From Staff Reports 

Asheville City Council engaged in corrective action, or at least gave the appearance of doing so, at its June 19 meeting.

Council had come under fire for several procedural breaches committed at its last meeting in the name of social justice.

 In short, council had voted on a matter without notifying the public and without allowing public comment. While the matter had been discussed at several council meetings, the discussion came primarily from advocates making presentations or organized for public comment. After a few such sessions, police officers began showing up at meetings to have their say at late-hour, general public comment periods.

Councilman Vijay Kapoor strongly opposed what her termed the disregard for rules and told his peers at least three times they were being neither transparent nor democratic. Furthermore, he said it was ill-advised to approve new rules without giving people with opposing viewpoints a chance to hear each other and reconcile contradictions.

The June 19 meeting started with Mayor Esther Manheimer stating that council would henceforth play by its own rules. For example, it would stop adding items to its published agendas during meetings, a process that had excluded people from sharing concerns with council before votes were taken.

The next big step was to rescind three actions taken by council and re-approve their substance in a more legally-defensible format. At its last meeting, council had approved three motions directing the city manager to implement policies governing the police department. The motions had been made on the fly, so the spoken language was messy, but formalized, they required, “a written consent policy for the APD for vehicular searches and searches of the person or personal property associated with the person,” “that APD not base a consent search on vehicular stops on a person having a criminal record or suspicious movement or behavior,” and “that APD de-prioritize low-level regulatory stops.” Kapoor and Vice Mayor Gwen Wisler had voted against the measures.

One problem with the actions was the city’s charter forbids council from telling the police chief what to do, and the three actions taken were construed by some observers as a thinly veiled attempt to do that. The reworded measures only authorized the city manager to work with the police chief to draft policies described in the three actions.

Police Chief Tammy Hooper had said repeatedly that before the campaign to adopt the changes began, the APD had de-prioritized low-level regulatory stops. Even though everybody was on the same page, it remained a bone of contention.

The other two measures were billed as addressing concerns raised a year ago about members of the APD disproportionately targeting people of color in vehicle stops. Dee Williams of the local chapter of the NAACP persuaded council to invite Ian Mance, an attorney working for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, to share with council the numbers. They showed not only a disproportionate number of African-Americans being stopped, but also less contraband being found on African-Americans.

This led groups like Black Lives Matter to call for reforms in the APD, an institution they viewed as plagued by systemic racism. Then, the incident happened, as analysts who study the application of statistics in shaping public sentiment have said, “surely it will.”

In Asheville, the incident was the brutalization of Johnnie Rush, captured on police bodycam footage. According to all accounts, Rush was a hard-working individual walking home from a late-night shift and harmlessly minding his own business.

The footage was leaked to Williams by somebody in the police department, and it became a cause célèbre. By extension, the department and the entire city were deluged with claims of systemic racism. The city responded by, among other things, creating a new Office of Equity and Inclusion that reports directly to the city manager. And, the public has been led to believe former City Manager Gary Jackson was forced out of office because of the incident and an apparent coverup.

Challenges to the actions council was trying to take came from police officers locally and regionally. Buncombe County  Sheriff Van Duncan had attended one of council’s meetings, but had been unable to stay into the late hours to be heard.

Officers argued they needed all the tools state and federal laws allow. At the June 19 meeting, risk manager John Miall said the city was exposing council and law enforcement to liability suits they would not win by limiting officers’ abilities to do their jobs. He said plaintiff attorneys were “salivating” at the potential for failure-to-act suits.

Many questions from Miall’s presentations remained unanswered. Were traffic stops cherry-picked from all other police actions because they showed racial bias? Was the number of stops statistically significant? Were percentages somehow gerrymandered in ways to accentuate the advocates’ agenda? And, most importantly, was correlation due to causation? 

Feeling he was unable to get a fair-and-balanced staff report with a council agenda, Kapoor took it upon himself to research the statistics that council had been presented.

When provided with numbers in a historical context from the police department, Kapoor said he found the increase in African-American traffic stops followed an increase in gun activity. The city’s crime analyst had been asked to find out where the most incidents were occurring so more officers could be assigned to those areas. As it turned out, those areas were in public housing and other “black neighborhoods.”

In other words, he was saying that city police officers did not have an agenda against people of color. The department was following crime, to keep the peace and protect innocents. As is often the case, he added, Asheville’s low-income neighborhoods also have higher populations of people of color. Kapoor said he emailed the analysis to his peers on council, but outside his own decisions, they did not play into council action.

Kapoor also said during budget considerations that he supported the proposed additions to the police force. “We are seeing a continued, significant increase in violent crime – especially gun violence – in certain parts of the city,” he said. What’s more, Obama’s 21st Century Policing report seemed to be common ground on which people on both sides of the issues were agreeing. It advocated for officers to do more community policing, but now APD was spending all its time putting out fires.

 Officers were continually being pulled out of other districts to handle crime downtown. When there weren’t enough officers to answer calls, how were they supposed to find time to engage in community fellowshipping, not to mention extra training to prevent profiling, etc.?

 Advocates for the police restrictions were also advocates for not granting the police chief her request to hire more officers. One activist, Amy Cantrell, sat on the floor of the council chambers, behind the podium, until escorted out of the building by officers on security detail. 

Cantrell told them she wanted to be arrested, so they agreed to grant her wish if she would go peacefully outside with them.

Rondell Lance, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police, said officers would be fine with the search changes, provided council gave them leeway. Rather than making written consent mandatory, he asked that the ordinances say, “when safe and practical.”

Illlustrations were given of when requiring written consent could endanger the safety of potential victims or the officer, and Kapoor and Councilman Keith Young got into a debate, with Young making claims and Kapoor fact-checking. 

The very exchange, the mayor said, showed council was not the body to be drafting the ordinances. 

She said she had talked to mayors in other jurisdictions who had implemented the policies council was trying to, and they described it as a very complex process.

In an impassioned speech, Young found fault with several claims made by members of the public. He said the Fourth Amendment protected an inalienable civil right. 

Young disagreed with assessments that there was something wrong with his cutting off of public comment and overriding of the city manager’s authority at the last meeting. 

Paralleling the officers’ requests, he spoke as if the ship was off-course, and he had to do what was necessary to steer it aright.

“Centuries of racial discrimination, of slavery and subjugation and Jim Crowe, didn’t simply vanish with the end of lawful segregation. It didn’t just stop when Dr. (Martin Luther) King (Jr.) made a speech …,’ Young said.