the Capitol in Washington that devolved into a riot.

Additionally, Durham as a county skews overwhelmingly to the left, with 124,508 registered Democratic voters (55%) compared to 24,494 Republican voters (11%) as of July 24.

Here’s a closer look at the two candidates.

Jahnmaud Lane

Lane, who is Black, grew up in Rocky Mount and moved to Durham in 2016 with his wife and two children. He works as a heating, ventilation and air conditioning technician for ARS/Rescue Rooter.

Lane hosts the online series “Mind of Jamal,” which he describes as a “news reporting platform.” Since 2016, he has attracted over 300,000 followers on Facebook and almost 35,000 subscribers on YouTube.

On his videos he has expressed support for former President Donald Trump; outrage over COVID-19 mask mandates; and disdain for the Black Lives Matter movement, efforts to defund the police and the media.

Lane, who has said online that he will not get the COVID-19 vaccine, has had content banned on platforms for violating policies. A Twitter account, @MindofJamal, is currently suspended. In a July 19 video about where to find his content when it gets banned, Lane said he is also on Parler, Gab and Telegram — platforms known for having a far-right user base and more lax content-moderation rules.

A photograph on the “Mind of Jamal” Facebook page shows him standing in front of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, wearing a “MAGADAD” T-shirt and carrying a “Make America Great Again” flag.

Lane said he didn’t enter the building but attended because “funny business” took place during the 2020 election.

The claim that the 2020 presidential election results were illegitimate has repeatedly been proven false by election officials and dismissed in courts.

Elaine O’Neal

O’Neal was born and raised in West End, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Durham, and attended Durham public schools, including Hillside High School. A double-graduate of N.C. Central University, she received both an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the university and law degree from the School of Law.

O’Neal is running for “a Durham with safe neighborhoods, stable housing, and great jobs,” according to her campaign website. As chair of the City Council’s Racial Equity Task Force, she helped to produce a 60-page report last year, which called on the city to address systemic racism through different policy areas.

In an interview with the N&O, O’Neal said she is “Durham-born, Durham-reared and Durham-trained.” She also said she’s staying focused on her own campaign, rather than comment on her opposition.

“It’s an election,” she said. “(If) you run and you want to do it, go for it. I’m going to run my race and everybody else has to run theirs, and the people will choose.”

Her judiciary career includes serving as North Carolina District Judge for 17 years before being elected to the Superior Court bench in 2011, the first woman to do so in Durham County. O’Neal was also the first woman to be named Chief District Court Judge in the county.

O’Neal eventually retired from the bench when she returned to NCCU in 2018 to serve as interim dean for two years.

O’Neal said she plans to spend more time speaking with community members from different Durham neighborhoods as she refines her platform specifics, including plans to target gun violence.

Community problems need community solutions, she said, and an approach that works in one area might not necessarily work in another.

“Everybody has an opinion, I have one as well,” she said. “But the opinions that matter most are coming from those who are actually living it.”

Policing and gun violence

In a phone interview with the N&O, Lane repeatedly said that he considers himself a former “no-good, piece-of-trash drug dealer.” In 2001, Lane was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of resisting and assaulting an officer. He also had his driver’s license taken away. Two years later, he spent just over a year in a state corrections facility for assaulting and inflicting serious bodily injury on another person.

His views on policing changed during his incarceration, and he now counts himself among those who “Back the Blue,” he said in the phone interview.

Lane said his top priorities if elected would be crime and gun violence. He wants to strengthen policing, raise officers’ pay and target crimes at all levels, saying “there is no such thing as a low-level drug dealer.”

“I want people (in Durham) to be able to sit outside on their porch at 11 o’clock at night and not worry about gunshots going through,” he said.

“Moving funds from police officers, from the police department — I will fight that with every breath of my body,” he said.

The City Council recently agreed to transfer funding for five vacant police positions in the current year’s budget and up to 15 more in six months based on the city’s new Community Safety Department’s needs at that time.

The department will pilot alternatives to traditional policing and oversee the management of a nearly $1 million investment in Bull City United, the county’s violence interruption team.

O’Neal also discussed the impact gun violence has had on the city at a downtown rally after filing her candidacy on Monday.

“We should lose no more of our young people to these streets,” O’Neal said in her speech. “We have survivors across the city walking around with bullet fragments in their bodies and broken lives, mothers who continue to mourn for children and loved ones snatched from them by guns.”

O’Neal said her highest priority as mayor would be to create a safe city for all Durham residents. That approach would include exploring ways to improve how the city partners with law enforcement, she said.

The N&O was unable to reach the Durham Republican Party by email for this story.

Maydha Devarajan is an intern at The News & Observer, supported by the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund at the North Carolina Community Foundation.

This story was originally published July 28, 2021 at 3:36 PM.