With a department in trouble a chief departs and Asheville’s city manager starts the search for another. Here’s the first of a two-part series delving into what happened next

Above: City Manager Gary Jackson, behind his nametag on the Asheville City Council dais. File photo by Max Cooper.

This is the first of a two-part series delving into the eight-month process of selecting one of Asheville’s most important jobs — police chief — and what that search revealed.

Last November, Asheville Police Department Chief William Anderson announced he would retire. By that point, that probably didn’t particularly come as a surprise to many here. Anderson had attracted major criticisms both within the department and without, from petitions by dissenting officers to criticisms from larger police organizations to controversies over a number of incidents involving his administration. From this view, Anderson misused his power to settle scores and failed to halt major problems within the APD, leading to a department in free-fall.

He also, notably, had plenty of supporters, including many on Council, City Manager Gary Jackson and a number of community members. Some of these asserted that Anderson — the city’s first African-American chief — had tried to make necessary reforms, an “earnest effort to improve the department” and reached out to help mend relations with different parts of the community. From this view, he was a capable leader who tried to make hard decisions but ran afoul of internal factions and outside pressure.

Which one of those images was true was debated — sometimes loudly and at length — but on Nov. 14 Anderson said he would step down and the competing factions, City Hall and no shortage of members of the public turned their attention to another question: what’s next?

Opening moves

In the six months after Anderson’s departure, from closed sessions among local government officials to public meetings and sometimes contentious debates, that decision would be made by Jackson. In May, he chose Tammy Hooper — then the deputy chief of the Alexandria Police Department — as Asheville’s new chief. She took office late last month.

It’s of course too early to tell what kind of leader Hooper will prove to be, and the concerns about the APD and its role reach beyond any one person. But behind the simple events stated above, a lot happened during those months, much of it even before the first application rolled into a consultant’s inbox.

Those events reveal quite a bit about how the city government makes a major decision, what it prioritizes and the deep divisions that remain about how to police a rapidly-changing city. Personnel decisions often have no shortage of secrecy — and this is no exception — so this story is worth telling, because there are a lot of people wondering where things go from here.

The Asheville Police Department, by almost everyone’s acknowledgement, wasn’t in the best shape. What and who was responsible for that was a matter of more debate. During Jackson’s decade-long tenure as head of the day-to-day affairs of City Hall — overseeing every department from the APD to Parks and Rec — tensions within and about the police cropped up multiple times. Just three-and-a-half years before Anderson resigned, Chief Bill Hogan resigned after a major scandal about missing evidence broke, and Asheville’s still dealing with the impact. Pay for rank-and-file officers also lagged behind their colleagues at the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office and battles over the role of the Civil Service Board revealed tensions within the department and city government.

As far as jobs go, the chief of the Asheville Police Department is one of the more powerful among city staff. They oversee one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the region, with 241 people at their command. Public safety remains one of the single largest parts of the city budget, and this fiscal year the APD’s budget is $2.47 million.

Importantly, while Council has a share of power, the only officials it directly hires (or fires) are the City Manager, City Attorney and City Clerk. Jackson handles much of the rest, though in theory he’s supposed to carry out the policies set by Council and is subject to their direction.

So when it came to specific positions like the next police chief that meant that, legally at least, this particular buck stopped at Jackson’s desk, something city staff and consultants would repeatedly emphasize to members of the public over the coming months. The back-and-forth, sometimes harshly, between assertions of the city manager’s authority and the wishes of community members and advocates would prove a major point of tension even when it came to defining the broad role the next chief will play.

Notably, the opening moves differed a little bit from the last time this particular seat was vacant. Back in 2011 Jackson appointed then-Capt. Wade Wood — an APD veteran — as acting chief (Wood is now deputy chief). This time, he went for a professional troubleshooter, Steve Belcher, who had taken over police departments in turmoil several times before.

While Hogan’s resignation came among major public controversy over the evidence room and the transparency of the police department, the controversies this time came at a moment when racial injustice and police brutality were a focus of both national and local attention, with multiple rallies and protests in the city core. Compared to the reaction to those protests in other cities, police presence at these rallies in Asheville were light.

But Asheville remains a very segregated city, and activists and locals emerged to call for that to change multiple times while the city was defining what the next chief would do and, later, who that person would be. Over the past decade, the department actually became less diverse — only eight percent of the officers are black — while 34 percent of incidents involving the use of force involved African-Americans and complaints by black citizens about the conduct of white officers made up over a quarter of those received by the city last year. For comparison, about 13 percent of the city’s population is black, according to the 2010 census.

Meanwhile, with all these events occurring, the city proceeded the way it does for a number of high positions or big plans: hire consultants and plan public input sessions. Much of this would take place before any applications even started. Instead, the events of these few months would determine what kind of chief, skills and emphases the city was looking for. Supposedly, it would also give the consultants and the city an idea of what the public needed.

But before Belcher even arrived in office concerns started to arise — including from one of the city’s own boards — that this time business as usual might not be enough.

‘More than a little concerned’

Unlike some cities, Asheville doesn’t have a civilian review board or committee with the power to change rules for the police department, but it does have an advisory committee that meets, once a month, to talk with local police officials and city staff while raising concerns and crafting policy. The Citizens Police Advisory Committee is composed of 13 members, including representatives of different areas of Asheville, city staff and police commanders and groups like the housing authority and Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

If Jackson and city staff were hoping for smooth sailing, they were in for some surprises. At its Dec. 2 meeting, multiple members of the committee pushed back against the city’s usual way of handling these decisions, asserting that relying on a consultant and a few public input sessions was distinctly lacking, both in defining the qualities needed in a chief and setting priorities for reforming the department.

Committee member Debbie Applewhite said she was “more than a little concerned” when Assistant City Manager Paul Fetherston laid out the city’s initial plans for proceeding forward, both with the process for searching for a chief and for implementing the official plans to overhaul the department.

“My suggestion is simply that that may be a bit of an artificial barrier: everything that happens touches on how the police interact with the public and how the department functions,” committee member Carol Hallstrom also said, when Fetherston tried to delineate staff’s authority. “I think there are many different views in this community worth hearing from directly about the internal operations.”

“Community, in the last go-round, didn’t have a lot of time, only had a two-day notice,” Committee member Allen Brailsford said. “If you only have a two-day notice about a meeting, it’s not very helpful. It would be good to have some time so if you have a job, you can make time to get out.”

Committee Chair Jayden Gurney, representing the housing authority, said the usual process left many people out.

“It seems like one of the larger problems was the meetings were scheduled at times when people who had nine to five jobs couldn’t attend,” Gurney said. “It did seem like checking the box. Do we have community input? Great. Wonderful. Let’s move on. It wasn’t really an attempt to garner more input, but an attempt to say on a report that we’re moving forward with community support.”

“The time was an issue, the location was an issue, the attitude of the search firm was an issue,” Hallstrom added, and Applewhite agreed. “The interest in having us actually engage in any way was not present.”

This time, Hallstrom said, the city needed to select the search firm far more carefully and without more public input “we’ll get the repetition of a process that was so limited in the ability of the community to participate that it was really about form over substance.”

But over the course of an extensive back and forth, Fetherston noted that any public process would depend on the consultant, and emphasized that at the end of the day, the city manager would make the call.

“I think we all want to see as much community input as possible; ultimately it’s the city manager that will make this critical decision,” he said.

A level of scrutiny

Over the ensuing months, Hallstrom would emerge as a voice frequently concerned about the use of consultants and the degree of public input, dialogue and decision-making city staff were willing to allow.

It was a topic she had extensive experience with. A civil rights activist in the ’60s, Hallstrom later moved to a career as an attorney, working for non-profits and the federal government on social justice and immigration issues. Over a long career she has had extensive experience crafting policies for — and dealing with — law enforcement agencies and the public. Now retired, she remains involved on a number of boards, non-profits and activist groups.

Hallstrom chose to use her seat, she says, “to raise substantial questions and concerns about the process itself after having been engaged in prior processes and not encouraged.”

From the outset, she tells the Blade, she would “try to make it clear that I and others who have a long history of working in police-community relations were very concerned about the competence, the openness with which this process would be conducted” given what she’d witnessed from the way city staff and consultants conducted both the previous chief search and gathering public input for the plan to overhaul the police department.

“A concern then and a concern in this round was the selection itself of the consulting firm,” she said, “A great deal of authority is granted to the search firm. Certainly the manager’s office broadly oversees it, certainly the manager’s office makes the final decision. But the influence of the search firm is huge.”

The use of consultants is a major plank of city government under Jackson’s administration. In both the selection of Anderson and crafting the plans for overhauling the department, the city relied on Chapel Hill-based Developmental Associates. On Feb. 2, the city manager hired Affion Public, a Pennsylvania-based firm focused on “providing technology and executive search services for state and local government.” Despite the concerns expressed by the police board about the need for more public input this time around, they were only contracted to conduct three public input sessions. It also wasn’t the first time the city dealt with the firm: it also ended up heading up the search for a planning director. As one of the consultants would note during a public input session later that month, the firm had also worked with Fetherston in the past.

Hallstrom believes that given the tensions in Asheville and the turmoil in the police department, the city should have stretched further. From her experience, she asserts, a different process was possible.

“It’s possible to start with more deliberative conversation about the search firm itself,” she notes. In fact, she specifically gave the city manager and staff the names of firms who she said have particular expertise, not just in headhunting for public employees, but for dealing with policing in divided communities in general.

“The distinctions between this recruiting and recruiting for other positions is substantial,” she notes, and she believed there were “opportunities to learn from” groups like the Police Executive Research Forum and NOBLE, an organization of black law enforcement leaders. Even if the city didn’t directly use these organizations in the process, she notes, it could have gathered some valuable insights by talking to them.

“My point simply is that there are organizations that are outside those that have historically owned the search process,” she tells the Blade.

But, to her observation, in many ways the city went about business as usual.

Elephants in the room

In the end, the main public input sessions happened in late February during a day marked by a barrage of snowstorms, when many events (and even one of the sessions) were rescheduled.

During this time, much of the process remained behind the scenes, with the consultant and city staff reluctant to even discuss it in general terms. Asked to talk about their role and plans Affion’s Scott Reilly ‚ the main consultant involved in the police chief search process — refused, instead directing the Blade to city spokespeople. When they were asked to about the process overall and city staff’s reasons for conducting it the way they did, Dawa Hitch, the city’s communications director, pointed media to the city’s webpage on the matter.

As it happened, the late February meetings happened during the days dominated by snowstorms. While many public events were cancelled, the meetings still happened, albeit with one being rescheduled. The best-attended was mid-day on Feb. 25, during a break in the snow, at Hill Street Baptist Church. The meeting overlapped with one of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and about 40 people, half of them African-American, showed up.

The church’s Rev. Keith Ogden, the IMA’s president and a prominent defender of Anderson during the political battles about the fate of the chief, offered a scathing assessment of the internal issues he believed needed to be resolved if the next chief, whoever they were, were to be successful.

Unleess city officials “get on the same sheet of music and turn to supporting a chief who makes recommendations for disciplining or supporting an officer for excessive use of force, for overstepping their bounds, these surveys are not going to make a difference,” he said. “If anything has to change, it’s the policies and procedures of how we discipline police officers who do not follow their own rules.”

He added that he felt the Civil Service Board exerted too much power and city officials should “say the hell with the Civil Service board” and “let the chips fall where they may.”

“You can’t have a disconnect from the top brass in the police department who don’t support a new leader,” Ogden said. “They’ll close ranks on what’s wrong for the sake of closing rank.”

He cited the example of police commanders suggesting a more lenient penalty for Jonathan Collins, officer from the public housing unit who spit at a teenager. Collins appealed a 320 hour suspension handed out by Anderson. In early February, the Civil Service Board upheld the sanction and sided with Anderson.

Ogden believed a lack of discipline within the department was “the elephant in the room.”

“If I was the chief and my top brass didn’t support me, they need to be reduced in rank or they need to be moved to another role,” he said. “We can do all the input sessions we want but unless they start doing that, it’s not going to make a difference.”

Given the critical nature of the decision, he said it was important the city not move too fast and warned of a “revolving door” for the next chief if the divisions within the department weren’t solved.

“We need the police, we love the police,” Ogden said. “But when it comes to justice we want to make sure justice is served, that it’s fair and that we’re representing our community.”

After his remarks, Fetherston took the stage talking about how the city had selected Affion to recruit the police chief.

The session was led by Hitch, the city’s director for public engagement, and Scott Reilly, a consultant with Affion.

Reilly noted that they’d also done a session with law enforcement earlier and “we heard that the police department is pretty much consultant-ed out,” he admitted with a chuckle. “They’ve had a lot of consultants come in over the last few months or year, and we’re another one. We want to try to get this right.”

To that end, they wanted “an open dialogue” about what the community wanted to see in their next chief.

“Our job is to be the matchmaker,” he continued “We’re not naïve to think that this isn’t going to be a challenging position for someone.”

First, Reilly wanted to know about similar cities to Asheville. Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, Burlington, Austin all came up.

“Why’s that important? We’re a headhunting firm,” “We want to understand those cities that we think are similar.” He agreed with the audience’s list, adding that Asheville has “a kind of college town vibe to it,” so he thought of Ft. Collins, Colo. and Columbia, Missouri.

“I would like to see someone who is transparent, who is willing to hold people accountable,” Bettie Council of the coalition, said.

“One of the qualities that has to be present is a very high level of cultural competence,” Robert Simmons, who works with Changing Together and the Southside Advisory Board, said. “There is a general sense in this community — and I’m not just talking about black and white, I’m talking about socioeconomic status in our community — that people are overlooked because they aren’t wealthy.”

“Does somebody have responsibility for analyzing what went wrong the previous times and making sure that whoever you’re interviewing for now can deal with it differently?” Ann Karson asked.

“Yeah, I think the lens with which you view what went wrong is probably wide and varied,” Reilly replied. “We certainly will have a perspective based on the stakeholder meetings we’ve had with the city manager’s office, with the City Council. There’s some difference of opinions within the department itself about what went wrong.”

“This person’s going to have to be a master communicator,” Reilly added, to balance the different perspectives within the department, the public and the city bureaucracy. “We heard lots of little things that sort of accumulated over time from the staff of the PD.”

We need “someone who’s done their homework and really knows about the city, the demographics, and is willing to meet and find out about the issues in the city, black communities and other groups also,” the next commenter said. “He or she needs to know what’s going on, in the past and currently.”

“I was born and raised here in Asheville and I’m thinking back to the late ’80s and early ’90s, the buzzword was ‘diversity,’” another speaker said. “It has a different meaning to everybody, so we need to be clear about what diversity means to our community.”

“If I had to synthesize and put that into a profile, which is what I have to do,” Reilly replied with a slight chuckle. “How do I do that?”

“I think it will require feedback from everybody here,” she replied. “That’s part of the groundwork and the healing process for us to understand our community. I see it that we’re diverse in the arts, diverse in different restaurants, but otherwise I really can’t tell you.”

“But who defines that?” Reilly asked. “The community,” replied multiple people in the room.

“We need to own that this is a racially divided city,” Rev. Mark Ward of Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Asheville said. “Not step around it and try to soft-talk it, that’s the truth. Whoever the candidate is needs to have a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics that drive that kind of division.”

While “our situation’s not unique,” he continued, the next chief — and the city government — needed a plan to deal with it.

“Coming here from Birmingham, Alabama, I cried for a month,” Willie Vincent said. “This city was so divided, but you cover it up. But you can tell that it’s divided. You’re talking about a problem today that we talked about in the ’60s. We should’ve moved away from those problems a long time ago but here we’re sitting today talking about the same problems. Is that what we’re going to continue to do? Just talk and do nothing?”

Coming from Birmingham and the civil rights struggles of the ’60s, Vincent said that it hurt to come here and witness some of the same problems. “You know something has to be wrong here and it’s still wrong here today as it was in the 1960s, you talking about the same old thing, you’re acting the same old way.”

“If race is not a big consideration in who’s selected as chief you’re going to be going through this process in another couple years,” UNCA professor Dwight Mullen, founder of the State of Black Asheville project, said. “My recommendation to put on your list is not just the person’s own accountability for what they feel or what they think or fitting themselves to the job description.”

The firm also needed to conduct a thorough investigation of their references, Mullen continued, both public and informal, “regarding their success, their experience is bringing together the different divides in communities, but particularly their experience in dealing with a multi-racial community.”

In reply, Reilly noted that given how closely knit many people working in the public sector across the country are, “it’s not hard to do those informal reference checks that you’re talking about.” The firm checks everything from a candidate’s criminal and education histories to a check on their presence in media.

“It’s not a failsafe, but it’s a very thorough check,” he said.

“Look to see how they resolved or actively worked with relationships between the African-American community and the Police Benevolent Associations and the Fraternal Order of Police,” Mullen replied.

Training in dealing with unconscious biases in policing a diverse city are also important, other speakers said.

Simmons wondered if the candidates would be brief on the divides within the department and with the Civil Service Board. They would, Reilly replied.

Priscilla Ndiaye, chair of the Southside Advisory Board, emphasized that communications with the community would be vital. She referred to comments surprised that a shooting that happened the day before the input session took place in “upscale” Biltmore Village.

“With the divisions in the community, that came off as an insult to some,” she said. “We have a lot of divisions here. I was born here and grew up here. At first it was just racial division, but now we have so many other divisions, among age, gender. We have to realize that Asheville is a community and we have to try to heal and overcome the divisions.”

Because of those divisions, she added, too many younger people were living the city.

Meetings also needed to be hosted “were anyone and everyone can attend,” another speaker added, especially those working during the day.

“It’s supposed to snow tonight,” Council noted at another point when city staff mentioned that there would also be an evening session. “Most people are going to be at the grocery store.”

“Communication depends on believing in community, depends on wanting to consult,” Karson added. “It means really, really working with all the people. That’s really difficult in a divided city like this.”

If the next chief is white, Karson added, they would need to work extensively with groups like Building Bridges “about the very subtle ways in which race operates in our favor.”

She also noted that she immigrated from South Africa and was “shocked” by the level of segregation in Asheville. “I hated to see it, I still hate to see it. But it’s there, we have to deal with it.”

Hallstrom also weighed in, asking the firm to make sure candidates defined what they meant by “transparent,”

“In my view it’s become one of those buzzwords now,” she said. Instead of just going out to community events, the department’s leaders needed to take a far more open attitude to sharing information with the community.

“Many, many things can in fact be shared with the community,” she said. “Much of what I hear from my colleagues is that the more openness we are able to have with the leadership of a police agency is going to have the potential to increase the trust a community has.”

“The notion of looking not at how much we can conceal, but how much we can share, at the outset is critical,” she said.

In response, Reilly cautioned that if a candidate was a deputy chief or captain under a chief that had issues with transparency, their own achievements might be harder to measure.

“Three things I hear in every city: transparency, sustainability, run it like a business,” he noted.

Hallstrom asked Reilly to include community member in crafting questions and scenarios for potential chief candidates, as well as in the interview process, “so there are multiple lenses that are reviewing and identifying.” Cooperation between those community members and APD rank-and-file in the same room crafting that process might also help bridge some of the divides, she added.

In the end, this back-and-forth over the city’s fraught divides was put into a bullet point list with the comments from the other two meetings, with items like “consider a survey,”clearly define what diversity means to Asheville – include Asheville Police Department (APD)” and “conduct a thorough investigation (reference checks) into experience (success) in multi-racial communities.”

Towards the end of the meeting, Fetherston noted that community members would be involved as the process went on, “we take that very seriously,” and people would have an opportunity to meet the finalists and ask them questions at a “facilitated q and a.”

Gurney noted that he felt Fetherston and the city manager’s office had been more involved than the previous selection of a police chief.

“Listening to the community’s input is one thing, implementing our input is another thing,” Ndiaye said. “The community wants to be part of the interviewing and hiring process.”

“That’s the definition of transparency: having the community involved in the hiring process,” Council said. “If we’re left out, you’re not serving the community.”

But when pressed by the attendees, especially about community involvement in the hiring and interview process, Reilly emphasized that the final decision — and implementing changes in the department — would come down to the city manager, not the public.

“We as a firm are believers in a very open process, we have community meet and greets, we’ve had community members sit on panels, we’ve done all of those things,” he said at one point. “The police chief works for the community, I agree with that, but the police chief works for the city manager. Where I’ve seen it go wrong is the community wants candidate A and the city manager wants candidate B. What happens? Who do we hire?”

Hitch interjected, noting that “this underscores the importance of today’s event. I want to make sure everybody fully understands that this is the opportunity to get your thoughts on this paper and it will be taken into consideration with all of the other things the city manager is going to have to consider.”

In reply, one of the attendees warned of another “elephant in the room,” namely that “we’ve lost two chief of police based on this same city manager.”

“Maybe it’s an issue of trust,” she said, with others nodding in agreement. “You’re saying — and I believe you — that this is an opportunity to express yourself and we will take this into consideration but how do we believe that?”

“Maybe the community doesn’t trust the city manager.”

Next: The applications roll in, a diagnosis of the APD’s woes hits hard, tensions with the public continue, candidates make their pitch and a chief emerges.

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