The choice facing Asheville is clear. In fights over NAACP reforms and the annual budget, City Hall is ground zero for the long-brewing fight between pushes for reform and the city’s historic racism, now openly backed and defended by the police chief and law enforcement lobbyists.

Above: Asheville City Council. File photo by Max Cooper.

Sometimes years go by when one isn’t sure if things are changing at all. Asheville’s city politics were, for a long time, especially adept at creating that particular illusion. Steeped in a culture of nearly glacial decision-making and the use of decorum to mask real differences, there was considerable pressure to make it seem like everything was, always, “ok,” at least for the people that got to speak. Too many among city staff and Council members were (and are still) adept in weaving boredom, confusion and delay to deter public input as much as possible.

But pressures have, for years, built below the surface. Sometimes, they’ve even erupted to the fore. The above arts, after all, can only mask reality, not change it. The courses charted in City Hall kept running into the reality of a rapidly gentrifying city. Over the past few years, the illusion has proved shakier than ever. At the ballot box and in public hearings, discontent started to get a bit louder.

Public pressure is an interesting thing; often it doesn’t seem to have an effect until the moment it changes everything. Over the past few weeks, the illusion didn’t just shake, it broke.

On May 22, locals took to City Hall to demand change. They got it, upsetting long-established norms and leading to Council directives both to open up police data and institute basic policing reforms long sought by the NAACP and many Ashevillians. Meanwhile, the mask came off about the nature of their opposition, as Asheville’s police chief and law enforcement lobbyists lobbed racist stereotypes and declared first that they would accept no reforms and then that Council members should be removed for even suggesting them.

The events also set up another major conflict, as they coincided with attempts by some Council members to sneak through a budget that controversially expands the police department. So this coming Tuesday, June 19, Council will both vote on confirming the NAACP reforms and possibly pass, with little discussion or transparency, a budget that cuts directly against them. The meeting starts at 5 p.m. in City Hall.

I initially attempted to write this as a regular Council report, but found over the past weeks that I simply couldn’t. There are fights where the sides are complex, and motives mixed or unsure. Many city issues revolve around just this kind of tension and nuance.

Not these. The roots here go deep, into the racism — especially the anti-black racism — at the heart of what still remains one of the most segregated cities in North Carolina, as well as to decades-long movements to finally push back and create a city that ends up as something more than an amusement park plastered on top of a hell.

One of racism’s most insidious aspects is that when it’s ingrained in a city, in everything from housing to health to the legal system, it doesn’t require slurs or even consciously racist beliefs to spread and maintain its power (though those certainly remain part of its evil).

All it requires is that nothing change. That the status quo continues on without serious efforts to tear it apart and build something new. Racism only requires that concern is limited to words, that the same excuses are repeated like mantras, that the same assumptions dominate as have always dominated, the same communities hurt that have always been hurt, the same people destroyed that have always been destroyed.

It is a horror for which the conflict-averse political culture too long dominant our town is uniquely suited for.

But the people’s patience, as the saying goes, is not endless. The past weeks have torn off the facade, and given the people of this city a clear and stark choice. Asheville will start to seriously reform, or it will succumb to the racism that has plagued it for generations.

‘The exact opposite of the way a democracy should work’

To someone unfamiliar with the city, it may seem like this all emerged out of nowhere. Indeed, detractors of the reforms have spent the ensuing weeks claiming just that.

But the NAACP reforms’ path to the dais started well over a year ago, and are an instructive lesson in both the power of persistence and the obstacles that face even the most modest reforms.

Racial justice in Asheville has been the topic of increasing organization for years. As measured repeatedly by projects like the State of Black Asheville, this city is one of the most segregated in the state on practically any measure you’d like to choose. Redlining struck Asheville so deeply that our city’s actually used as a national example of how racist policies can shape a whole city over generations.

Law enforcement’s no exception. While “progressive” Councils largely ignored the issue for many years, Black Lives Matter groups and rallies caught on early here for a reason.

Those issues had persisted for generations. But by almost all accounts, things worsened during the years of the tourism boom. Black household wealth collapsed while housing prices and the cost of living skyrocketed. While those latter factors hit just about every Ashevillian outside the gentry in some way, it hurt minority communities with particular severity. Gentrification demolished historic structures (the site of the first black hospital in Asheville was literally bulldozed for a brewery’s parking lot) and still threatens to plow interstates through black neighborhoods, often with the active complicity or encouragement of “progressive” governments.

When APD Sgt. Tyler Radford shot and killed Jerry Williams in July 2016 under disputed circumstances, it brought new focus to a long-running issue. The official accounts were greeted with widespread distrust by many Ashevillians, especially those in the black community. In the major protests that followed, black locals spoke more publicly about harassment and violence, as well as the department’s refusal to reform. The APD proved their point handily when they cracked down on police brutality protests, with then-new Chief Tammy Hooper even breaking the department’s usual procedures to do so.

In the aftermath of those protests, an array of local leaders and activists coalesced around diving even deeper into the city’s police policy.

In late 2015, the NAACP elected its first new president in 16 years, Carmen Ramos-Kennedy. An experienced progressive activist, especially in the Moral Monday movement that had helped forge connections among the city’s traditionally disparate progressive subcultures, under her leadership the organization would turn an increasing focus towards local issues, especially policing and criminal justice.

In late 2016 longtime advocate Dee Williams became chair of the NAACP’s criminal justice committee. Williams had many years of experience both analyzing numbers and pushing for policy changes. Earlier that year, she’d played a key role in organizing successful efforts to get local governments to “ban the box” in an effort to allow those with criminal records to not be immediately disqualified from employment.

Williams had also forged connections with open government activists, including Patrick Conant, an open data advocate who’d worked with both the city of Asheville and social justice causes. They specifically focused on the data collected by Open Data Policing. A project of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, the project’s numbers had become part of the local debate during the protest over Williams’ killing. The site’s tallies, based off the APD’s own reports, showed that the APD disproportionately stopped and searched black drivers.

Williams reached out to Ian Mance, an attorney with the SCSJ, an organization she’d worked with during the Ban the Box campaign. Mance, also one of the founders of Open Data Policing, had extensively analyzed and presented to multiple city governments across the state about such data, leading to policy changes in Durham, Fayetteville, Greensboro, Chapel Hill and more.

This ad-hoc coalition of reformers received nearly immediate pushback. Conant and Williams both recalled to the Blade at the time how their first meetings encountered hostile city officials who disputed the basic statistics and even resented the use of the term racial disparity.

“They’re not used to citizens presenting findings to them and asking for feedback and to take action,” Williams told the Blade last year. “It’s almost like they think if a policy doesn’t come from the top down, it’s no good. It’s the exact opposite of the way a democracy should work.”

Nonetheless, they continued their work. Mance traveled to Asheville frequently, meeting with city officials and presenting to the public. The NAACP unveiled Mance’s presentations at a series of events. They presented the same information to the city’s police committee and onto Council’s Public Safety Committee, which early last year recommended it to the full body for consideration.

The numbers showed a dire reality. The department was searching an unusually high number of innocent people, many of them black. Over 15 years, the department had stopped black drivers at a rate 50 percent higher than their percentage of the population. Over half the APD’s searches were “consent searches,” conducted without probable cause, but with the supposed agreement of the driver. This type of search is notoriously vulnerable to intimidation, social pressure and a misunderstanding of the law, and even some police officials discourage its use. Many of the APD’s stops of black drivers weren’t for public safety issues (like drunk driving or speeding), but for minor regulatory violations (like an expired registration or busted tail light).

In response, the NAACP and SCSJ were recommending some fairly modest reforms. Officers should have to get a written signature to confirm a person was agreeing to have their vehicle searched without intimidation and was aware of their rights (a practice known as “written consent”) and Council should change the city’s policy to de-emphasize or end minor regulatory stops.

In rhetoric, at least, Asheville’s officials seemed receptive. Mayor Esther Manheimer declared the situation “an emergency.” Council member Keith Young, then the only African-American among the elected officials, emphasized the need to pass the measures, telling his colleagues “driving while black in Asheville is real.”

But the city’s talent for burying important issues kicked in. Hooper straight up disagreed with the proposals and claimed they weren’t necessary. The APD would agree to audit individual officers’ stop data and eventually admitted that they’d failed to submit 1300 stop records to the state (the department claimed they would do better in the future). Otherwise they would do basically nothing. Council deferred to her, and Hooper’s resistance basically squashed the NAACP reforms.

“There was no follow through and no indication that this was actually a priority,” Mance later recalled in an email to the Blade. “Young voiced an interest in taking action and looking into the policies we’d discussed; but no one on the Council supported him, and everyone just moved on.”

Indeed, over the coming months a majority of Council would cut very much in the opposite direction, supporting 5-2 a controversial plan by Hooper to ramp up policing in downtown despite concerns about the racial disparities and extensive debunking of the stats she used to claim Asheville was seeing massive spikes in crime. Critics of the plan asserted that given the current state of the APD, giving it more resources would just mean more marginalized people faced harassment on minor or fabricated charges. Across the country, gentrification inevitably results in more policing of marginalized communities.

Mance said he was surprised, given the expressions of concern Manheimer and Council members had expressed, that there wasn’t action taken on the proposed reforms last year. In Durham, he noted, the SCSJ’s first presentation was followed with serious steps by city officials including an in-depth investigation of the police’s practices, multiple meetings, and — six months later —a policy requiring written consent.

In the ensuing months of official inaction, something striking happened. The numbers got worse. When 2017 drew to a close Asheville’s racial disparities weren’t just dire; they were some of the worst in North Carolina.

Worst in the state

By the time Mance made his official presentation to Council late last April, some troubling trends in the local data had already begun to emerge. In the first few months of the year, over half the drivers stopped by the APD were black, despite black Ashevillians making up just about 12 percent of the city’s population and likely an even lower percentage of its motorists.

Things didn’t get much better. In 2017 the APD stopped just six more white drivers than in 2016. During the same time they stopped 591 more black drivers.

“They reported 99 additional black stops for every one white [driver] stopped,” Mance noted.

In 2017 the searches of black drivers tripled. The department had a much higher search rate than the state average overall, one overwhelmingly driven by the highest racial disparities in search rates of black drivers of any major city in the state.

What happened? Former Council member Cecil Bothwell asserted in a Citizen-Times column earlier this year that the increases were just a byproduct of Hooper’s department reporting traffic stop data more accurately (he seemed undisturbed by the massive racial disparities that supposedly more accurate data revealed).

But even assuming the APD was suddenly doing a better job of reporting stops, Mance said, which “I’m not aware of,” that doesn’t explain the increases. “As far as I know there have been no reforms, there have been no improved practices…It would be very odd if the underreporting were 99 percent black drivers.”

Instead “this is reflecting something that came from the top,” Mance said, noting that the increases were most likely due to policing methods directly endorsed or pursued by Hooper and other senior police officers. “You’ve doubled your black search rates year over year.”

“Things have gotten worse, and in a time when the department was under increasing scrutiny.”

The NAACP and its allies kept pressing forward. Early this year, something happened that galvanized enduring public anger around the issue of police misconduct.

Someone within the APD finally grew a conscience and released the video of the horrifying attack on Johnnie Rush, a local black man assaulted by a then-APD officer while walking home from work last August (the police claimed, without evidence, that he was jaywalking).

Here, on tape, was brutal confirmation of what communities of color and activists had been asserting for years. In the video APD officers spend their time not solving violent crimes, but harassing a man for crossing the street, then helping as one of their own, then-officer Chris Hickman, electrocuted and brutally beat him before lying to his supervisor (claiming Rush was reaching for his taser). The same supervisor (Sgt. Lisa Taube, who remains with the department) then mocked Rush’s injuries and falsely accused him of being intoxicated even after Hickman admitted that “I beat the shit out of his head.”

That happened in August, but due to Hooper violating the APD’s own policy and failing to report it to the State Bureau of Investigation, it stayed out of the headlines during a closely-fought Council election and the department’s re-accreditation. In that re-accreditation report, rather than acknowledging the reality of racism within the department, the APD blamed activists *(“a contingent of citizens who are displeased with the Department”) for the issue even being an issue at all.

When the attack on Rush made the news, all hell broke loose.

The Rush videos (most of them later released by court order) cut completely against Hooper and other city staff’s rosy assessment of improving community relations. The public packed forums and spoke for hours at Council meetings, demanding major policy changes and that officials be removed or step down. Their anger understandably ran deep, and movements for more accountability gained momentum. In March, longtime City manager Gary Jackson was unanimously removed by Council.

The issue attracted both national and statewide attention. The North Carolina Public Defender Committee on Racial Equity sent Asheville’s government a letter urging them to finally adopt the NAACP reforms, “given the deteriorating state of community-police relations in the city.”

Open government activists launched a major effort to release more police data and documents to the public (full disclosure: the Blade endorsed this push for transparency). Mance returned to City Hall, repeatedly informing Council of the data showing the results of their failure to act in 2017. The NAACP reforms were once again before the Public Safety Committee, who once again sent them to Council.

‘Give the people of Asheville what they want’

“Exercise of legislative powers, functions and duties.

The council has and shall exercise all legislative powers, functions and duties conferred upon the city or its officers.” — Asheville City Charter, Section 13

“Asheville City Council has the authority to…determine policy in the fields of planning, traffic, law and order, public works, finance, and recreation.”

City of Asheville, website description of Council’s powers.

“Investigation of departments and offices.

The council or the manager or any person or committee authorized by either of them shall have power to inquire into the conduct of any department, office or officer of the city and to make investigations as to municipal affairs and, for such purpose or purposes, may provide for an examination or audit of the accounts of any department, office or officer of the city, may subpoena witnesses, administer oaths and compel the production of books, papers and other evidence.” — Asheville City Charter, Section 28

As the May 22 meeting opened, it was quickly clear that the dynamics had changed. A group of activists had organized a “public filibuster” to demand that Council formally vote on releasing the police data. They took the first public comment portion of the meeting available, on the consent agenda (a list of minor items usually voted on all at once) to declare that they would read for 10 minutes each from various works until Council gave them a firm up-or-down vote to release the police data sought by activists.

The tactic worked. After about 20 minutes, Council member Sheneika Smith made a motion to release the information. It initially passed 4-3 (with Vice mayor Gwen Wisler and Council members Vijay Kapoor and Julie Mayfield against) but after some wrangling about protocol a revised motion passed unanimously. That move declared that the data sets would be released “in accordance with the law and other confidentiality requirements.”

The move showed a public more mobilized and aware of what’s going on in city hall on the policing issue; it took considerable organizing and knowledge of Council’s own procedures to pull off the “public filibuster.” It also foreshadowed the major fight over the NAACP reforms that would happen next.

Ramos-Kennedy opened the presentation on those measures by making it clear that, as local NAACP president, her patience had run out.

“Personally, I’m stumped,” she said, by the APD’s “flat-out rejection” of written consent. She noted even many in law enforcement, including the federal Report on 21st Century Policing had recommended the practice.

“If the intention is to create real change and continue to rebuild the trust lost after the revelation of the Johnnie Rush incident, I say give the people of Asheville what they want: mandatory written consent,” she said. “We need a vote, folks.”

Mance presented on the more recent numbers, noting Asheville’s awful distinction among North Carolina cities for the sheer level of its racial disparities.

He started by rebutting the APD’s claims that traffic from tourism skewed the area’s driver demographics in a way that made the racial disparities irrelevant. According to a study by the local visitors’ bureau, Mance noted, Asheville’s tourist population is whiter than the city’s, and the percentage of white drivers stopped mirrored their percentage of population almost exactly, while black drivers were stopped at a far higher rate.

Specifically, he noted, the APD searched drivers about three times as often as the state average, and relied on supposedly voluntary searches of vehicles to a degree none of the other major cities in North Carolina do.

“There’s a lot of energy in this report to trying to confuse the issue and make the case that maybe these disparities aren’t that bad,” Mance said. “Last year for the first time in Asheville’s history, the majority of searches were minorities.”

He reiterated that the most prevalent racial disparities showed up in minor regulatory stops and “if you’re looking to reduce the likelihood of another Mr. Rush happening, one of the best ideas you can do is to reduce the number of low-level citizen-police interactions.”

Kapoor wondered if the racial disparities were due instead to the APD primarily searching “in certain parts of the city where crime is occurring.”

While Mance noted he’d been careful not to assume officers’ motives, he countered that the outcomes were clear: black drivers were stopped far more often, for far flimsier reasons, to less effect.

“It should concern Council that black drivers are stopped at more than twice the rate,” he said. “With respect to the idea that we have these outcomes because officers are assigned to areas that are disproportionately minority-occupied, that raises problems on its own,” especially around “equal protection issues.”

Kapoor wondered again if the racial disparities in stops were due to violent crime in black neighborhoods.

“I would question whether or not traffic stops are a way to get at these larger crime issues,” Mance replied. “You can argue that it alienates people in those communities.”

He added that repeated analyses had shown that race was the biggest factor, nationwide, in if a driver was searched.

Then it was Hooper’s turn.

Notably, this was one of the first times she’d spoken directly to Council since the Rush news broke. One major question in the wake of the Rush incident was if Hooper would respond by acceding to some reforms.

Her appearance before Council on May 22 settled the issue. She remained completely opposed to any reforms and denied the numbers revealed that the department had any issues with racial disparities at all.

“We don’t consider racial demographics of a community to be a reliable benchmark for traffic stop numbers,” Hooper said, referring to a single study by a North Carolina Central University professor whose work is often cited by law enforcement organizations. The conclusions in that study are contradicted by many other experts (and even some police officials) who’ve studied the issue, including a peer-reviewed analysis completed by a UNC team that analyzed nearly 20 million North Carolina traffic stops and found race was overwhelmingly the biggest factor.

Hooper pinned racial disparities on “the officers patrolling high crime areas create higher rates of stops, ticketing and arrests for populations in those particular areas.”

She claimed crime in Asheville “is extremely high” (her assertions about rising crime rates have proved dubious before) and said officers are expected to address this in their “discretionary time” and blamed overwhelmingly African-American public housing as the source of violent crime.

Hooper’s assertions fit into a long tradition of blaming “black on black crime” or minority “high crime areas” as an excuse for racial disparities and racism from law enforcement along with the surveillance, arrests and suspicion of whole communities. It’s not new either: last year Hooper excused an officer brandishing an AR-15 at a group of black teenagers in Montford by blaming gun violence in public housing.

But this time Hooper encountered a more skeptical Council.

Council member Keith Young asked Hooper point blank when the department would adopt a written consent policy.

“We’re not adopting a written consent policy,” she replied, claiming it wasn’t necessary because “we have body cam video.”

Mayor Esther Manheimer asked if police informed people that they had the right to refuse a search. Hooper said she didn’t know, but “there’s not a lawful requirement” that police provide that information and that she hadn’t heard any complaints about their consent searches (leaving out, presumably, the entire NAACP-led citizen campaign she was responding to).

“We have to recognize there’s an enormous power differential, it has to very intimidating for anyone,” Mayfield noted.

“Let’s make it as clear as possible: sign a paper saying you consent,” Council member Brian Haynes said.

Council member Sheneika Smith said written consent was necessary to build trust, that the city and the police had to give make some concessions to the public, “we can’t keep coming to the table with our fist closed.”

“If we keep going through these presentations and we’re never going to give a little,” the APD wasn’t going to get any collaboration from the local community, Smith claimed.

“We have come with a lot, we’ve come a long way,” Hooper said.

“We want written consent,” Smith emphasized.

“I hear that,” Hooper said, but then proceeded to claim the way the APD used consent searches was “a tool” and “why would we take away any of the tools that we have” as “we’re finding drugs.”

But to make these assertions Hooper basically ignored information Mance revealed in his report. She asserted that consent searches found “several weapons” (they’ve found three in her entire tenure), that they found drugs (his report noted that when consent searches they do turn up contraband, it’s overwhelmingly small amounts of marijuana) including crack cocaine “on a number of occasions.” Finally Hooper claimed that many consent searches had recently turned up “some sort of white powder” but that she couldn’t tell Council what substance this was because “it hasn’t been tested yet.”

Mayfield hoped that Mance and Hooper could “bring these conversations together” as their different takes on the information disturbed her and left her unable to make a decision on the matter.

‘Tired of nothing happening’

But other Council members were willing to act more decisively.

After some discussion, Young made a motion to direct the city manager to implement a written consent policy (applying to personal property like backpacks as well as vehicles), to bar “suspicious behavior” or previous criminal record as a reason for seeking a search and to formally de-emphasize regulatory stops.

“I’m kind of tired of us looking at a presentation, nothing happening and us kind of moving along,” he said. “It has been made extremely, apparently clear that written consent is not something our chief is willing to go into right now.” He didn’t find her reasons convincing.

While Council couldn’t tell the chief what to do directly, he added, they could direct the city manager to implement a policy.

Manheimer was about to open public comment when Kapoor complained that Council wasn’t giving the issue enough consideration. “I know these have had significant community discussion, but this is the first time as a Council member that I’ve discussed it.” He wanted it sent back to the Public Safety Committee (which had just sent the issue to Council) for further study.

“With all due respect we’ve already been there,” Young shot back.

“I’ve just heard this presentation for the fourth time,” Haynes, who also serves as the Public Safety committee chair, said.

Wisler agreed with Kapoor, claiming that the city wasn’t following its usual procedures and that she understood the public’s sense of urgency, but “there’s another side to this.”

“That side is action,” Young replied. “We haven’t given everyone the opportunity” to speak on the issue, Wisler countered.

Young answered that if they didn’t like what he was doing, opponents of the move were free “to state your displeasure and vote against it,” but he’d felt that in the year and a half since the NAACP’s presentations, the community had had enough discussion and wanted action.

Manheimer asked Young if he would put the NAACP reforms back through the committee process. He refused, then called the question, a tactic a Council member can use to force an immediate vote on a motion. All the motions passed 5-2, with just Kapoor and Wisler opposed.

As usual, Hooper left the meeting early. But other police officials were less circumspect in their invocation of racism. Due to Young calling the question and forcing a vote, many of them spoke during the open public comment period at the end of the meeting.

Brandon McGaha, the regional president of the Police Benevolent Association, threatened to sue the city for even trying to pass regulations about the way the department conducted its searches.

“Any attempt to obstruct an officer’s legal ability to stop a car will be met with legal action,” he claimed, following it up by asserting that telling an officer they couldn’t stop and try to search someone they believed was suspicious “was illegal.”

While Hooper claimed that minor regulatory stops had been de-emphasized, her own officers apparently didn’t get the message. Sgt. Diana Loveland defended the entire practice, claiming that — despite searches of black drivers yielding contraband less often — they somehow “deter crime.”

“Those vehicle stops correlate very nicely with the crime rate we have,” Loveland said. If officers didn’t have the ability to pull people over for expired registration in a minority neighborhood, she claimed, “crime will go up.” She added, despite the massive racial disparities, that “we’re not using it in a negative way.”

She criticized Young and Smith for not going on ridealongs with the police. Young responded that he placed a higher priority on the fact that in 38 years as a black Ashevillian “I’ve had many interactions with the police in this city,” and while some officers were good, “some were not as tasteful and pleasant as we’d like to think.”

“I want you to see the distance we’ve come,” Lovegood claimed. “I don’t want you to hold those experiences against every officer you come into contact with.”

“I don’t, but when those experiences continue to happen, at 38, right now, you can only go by what you know and the data and what you see,” Young replied.

“Our police are stopping vehicles based on where the crimes are,” APD Officer Rick Tulles offered as an explanation for the disproportionate number of stops of black drivers. “Stops are a tool we use to deter, prevent, identify suspects or in some cases identify people that aren’t involved in crimes. That happens too.”

He claimed that violent crime was going up because police officers were under too much scrutiny and strain from local government and the public — the widely debunked “Ferguson effect” popular on the far-right.

Every last one of the police officers and lobbyists who spoke against the reforms was white.

The push against the reforms also received some support from the dais. Kapoor said that the passage of the NAACP reforms would prove a “black eye for this Council for years to come” because it departed from its usual procedure. Given the roots of the reform push in a response to police brutality, it was a particularly awful choice of words.

Stark choices

While Council advanced the NAACP reforms, on another policing issue transparency was far less forthcoming. The budget hearing, scheduled late in the agenda, was further delayed when Council opted to hold a nearly hour-long public hearing before it. Most locals, especially those critical of the police expansion, had left. While a few critics remained, most of the speakers were police lobbyists defending the expansion. It was a farce.

In the weeks since, activists and locals have organized more extensively around the budget, especially in opposition to the police expansion. They’ve pointed to the overwhelming share of the budget garnered by the APD and called for the funds to instead be directed towards improvements in transit, eviction relief and directly addressing neighborhood concerns. Some activists (and this journalist) have called on Council to re-open the public hearing on the budget, given the unusually late hour of the budget hearing and the lack of transparency about the most controversial measures. We’ll see if those voices are heard at tonight’s meeting.

Kapoor took his criticisms public, in a statement claiming the NAACP reforms were passed in a way that violated “basic democratic process.” He added a reconsideration of them to the agenda. City staff’s own report on the issue said the move “potentially” violated several of the city’s rules of procedure, in particular by not taking public comment before the final vote. A new version of the reforms on the agenda technically rescinds and replaces them in a supposed effort to better conform with Council’s rules while having the same effect. But notably the new wording of the resolutions, rather than “directing” the city manager, just “authorizes” them to work with the APD to implement the changes. That might, and should, be a sticking point if it waters down the measures. Senior city staff have a long record of ignoring Council’s will unless it’s very clearly spelled out.

Also, from 13 years covering City Hall, Council was on firm ground with what they did; under the city charter they can clearly make policy in multiple areas, including law enforcement. This is done, technically, through instructing the city manager to carry out a particular measure.

Key here is the difference between rules (parts of the city charter or policies Council must follow) and norms (the general way it’s done business, which can change if enough Council members want it to). Council has the ability to set policies for a broad range of city departments — including law enforcement — and functions as long as they don’t run afoul of state or federal law. Technically this is done through them directing the city manager to carry out a given measure and, indeed, that’s what happened in this case. Remember that Young began his push for the NAACP reforms by noting that they were specifically directing the city manager to carry these policies out.

Norms are different from rules; they’re just the customs a group of officials have generally followed. Typically, the norms of Asheville’s Council have leaned pretty heavily towards extensive committee presentations, requiring staff to sign off on any policy changes, nearly-glacial decision-making on social justice issues and dissenting Council members not pressing an issue forward if they didn’t have near unanimous support.

But norms are less a matter of “Council can or can’t” and more “should Council…” There’s no rule saying they have to function the way they have. Technically any Council member can raise a proposal and, if they get support from a second member, force a vote on an issue. They can even, after some debate, call the question and compel that vote without further delay. They can also pass policy changes over the objections of staff. These powers just haven’t been used much in the past decade. While public comment is required for some matters (like public hearings on a zoning change), it’s not for all policy changes. Council has generally held such sessions (and in many cases there are good arguments for doing so) but there have been plenty of exceptions.

The fact is that Asheville governmental procedure has never been as consistent as its defenders claim. It’s not normal for Council to remove a city manager with a quick vote during a work session, without prior notice or public comment. They unanimously did just that in March. It’s also not normal to have a three to five minute presentation about a $180 million budget and then not hold the public hearing on that issue until after 9 p.m., but Council recently did that too. In both cases Kapoor and Wisler — as well as the city attorney and senior staff — were absolutely fine with these steps.

The fact that some on Council and staff are just fine with ditching usual parts of their budget process when it makes things even less transparent, but become sticklers for procedure when it comes to any attempt to rein in overpolicing, is telling. This is politics, and invocations of “process” are always political. The question, then, is who that politics serves — and who it leaves out.

The opposition of Hooper and police lobbyists poses an even starker dilemma, one that makes Asheville’s choice between reform and racism clearer than ever.

Hooper didn’t just maintain her opposition, in the weeks since she actively lobbied against attempts to reform her department. She reached out to the N.C. Association of Chiefs of Police, requesting a letter condemning the NAACP reforms, especially written consent. According to reporting from Mountain Xpress‘ Daniel Walton, Hooper even offered a key revision to the group’s original draft, which read “police policies dictated by racial concerns are as objectionable as racial profiling.” Hooper had the group replace “racial concerns” with “political concerns or agendas.”

Meanwhile, the PBA, in a rationale only an authoritarian could love, asserted in a letter that Council violated the charter by even instructing the city manager to implement any restraints on the police department and that the members who did so (which, remember, includes both of the African-American members of Council) could face legal action or even removal from office.

Wisler, Kapoor and some others on Council have expressed dismay that Mance’s numbers and the realities behind the NAACP reforms don’t line up with Hooper’s assertions. This is either disingenuous or naive. Hooper’s rationales are window-dressing for a blunt refusal of accountability. At the end of the day she wouldn’t accept written consent or similar reforms even if every single person unjustly stopped by the APD were to personally come forward and break down video of their mistreatment frame by frame. The fact is, in fights over power and justice, many sides will never agree, and it’s incumbent on Council to decide to take action anyway.

On that front, the choice is pretty clear. On one side there’s reams of stats, from the State of Black Asheville reports to the Open Data Policing numbers, the behavior of local law enforcement from rookie to supervisor demonstrated in the Rush videos and the stories of countless black Ashevillians of experiences so pervasive that everyone from the homeless to Council members share them. On the other there’s brittle resentment at any public scrutiny, highly contested or debunked numbers and studies thrown on top of endlessly tangled explanations for why race can’t ever, ever, ever be the issue.

Hooper’s proposed revision to the police chiefs’ letter is telling. She sees marginalized people speaking up about their lives and experiences as “political,” while her repeated portrayals of black communities as dangerous predators who will miraculously be halted by bullying them into a search over an expired registration somehow aren’t.

What’s happening is a lot simpler than many pretend. The attitudes expressed by Hooper and many of the other police officials are simply garden-variety racism, combined with a hatred of even very modest accountability enabled by years of indulgent city governments unwilling to confront the horrors in their midst.

I’ve heard various explanations for Hooper’s conduct, but the simplest and best is that she’s just a bigot who despises large swaths of the public, resents any questioning of her actions and knows she won’t be held accountable by a city government still invested in the shattered myth of her as a reformer, even as she loudly refuses any actual reform.

She’s bragged about her role in the ’90s drug war, spent most of her career in a mostly white, wealthy enclave on the outskirts of D.C. and has defended almost every incident of an officer perpetrating violence against black Ashevillians during her tenure. She or her immediate subordinates have either heavily distorted or outright lied about everything from their own policies to clampdowns on protests. She does so because she knows that (so far) she won’t be held accountable.

Indeed, her claim that the APD has de-emphasized minor regulatory stops should be subjected to serious scrutiny, because clearly some of her own officers think such stops are just fine.

Also, the public should once again demand that she be fired.

But as disturbing as Hooper’s conduct is, the fact that so many police organizations and officers within her own department share these attitudes is even more disturbing. Given the mentality they’ve publicly declared, it’s not hard to see how the attack on Johnnie Rush happened.

There is a term for what they are seeking, a place where elected representatives have no ability to rein in law enforcement, no matter how appalling their actions, and will be removed from office even for trying. There is a term for a place where departments always get more money and weapons no matter how flimsy the reason, where they are free to intimidate black and impoverished locals without end, where every valid criticism is buried, every lie unquestioned and every civilian has to show them deference no matter how incompetent or brutal they are.

That term is a police state.

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