Strange applause, another broken promise on policing and massive blind spots mark a dismaying turn in City Hall

Above: Asheville City Council, file photo by Max Cooper

As one, all seven Asheville City Council members marked the opening of their Sept. 25 meeting by rising to give a standing ovation.

Council members clap a lot. But this was not to appreciate some undisputed act of heroism, public service or charity. Instead, the applause was for departing City Attorney Robin Currin.

To say Currin’s tenure was controversial would be an understatement. Despite serving an ostensibly progressive Council her legal stances weren’t just right-wing, they were far-right. Due to her influence the city repeatedly refused to help the LGBT population, fight the housing crisis, advance transparency or seriously address racial equity. Currin even expressed outright contempt for trans and non-binary individuals. She played a major role in Asheville’s government declining to take modest actions taken by other cities around the state (though her office did try, unsuccessfully, to essentially ban busking).

Indeed, while she had her defenders on Council, other members were specifically elected by voters angry at the approach Currin personified. It would have been one thing for them to refrain from criticizing Currin on her departure, it was quite another to join in enthusiastically endorsing her.

Weeks later, it’s still not clear what they were applauding for.

By itself the action would have been unfortunate — an example of Council’s culture of conformity taken to somewhat absurd lengths — but not particularly notable.

However, it embodied an attitude that defined both that meeting and the recent overall direction of City Hall, one marked by a doubling down on business as usual, a reaction and even outright reversal to the pushes for reform that marked the earlier half of this year.

In the ensuing hour and a half, Council would acquiesce to worse, as the police chief blatantly broke another promise, staff buried a key report and a community criticized them for being most of a decade late on basic cooperation. Meanwhile, Council members who’d been vocal about the need for change on these issues before remained largely silent. Combined with remarks from staff that exhibited their own blind spots, these examples showed a City Hall not just somewhat out of touch, but living in another world entirely.

In 13 years of covering Council, readers, it was one of the most dismaying meetings I’ve ever seen.

Hitting reverse

While efforts to reform city government — especially policing — stretch back many years, the revelations about the brutal police attack on Johnnie Rush earlier this year proved a key moment. In the wake of that news and mounting public pressure NAACP reforms, proposed over a year before, were finally passed. This happened in the face of fierce opposition from Asheville Police Department Chief Tammy Hooper and law enforcement lobbyists, who invoked blatantly racist stereotypes in trying to halt the measures. Council also directed that more APD policies and data be made available to the public.

Less than a month after the attack, at a whirlwind March 20 work session, Council also removed longtime City manager Gary Jackson and pushed for a bevy of changes, including steps intended to help locals file complaints, make the police department more accountable, more swiftly fire officers guilty of misconduct and more.

But by late August, it was clear that much of city government was shifting to bury the incident rather than learn from it. Centrist Council members publicly lamented that — in a city with a long history of police brutality and some of the worst racial disparities in the state — they were still having to even focus on the issue.

The official report on the Rush incident also proved a farce. The consulting firm only interviewed city officials (every named staffer interviewed was white), ignored key evidence and claimed that the APD was a “high-functioning department” despite major multi-level problems with everything from training to body cam review to notifying its superiors in city government. The only mention of structural racism in the report was an assertion that some Council members even bringing the issue up was “inappropriately prejudiced” against law enforcement.

At the March 20 meeting, Mayor Esther Manheimer promised the public that from now on use of force occurrences would be forwarded to the SBI and the district attorney. This was intended to ensure greater oversight of the department, so that the APD didn’t end up investigating itself and was subject to at least some level of outside accountability.

While the APD’s existing policies had called for notifying the SBI in the case of death or serious injury (Rush was tased repeatedly and the officer who attacked him admitted that “I beat the shit out of his head”) Hooper had notoriously failed to do so for nearly five months. While the officials refrained from outright criticizing the police chief at that meeting, the step was intended to remove any uncertainty that in future excessive force cases, outside investigators would at least be notified.

But on Sept. 25 Hooper referred to the attack on Rush as due merely to “gaps and blind spots” rather than any larger issues, and claimed the APD had improved training and was more closely monitoring body cam footage, but she didn’t mention the SBI notification change at all.

Council member Julie Mayfield, picking up on this omission, asked Hooper about the matter directly.

“Have you already made the policy change that the SBI will be notified every time there’s a use of force incident?”

Hooper then bluntly refused to carry out the reform.

“The SBI will not be notified every time there’s a use of force incident,” Hooper replied. She then claimed that instead of notifying outside investigators the APD would review such cases and make the decisions in each one as they saw fit, based on criteria worked out with the local district attorney.

Under the city charter, Council has the power to create law enforcement policy. Indeed, its own website notes that Council’s powers include “determining policy” in fields like “law and order.” So this was a senior city staffer blatantly defying their duty to carry out the policies pushed by the elected officials.

But no one on Council, even members like Brian Haynes, Keith Young and Sheneika Smith who’ve been vocal about the need for police reform before, contradicted Hooper. She just refused to carry out Council’s direction, and they all acquiesced.

The city’s Communications Director, Dawa Hitch, then noted that they now had a better p.r. plan in place for “certain unfortunate situations,” including policies (developed by staff) directing how Council members should respond in a public crisis. Mayfield then praised Hooper.

It was a dismaying finale to the burst of proposed changes proposed in March. While the Sept. 25 meeting was unusually short, Council and staff didn’t even see fit to publicly present an update on the “equity and transparency” measures they’d adopted at that March meeting. That report was instead buried in the agenda, with Manheimer stating it was available online and Assistant City Manager Peggy Rowe noting that some of the new personnel reforms were facing legal concerns.

A lost decade

Council then took up the issue of passing the Burton Street neighborhood plan, which they eventually did unanimously. A historically black neighborhood with a long history of community organizing, the area was also hit hard by racist policies like redlining, including multiple interstates that demolished swaths of the area. For decades city governments neglected neighborhood concerns about failing infrastructure and a lack of city resources. Looming over it all is the potentially massive impact of the proposed Interstate 26 expansion.

While multiple city administrations have claimed to take the neighborhood’s concerns seriously, their actions have shown a different path. Back in 2014, for example, rather than halting the coming interstate and its demolitions, city officials started actively trying to move it forward. The move was sharply criticized by many neighborhood leaders who felt that once again their wishes were being ignored.

Burton Street first developed a neighborhood plan in 2010, calling for more resources, better infrastructure and a serious commitment to affordability keeping the close-knit community and its history intact. Eight years later, Council was finally taking a vote to commit to the Burton Street Plan. The plan is intended to mitigate the effects of the I-26 demolitions, it includes many of the things residents have been asking for since well before 2010; less of a hit from property taxes, better sidewalks and parks combined with more support for their community center and unique history.

This too, fits a larger history. When black communities such at Southside or Burton Street organize, their relations with city staff tend to face a lot more obstacles and delays than community groups in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. In Southside, for example, even getting basic infrastructure repaired has met with major opposition from city staff.

Nonetheless, Mayfield praised the plan and urged residents to “keep banging on our door and keep raising your hand and make the city is moving in the direction you think we need to go. It’s going to need you to be the squeaky wheel.”

But while Burton Street residents expressed relief the city was moving the plan forward, they also voiced frustration at the delays and skepticism about the ultimate outcome. Many noted they’d tried to get their ideas taken seriously by city government for most of a decade.

“I hoped we wouldn’t have to come up here again to get y’all to support what we put in place in 2010, 2009 and it just sat on a shelf and collected a lot of dust,” DeWayne Barton said. “Hopefully once we adopt it y’all will put some energy and some resources behind it. We as a community have been doing this for a long time, we’d like some help from the city to make this become a reality.”

“We need to start working on something tomorrow and not wait another 10 years,” he added.

“This is the third time our community has been inundated by highways,” Vivian Conley said. “It takes away people, houses, places and our sense of community. It just keeps shrinking. But maybe this is the last time.”

She remained hopeful, she said, with “a better feeling” that this time the city and the state Department of Transportation would actually take their concerns seriously and put real resources into the community’s concerns. “But don’t take 100 years to do it, please.”

Learning nothing

Why this piece took the form of an opinion column instead of a news report was because I’ve so rarely seen a disturbing direction from city government embodied by so many separate incidents in a single meeting, from major ones like letting Hooper simply refuse to carry out directives from Council to smaller shows of power dynamics.

The mentality behind the City Hall bubble was actually summed up in the budget worksession that took place before the meeting even started. There, Hitch presented on the goals of the city’s public relations efforts. She noted that they struggled because of an “exhausted” public that felt that they gave their input to city government only to see it ignored. To fix this situation she suggested (what else) better p.r.

But no amount of public relations in the world is going to fix this. Repeatedly, members of the public in what’s a fairly left-leaning city tell Council members and city staff what they want. Repeatedly, senior city staff who lean in a far more conservative direction ignore those proposals, bury them or even show outright contempt in response. Instead of city attorneys brainstorming creative ways to push forward or directly challenge state limitations, far-right lawyers get carte blanche to crush progressive proposals for years. In some cases they even see major officials, as Hooper did, bluntly refuse to carry out even modest reforms.

Of course people are exhausted and frustrated. Not because of a lack of public relations, but because a government that keeps ignoring their input and even treating their wishes with contempt is going to breed that kind of anger.

Observe that it took most of a decade for the particularly determined and organized Burton Street residents to maybe, perhaps, finally get a portion of the resources they’re due. Their skepticism is completely understandable. It is shared by many other communities in an increasingly gentrifying city.

That’s why the applause for Currin that began this article is a more important thing that it seems. After everything awful she did, she still got a standing ovation. Politics is about power, and power dynamics are set by small actions as well as major ones. There is a direct line from that to a deferential Council buckling when Hooper publicly declines to do her job. Given that they’ll get applause no matter what they do, and that Council won’t seriously check them, what bureaucrat would take the will of our elected officials seriously?

There are, at that dais, Council members who have pushed back against this state of affairs, who were even elected because they campaigned against it. But during this meeting, and too many others, they were largely silent. Whatever their reasons, that needs to change. Whatever pressures they are under, whatever fears they have, they were not elected to be quiet.

As the events of the past few weeks have brutally shown, times are genuinely terrifying, in our city and elsewhere. More than ever, the people of Asheville need a local government that stands strong against oppressions both nationally and locally, not one that buckles under the slightest pressure. Our city government needs to rein in the police and bureaucracy, not let them run amok. They need to put the needs of long-ignored communities front-and-center, not subject them to nearly a decade of waiting for a share of public resources that are theirs by right.

Above all, in these times Asheville needs defenders, not figureheads. While City Hall may prize silence and conformity, those weaknesses have their costs as well. Without a doubt, the next major local crisis is already on the way. It won’t be stopped by ceremony.

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