Facing growing public pressure, Asheville’s police chief finally heads for the exit. A look at the damaging legacy of the city’s most-despised public official — and what a way forward might look like

Above: Outgoing Asheville Police Department Chief Tammy Hooper. File photo by Max Cooper.

Finally.

On the morning of Nov. 7, as locals were still digesting the election tallies from the night before, the news hit: “Asheville Police Chief Tammy Hooper has given notice of her resignation, with an effective date of Jan. 2, 2019, to pursue consulting opportunities.”

Good riddance. It’s no secret in these pages that I believe Hooper should have been fired a long time ago. I am far from the only local to hold that view, or voice it.

Hooper was a terrible police chief. Brittle, racist, deceitful and incompetent, she presided over a department notorious for some of the worst racial disparities of any major city in North Carolina while opposing even the mildest reforms and repeatedly showing contempt for the public. The APD had never been particularly good, but under Hooper its problems grew an order of magnitude worse.

Hooper’s departure didn’t come out of the blue. She’d been widely disliked for most of her tenure and under mounting public pressure ever since video of the brutal police attack on Johnnie Rush hit the news earlier this year, followed by a barrage of other controversies in the ensuing months.

Any reasonable observer might figure her departure followed pretty naturally. But the city’s Communications Department (motto: “everything is fine, goddammit”) had a different story, one from a world where all of this was orderly transition and competent reforms.

They claimed that back in February (no one at the city remembers the exact date, but they’re all sure it was when the videos of officers brutalizing Rush were still buried in the APD’s servers), Hooper had given “notice of her resignation to the former city manager” to leave City Hall for the wide world of consulting (mysteriously, no record of this notice exists). But after Gary Jackson was axed by Council at the height of the Rush scandal in March, “Chief Hooper recognized the need to provide strong leadership to the police department during a critical time.”

Hooper then selflessly agreed “to continue leading the police department until a new city manager was hired.” She’d even volunteered to gift the city 75 hours of consulting services after her formal departure (for the modest fee of $118,000, or $1,537 an hour, an incredibly expensive amount even in our consultant-happy town). Oddly, for a city usually obsessed with procedure, the only record of this supposed deal isn’t from March, it’s from Nov. 5, just two days before Hooper’s resignation was publicly announced.

The announcement even threw in a list of things the city was “grateful” to Hooper for, including de-escalation training and a new use of force policy (which the Rush attack showed everyone from officers to a supervisor completely ignoring), requiring body cams (footage from which require a leak or a court order for the public to ever see) and “the implementation of numerous community partnership strategies” (which I assume is cityspeak for “alienating damn near everyone who isn’t rich and white”).

The city’s explanation was thin on Nov. 7 and subsequent reporting has rendered it practically translucent, revealing the bizarre lack of documentation of Hooper’s supposed offer to resign as well as the obscene size of her “consulting” fee.

Hooper, who’d known about the Rush attack for months before the news broke (and kept the case from reaching Council or the city manager), publicly said she was willing to resign after the video hit the public eye. But in the ensuing months she gave every indication of someone determined to keep her job, and a majority of Council gave every indication of their determination to keep here there.

Given the shadowy state of many major decisions in City Hall (Jackson was removed in March, and Council never cited a specific reason beyond “we believe that making this change now is in the City and his best interests”) we may never know the full story behind Hooper’s departure. From my vantage point and based on over a decade of experience covering City Hall, here’s a somewhat more plausible scenario.

The centrist majority on Council had a lot of reasons for keeping Hooper in power, from the need to prop up the myth they’d built up of her as a “reform chief” to her putting the department’s resources full-tilt behind gentrifying the city. They figured, as they’ve figured a lot of times before, that public anger on the issue could simply be ridden out.

But it couldn’t. Rather than diminishing over the ensuing months, criticism grew. From doubling down on opposing even modest civil rights reforms to blatantly reneging on changes promised in the wake of the Rush attack, Hooper proceeded to anger swaths of the public in nearly every way possible. Despite a lot of institutional pressure against calls for her removal, the public backlash mounted rather than diminished. A petition for her firing gained ground over the past months and longtime civil rights activists were publicly condemning her actions.

In late October, Council also announced the appointment of Debra Campbell, Charlotte’s longtime assistant city manager and the first African-American and woman appointed to the city bureaucracy’s top job.

It’s too early to know what Campbell’s actual stances in office will be, but her initial address to Ashevillians marked a definite shift. In contrast to Jackson’s jargon-laden reassurances, Campbell acknowledged the depths of the community’s distrust and expressed a desire to move in a more progressive direction.

To a new city manager ostensibly seeking to rebuild shattered ties with the people of Asheville, firing the most widely disliked official in town is an obvious step. It’s entirely plausible Hooper decided for a less ignominious exit while she still had the ability to do so. The chances of City Hall ever admitting “public pressure drove her out” are nil.

Exiting on her own terms also proved incredibly profitable. Keep in mind that $118,000 came on top of her already-generous $168,578 a year salary. It’s a figure everyone should keep in mind the next time any city official whines that funding for basic social justice measures is simply too expensive.

Importantly, however, the money doesn’t just cover her supposed administrative talents, or city officials’ frantic explanation that it was extra compensation for her agreeing to stay in March (which they somehow only put into writing a week ago). Contained in it is an agreement that Hooper won’t press any future legal action or claims against the city.

Hooper’s reign ended, in bleakly appropriate fashion, with a pile of shoddy excuses and a sackful of hush money.

The final months

If Hooper actually offered to resign in February, the city made a catastrophic mistake by not accepting it. Hooper’s actions in the ensuing months preceded to wreck what little public trust remained, on a scale that I don’t think has really been appreciated.

Hooper hadn’t exactly covered herself in glory before. She showed her colors early when she clamped down on anti-police brutality protests with a notable level of personal spite. Prior to the Rush case, she defended officers in every public incident of violence against black Ashevillians, from brandishing an AR-15 at teenagers to throwing a mentally disabled man to the ground. By dodging basic public process and touting dubious crime numbers to push for a controversial police expansion, she helped galvanize the most public opposition to a city budget in well over a decade.

Her actions in response to the Rush attack — keeping the case secret for months and violating her own use-of-force policy requiring the notification of outside investigators — were already bad enough, and it’s no coincidence this is the first time calls for her firing burst onto the scene.

In April, it emerged that the traffic stop and search numbers for 2017 showed that the department’s already-awful racial disparities had gotten worse. A lot worse. Under Hooper the APD had more dire disparities than any other major city in North Carolina. The increased stops and searches of black drivers had increased at such an astronomical rate that a lawyer who crunches this data for a living observed that the cause must be “something that came from the top,” i.e. policies pushed by Hooper herself.

In response, the NAACP redoubled their push for basic policing reforms to curb the disparities in traffic stops and searches. After the Rush news broke, there was some speculation that Hooper would now be more amenable to these basic changes, if just to do something in response to growing public anger.

Instead she fought against them, invoking “black on black crime” stereotypes with a long and ugly history and going to other police chiefs across the state to actively counter the will of the elected officials running the government of the city she ostensibly served. The reforms passed anyway, but she proceeded to drag her feet on implementing them. Months later, the department still hasn’t put the policies Council ordered into action.

It got worse. News broke that in 2016 Hooper hadn’t just cracked down on anti-police brutality protests but surveilled civil rights activists, something she now blatantly defended. Local civil rights leaders understandably condemned this “outrageous use of police powers.” Ashevillians showed up to the July Council meeting to criticize the department’s lack of competence and call for consequences, including her firing.

The official report on the Rush incident proved such a blatant whitewash that it increased public skepticism rather than assuaging it. While even the investigators (all of them former or current police officials) found major problems with the APD’s training, oversight and recruitment, they still claimed it was a “high-functioning agency.” They only interviewed city staff and police officials who, shockingly, thought they’d handled things just fine. Every single named official interviewed for the report was white. The only mention of structural racism in the report was a warning to elected officials that even bringing the issue up was “inappropriately prejudiced” against cops.

In the report’s wake, some Council members timidly asked if she’d follow through on reforms requiring outside investigators automatically be notified about future use of force cases. Hooper bluntly refused, saying the APD would only do so when it saw fit.

If Council was silent, the public was increasingly less so, as grassroots efforts to push for Hooper’s removal grew in strength over these months. That formed the backdrop to her resignation.

Since there is now an official city report condemning the very mention of racism within the APD, now’s a perfect time to talk about it. Let’s start with Hooper.

Yes, Hooper was a racist. I know that in the ridiculously conflict-averse culture predominant in our city’s politics it’s fashionable to not criticize white people in positions of power for their actions, but it remains the truth.

Let’s review.

She retaliated against police brutality protests. She defended violence against black Ashevillians while surveilling peaceful civil rights groups. Under her leadership, the department’s traffic stop/search racial disparities went from bad to among the worst in the state. This happened so quickly that experts who observe those stats for a living concluded it could only be due to her specific direction. She loudly opposed reforms proposed by the NAACP and repeatedly invoked ugly stereotypes to do so. She capped it off by blatantly breaking promises for even minimal oversight while endorsing a report that criticized elected officials for even mentioning bigotry.

That’s racism, Asheville, and the fact more people aren’t willing to name it is one reason our city remains so segregated. Tammy Hooper was a racist who used her power to do incalculable damage, and the city will be fighting against her legacy for years to come.

The heart of the problem

While Hooper will soon be gone, the beliefs and oppressions she exacerbated won’t, because the racism didn’t just come from her.

Hooper’s tenure has given the people of this city a harshly clear idea of the depth of the problem.

When I called for Hooper’s firing back in March, I emphasized that while removing officials who abuse their power is a necessary part of any actual change, it’s not enough by itself. What happens next is even more important.

First, forget putting hopes in a “reform chief.” No such being exists, because the problems of the APD (and other police departments around the country) are far deeper than that. The focus needs to be on overhauling both the department and the way it answers to public institutions.

The city charter needs to be changed to abolish the position of police chief and replace it with a civilian that directly responds to Council, and can be removed accordingly. Council needs to regard that official, rather than the rights of the public, as expendable. They also need to reassert that it is within their power to pass and enforce the policies the public demands, and they need to pass strict anti-bigotry measures as quickly as possible. Even with the very real limitations of North Carolina law, they have broad legal power to “determine policy in the fields of planning, traffic, law and order, public works, finance, and recreation.” Their interactions need to be marked by a lot less deference and a lot more skepticism.

The size of the APD needs to be drastically scaled back. Currently, Asheville is one of the most over-policed cities in the state, with 3.3 officers per 1000 citizens (as compared to the state average of 2.5). As a start, the city needs reverse the recent downtown policing expansion and reduce the department to the state average, with plans to go well below that. Limiting the damage this institution can do requires limiting both the resources and manpower it has traditionally used to do that damage.

Its mission needs to be much more narrowly defined, based on criteria designed by the communities who’ve borne the brunt of their problems (and not police lobbyists, who should be excluded from the process entirely). At a minimum, its scope needs to be turned completely away from arbitrary stops, searches, jaywalking and trespassing charges that largely serve to terrorize marginalized communities rather than prevent any actual violence. The “secondary employment” policies that allow wealthy business owners to hire officers as private security need to be ended entirely.

The organization that remains needs to be drastically different from its current form, far smaller, better-paid, differently trained and — in the vast majority of situations — unarmed. It needs to include no one currently on the APD.

This, importantly, would just be a start, the barest steps required to curb age-old oppressions, and it would set Asheville on a course to replace the APD with something resembling Rojava’s Asayish protection force a lot more than any current police department.

Importantly, this frees up millions of desperately-needed dollars to more adequately address public safety. Some of those city resources can be devoted to teams of medical and mental health professionals who can act as an alternative first response in many situations where police intervention worsens the situation.

If these reforms seem difficult, remember that for most of a year we’ve been told that Hooper was doing great and was going to stay for as long as she wanted. Hooper’s predecessors over the past eight years had also resigned, Bill Hogan after the evidence room scandal and William Anderson due to factional strife and complaints within the APD.

While public pressure played a role in those cases, Tammy Hooper is the first chief on her way out primarily due to popular backlash, because locals kept organizing when then they were warned not to, and because of the reality that everyone from Council members to the homeless had a story about the abuses of power they had faced.

That alone has helped shift dynamics in this city, and is a reminder that at the end of the day, the real power doesn’t reside in City Hall.

—

The Asheville Blade is entirely funded by our readers. If you like what we do, donate directly to us on Patreon or make a one-time gift to support our work. Questions? Comments? Email us.

Copyright © 2024 The Asheville Blade. All Rights Reserved.