Enough is enough. The Asheville police chief’s awful track record, deceptions and inexcusable inaction mean she must be removed from office. Our city can’t have change while allowing powerful officials to keep their positions no matter what damage they do.
Above: Asheville Police Department Chief Tammy Hooper. File photo by Max Cooper.
Last Wednesday night, in front of a packed room full of justifiable rage Asheville Police Department Chief Tammy Hooper said that, if the public wanted it, she’d resign. Their anger was sparked by the emergence of video of the brutal beating of Johnnie Jermaine Rush last August by then-APD officer Chris Hickman. Rush was walking home from work when he was stopped by police for supposedly jaywalking, before he was repeatedly and brutally attacked by Hickman while other officers looked on or even aided the violence. The anger was fed by the fact that the harm dealt out to Rush was just the latest act of brutality in the long, long history of this city’s brutal segregation and the APD’s own massive problems with violence against black Ashevillians.
Hooper, it emerged, had waited nearly five months to call in the State Bureau of Investigation to see if Hickman should face criminal charges, something that usually happens in a matter of days. She waited so long the SBI declined to investigate and her department ended up investigating itself. According to senior city staff and Asheville City Council, she also hadn’t informed them of the incident at all. A highly-charged local election, where racism and police brutality were major topics of debate, passed with the damage done to Rush in the dark. So did the APD’s re-accreditation. Hickman, who’d been on administrative duty since the incident, finally resigned in January, but other officers involved, including a supervisor who failed to carry out her duty and investigate the use of force, remain in the department.
For all that and more Hooper should go. Asheville’s Council and city manager need to fire her.
Hooper claimed that in waiting so long to call in the SBI she was just following the APD’s usual process (the department was pursuing an administrative investigation of Hickman at the time). But this is false. In 2016 simultaneous criminal and administrative investigations were quickly launched after Sgt. Tyler Radford shot and killed Jerry Williams in disputed circumstances.
The APD’s own use of force policy, the new one that Hooper crafted and that her defenders have touted repeatedly, directs that “the Chief of Police or designee will request the NC State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) to investigate any incident where an APD officer is involved in a use of force that results in death or serious physical injury of any person.”
Perhaps she didn’t consider the blows Rush took from Hickman’s fists, or the burns he suffered from the APD officer’s taser, to be sufficiently serious.
Hickman was allowed to resign after an investigation that dragged on for months, and all the time he drew a salary. This wasn’t some complicated or well-hidden ethical violation: crystal clear video evidence was in Hooper’s hands the next day that Hickman had brutally assaulted one of the very people the department claims to serve. He finally faced criminal charges just last Thursday, the day after Hooper and city officials faced locals who told them in no uncertain terms that the people’s patience was at an end.
When pressed last week if her department was pursuing the APD employee who leaked the video, she carefully claimed only that the APD wasn’t investigating the leak (meaning another agency could be), which given her previous statements on the issue isn’t exactly reassuring.
Her handling of the Rush case would be bad enough by itself, but this isn’t the first major problem with Hooper’s conduct since she took office in 2015. After Williams’ 2016 killing, she led the APD in clamping down on peaceful protests with a barrage of dubious charges and petty score-settling that included a deputy chief outright lying to the public about basic facts of the case. When the NAACP and Southern Coalition for Social Justice raised the fact of Asheville’s appalling racial disparities in traffic stops last year, Hooper pushed back and stopped even basic reforms, asserting they weren’t necessary.
When locals voiced serious concerns about the culture of the APD, pointing out last year that Hooper’s proposal to expand policing downtown would just lead to more violence against minorities on minor or false charges (like, well, jaywalking), Hooper skipped the public process. In doing so, she avoided serious questioning about the incredibly dubious stats she also used to back her proposal.
When Officer Shalin Oza threw a black teenager to the ground she did nothing. When, months later, he held an AR-15 while threatening to arrest a group of black teenagers, she defended him. She did the same for Officer Zach Raymond, who shoved an intellectually disabled black man to the pavement during a bomb hoax last year.
The treatment given to officers like Oza and Raymond made a Chris Hickman inevitable. Where would police prone to violence against Asheville’s minority communities ever get the idea that they would face even minimum accountability?
Her defenders have offered two main rationales for Hooper keeping her job. Neither is compelling. The first is that removing her won’t change larger systemic issues. The second is that, if she was fired, Asheville couldn’t do better than this.
That makes no sense.
Systemic change means removing people who’ve caused or contributed to serious problems from positions of power. It is not all of it, it is not most of it, but it is damn sure part of it.
This justification is, when used by people tied to the status quo, is often not offered in good faith. It is instead an excuse to have officials avoid any consequences “because we need to focus on the systemic problem.” It’s a major reason why things don’t change, why we don’t deal seriously with our town’s racism and why Rush wasn’t the first and won’t be the last.
This view requires believing that any sort of reform can seriously happen while the same people keep the same positions of power no matter how badly they screw up, how much contempt they demonstrate for the public and how often they get caught trying to obscure the truth. Somehow, the idea is that they’ll mysteriously learn despite never facing any sanction whatsoever for damaging behavior.
It doesn’t work, of course. So awful incidents like this keep happening and every time officials muster a sea of shocked expressions like this isn’t the obvious outcome of this approach.
You’d think by the point Council is using terms like “cascade of poor decisions” in official announcements they’d start to realize that maybe, just maybe, someone should finally lose their job.
Sadly, so far that’s not the case. If the majority of Council is sincere about their outrage, they have a funny way of showing it.
The second defense of Hooper, to assert that Ashevillians can’t do better than this, is even worse. It is, bluntly, an insult. I’m sure we can find someone for $160,643 a year who doesn’t crack down on peaceful protests, won’t bury reforms proposed by civil rights groups and doesn’t defend repeated incidents of brutality against black Ashevillians until they get so obvious and horrific that they make national news.
I’m sure we can, for that generous salary, round up someone minimally competent and honest enough that they don’t repeatedly try to deceive the public or wait five months to launch a basic criminal investigation while failing to inform the city manager and Council about a major incident of racist violence.
Honestly, not racking up Hooper’s long list of failures and injustices seems like it should be a pretty goddamn basic achievement. But here we are.
It’s grand that Hickman will, unlike almost any other local police officer caught on tape brutally enforcing our city’s segregation, actually face criminal charges for his violence. Great. But let’s not forget the officers who helped him shove Rush to the ground, let’s not forget the trainee who felt he should stop a black man for walking across the street. Let’s not forget Sgt. Lisa Taube, the supervisor who Rush says accused him of lying and whom, even the city has admitted, failed to do her most basic duty and investigate Hickman’s violence. All of them are still on the force.
So is the police chief who would have been perfectly happy to let this stay out of the public eye forever if someone in her department hadn’t had enough of a conscience and sent the body cam video to the Citizen-Times.
What those eight brutal minutes revealed wasn’t just a violent abuse of power, it was a slew of police that didn’t give a damn and actively enabled Hickman’s assault.
So the firings shouldn’t end with Hooper. But that’s where it needs to start, and she bears a great deal of responsibility. The APD she’s led and molded is one where officers from rookie on up to supervisor didn’t bat an eye at the evil displayed that August night. Her conduct throughout has reeked, once again, of damage control rather than an actual reckoning. Combined with her multitude of other problems it’s time for Council and the city manager to do their jobs and fire the police chief.
If her replacement takes a similar approach? Fire them too (the first time they do something awful, not the fifth) until one of Hooper’s successors — and everyone under their command — gets the point that they ignore the people’s rights at their peril. A city government that can’t give us something better than this is admitting it can’t govern.
The public should let them know.
Justice requires accountability. Justice requires action. Every time our elected officials forget that fact, they just ensure we’ll be back here again.
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