Using sham community meetings and fake neighborhood groups, the far-right pushes for more cops and crackdowns. Asheville’s city government is supporting them.

Above: pictures of homeless people sleeping in downtown. The images were produced for an August meeting of local gentry calling for more police repression of the homeless

The pictures loomed large over the room in Celine and Company, a ritzy downtown catering business. They each depicted a homeless person curled up in a sleeping bag. They’re not threatening anyone, not even yelling or shouting in frustration. They’re just trying to exist and rest.

Someone had taken them and then paid to have them blown up to the size of propaganda posters. For many in the crowd — about 75 people, overwhelmingly white and well-off — that gathered there on Aug. 15 for a “special meeting” these were the people they were there to crush. The city officials that showed up were all ears.

One local who attended, appalled by what they heard, started recording. That recording, obtained by the Blade, reveals local gentry repeatedly calling for the police to kick out and arrest homeless people (or anyone they think might be homeless) and even to dismantle shelters and public services to make the area friendlier for the wealthy and tourists and more hostile for everyone else.

“It was like a Klan rally,” the local told the Blade. “They seemed so enthusiastic about getting rid of people. There was so little compassion in that room. Their solution to everything is the police.”

It also wouldn’t be the last such meeting, nor downtown the only target. Meetings were also convened by far-right figures — many not even living in the area — in West Asheville, where they raged about left-wing conspiracies and called for police crackdowns on anyone they considered “unsavoury” (queers, anti-racists and anarchists are particular targets of their ire). Literal fascists are even promoting their efforts.

But so far, officials in the ostensibly progressive city government are fully on board. Assistant city manager Cathy Ball later called the downtown meeting “a community call to action.” Interim police chief Robert White, talking to a committee of Council members earlier this week, mused about “legitimate concerns” and noted that the APD might turn over some policing duties to community “volunteers” (given the circumstances, that would mean private security or the local far-right).

Fliers for the August meeting were passed out by Chris Peterson, a right-wing landlord famous for criticizing the city budget. While plenty of Ashevillians don’t like the way the city spends its money, they generally do so because they want to cut the police department and slash pay for high-level staff while putting more funds put towards housing, transit and addressing inequity. Peterson instead believes that even the paltry amounts the city spends on those public services are too much, and that they should double down on more cops and repression.

While he stayed silent during the meeting, the flier he handed out was less taciturn. In a page-long rant in small type he writes that “Asheville is now Trashville” and calls on “downtown business and residents” to “take back downtown.” He also inveighs against the hotel moratorium, bike paths and a supposed epidemic of crime and drug use that seems to mostly boil down to the fact that he sees homeless people and that the library has a public bathroom

The meeting was moderated by Sheila Surrett, a vocal figure on Asheville’s far-right. Her Facebook page is bedecked with pro-Trump paraphernalia, even a greeting from Don Yelton (best known as the guy behind that infamous racist rant on The Daily Show). It also shows her filming a homeless person who’s clearly in the middle of a mental health episode, talking to themselves and not threatening anyone. She was outraged that police weren’t immediately arresting them.

At this summer’s budget hearing Surrett compared downtown Asheville to Chicago, a common trope among conservatives calling for more crackdowns on communities of color. She claimed that “I don’t feel safe downtown,” pushed Council to hire more cops and crowed about pushing legislators to pass the attempt to enact a racist gerrymander of local elections the previous year.

Homicides are half what they were in 2018. Even the APD, while trying to darkly push a story of Asheville’s growing crime wave, have had to admit that they’re mostly just seeing a rise in minor thefts.

After Surrett convened the meeting, the speakers launched into diatribes against the poor and homeless.

“I’m a little bit concerned for my safety, because I don’t see anybody out there,” one said. “As I go down Coxe Avenue I have to switch across the street four or five times on the way to work out. It’s not a good feeling.”

Why the speaker simply had to switch across the street was never mentioned. Like so many that followed him, he mentioned no actual threat or violence.

“I can only imagine what our tourists think, and that’s what I’m really concerned about too,” he admitted. “When I have my friends here, and they don’t feel safe. We’ve got to do something. We need more police protection around downtown.”

The next speaker wanted shelters gone from downtown entirely, fuming that “another problem is this place called AHOPE. That institution has to be stopped, because that’s where they come to.” They also wanted the police to round up “coddled kids with their attitudes.”

“It’s shocking how rapidly things have deteriorated in our little neighborhood,” Montford resident Debbie Schumaker said, mourning that the neighborhood was “just a couple blocks” from public housing and shelters. She wanted hotel tax dollars turned towards — what else — more policing.

Gail Withers was appalled because the homeless weren’t sufficiently deferential to religious groups. “These people make fun of the churches, for treating them, for feeding them, saw nine people in these blankets, making fun of the people trying to make fun of people trying to make a better situation.”

Another speaker claimed to be from West Asheville, where “we’re fighting a legal war, we’re not seeing our law enforcement being allowed to ride bicycles or do foot patrols.” This is false; the APD would later boast of how many foot patrols they conducted along the same corridor.

“I can’t walk to Ingles without being hassled by young men who get indignant,” the speaker said, before launching into a diatribe against drug users.

Another Montford resident fumed about “the people come from all over to be homeless here, with their dogs and their needles. I wonder where the money is going.”

“People try to shake me down or intimidate me as I’m walking my dog,” another said.

“Asheville’s always had a homeless problem, but it’s ratcheted up lately,” Dean Moore said. “Think more of a drug problem than anything else, especially with the aggressive panhandling. The homeless and drug problem is killing the city.”

Notably, very few of the speakers mentioned any actual harassment, threats or violence. Just that they vaguely didn’t feel safe, that they didn’t want to be on the same side of the street as the homeless or that they felt the people they observed spoke up too much or made downtown too unfriendly for tourists.

This august assembly, convened and introduced by some of the city’s most prominent far-right cranks, even had city staff present. Ball, who oversees the police department, was the first to respond to the audience. Rather than pushing back, even mildly, she was deferential.

“First of all, thank you, thank you for caring enough about our city to be here,” Ball enthused. She then reassures them that “Council did approve funding for a downtown police district. What that means is that you would have all-around police 24/7. This January you’ll have a full district, just like we have in east, west, north and south. You’ll have 30 recruits.”

The police district Ball mentioned isn’t popular. For over three years locals have mobilized against the idea, claiming that given the nature of the police and the department’s particularly appalling record of harassing the homeless and communities of color, more police on the streets just means more repression.

Even before the expansion Asheville already had a bloated police department, with more cops per capita than any major North Carolina city. In a time when the city’s housing crisis is worse than ever, trees are disappearing and infrastructure crumbling, pouring yet more cash into cops hasn’t drawn much enthusiasm from the larger public.

The city’s claimed the new district’s to deal with violent crime or increasing numbers of tourists. But here was Ball, in front of a room where speaker after speaker just outright said they want the poor and homeless (and “kids with attitudes,” for good measure) kicked out of downtown to make room for tourists, telling far-right gentry the police are there to do their bidding.

“We are working on Haywood, we are remaking it,” Ball promised the crowd. “We are in the process of implementing a plan to improve that area [across from Basilica]. We have a street cleaning crew. We know that’s not enough, we want to work with you all, we want to hear your concerns. We recognize that you’ve been a part of making Asheville thrive for many years.”

Even that, and subsequent remarks by the city’s downtown liaison promising to communicate with the group, didn’t calm their ire. One person shouted about the city “appeasing” the homeless, another claimed those barely surviving on the margins of one of the most rapidly-gentrifying cities in the country had a shadowy “underground network.” That last conspiracy theory would come up again and again in the following months. Surrett concluded the meeting by promising that “our little group” would meet again to push for a crackdown because “we feel like this has to happen.”

The whitewash

On Aug. 27 Ball took the podium at City Hall during the regular Asheville City Council meeting. In her account to the city’s elected officials the far-right ravings were suddenly cleaned up by city jargon, transformed into widespread community discontent which naturally required (like the three years before) more cops.

“We had a lot of concern in our community in the past couple months around safety, especially in downtown,” Ball said. “On Aug. 15 there was a special called meeting from some of those citizens who were concerned and they brought up a number of different issues.”

She didn’t specifically mention which concerns, or from whom, but she immediately proceeded to highlight the downtown police district she’d touted on Aug. 15.

The goal, she said, was to “end homelessness by making it rare, brief and non-recurring.”

Those homeless “as long as they hadn’t committed a crime” (police frequently use arbitrary trespassing charges to target them) would be sent to Homeward Bound. The city had even allocated $150,000 — less than Ball’s annual salary — for the program. The city, she claimed, was also working with the county in a “harm reduction task force.”

“This is a community call to action,” Ball said of the Celine and Company meeting, displaying a slide that read “public safety and homelessness are BIG problems.”

“The homelessness, the drug overdoses, they’re hard things to talk about,” she concluded. “But we want to come together to solve them, we can not do it alone.”

“What I hear from a lot of downtown business owners and people who live there is concerns about dealing with transient folks, it’s less the chronic homeless, it’s more kind of folks who are in town for a little while and then go on,” Council member Vijay Kapoor said and asked what was being done to people “running into problems with the transient.”

Ball replied that the city wanted the public to let them know if there was “perceived to be any criminal activity.” She quickly mentioned requiring “dog tags for folks” and using the police to discourage homeless “from hanging out in places where it’s deterring people from conducting their business.”

The next day, city officials had to clarify Ball meant tags on homeless peoples’ dogs. She did not, they emphasized, mean putting military-style tags on homeless people to track them. Given the tenor of the presentation and the city’s track record, it was hard to tell.

The accident report

The downtown meeting was one of the first such get-togethers, but as the months wound on it would not be the last. On Sept. 5 another far-right type was posting on Surrett’s facebook wall about a meeting of “concerned residents” in West Asheville. They were particularly targeting “free needles” they blamed on Firestorm, an anarchist collective, community space and bookstore and 12 Baskets, a space located below Firestorm offering free food to the public.

Both sites — and the Steady Collective, a harm reduction group that hosts a weekly needle exchange at Firestorm — have been targeted by the city of Asheville and a sliver of the local gentry.

Last year, the city tried to shut down Firestorm and Steady Collective, slapping them with zoning violations asserting they were running an illegal shelter by offering a needle exchange for two-and-a-half hours a week. The rationale was thin, dubious even by the city’s own rules.

The plan backfired. Over 100 people showed up to one of the city’s first meetings on the issue, and the locals were overwhelmingly in support of Firestorm and Steady. Asheville’s government was getting bombarded with warning letters from major human rights groups and lurching into an unfavorable legal battle before they finally dropped the violations entirely.

But now there’s a push by the police and the local far-right to go after those spaces again. Instead of larger public meetings where they might be swamped by angry locals pushing back against their policies, the city’s shown up to smaller ones convened by local gentry in locations where they can more easily pack a room to make it seem like public opinion is on their side.

Like with downtown, city officials are laundering what amount to blatant bigotry from a small sliver of property owners and far-right groups as “legitimate concerns” in an effort to ramp up repression.

This even extends to minor matters like accident reports. This fall, a local who works within walking distance of Firestorm had their car struck and damaged. When they called the APD to file a basic report for their insurance, the officer that showed up had more of an agenda than just documenting the accident.

“It was hit while I was at work,” they told the Blade, speaking under condition of anonymity. “He gave me my report then said that the opioid epidemic has gotten so bad here we have incidents of people nodding off and hitting cars.”

The worker found the officer’s assertion absurd. Their car was parked near a busy street and accidents happen, especially in this town. “Look around Asheville, nobody has a perfect car.”

“He said ‘that’s why the APD is pushing the city to install security cameras here, it’s really important, it’ll help us catch things like this,'” they continued.

Not only did the officer, with zero evidence, try to pin a traffic accident on drug users. According to the local, he went a step further and tried to blame the accident on “what we have down the street,” motioning in the direction of Firestorm and 12 Baskets.

The person was appalled by the officer’s actions. They emphasize that they encounter the homeless every day on Haywood, and don’t feel unsafe.

“If we interact, it’s always pleasant. I can’t tell you the last time I got a genuinely uncomfortable feeling,” they said. “All you have to do is walk down the street and not be a fucking jackass.”

“Our community has been gentrified to the point where people can’t even find Section 8 housing,” they note. “The cops and the local government and the developers from Charlotte are doing this.”

Clapping for death

The account showed that APD officers were doing far more than just passively responding to citizen complaints. It didn’t end there. In at least one incident, they directly tried to pressure activists into meetings packed with hostile gentry. On Oct. 17, there was a meeting at Grace Baptist Church pushed by the city. As it later emerged, it would be well-attended by some local far-right figures as well. It wasn’t well advertised — a lot of residents weren’t aware of it until after it happened — but apparently the APD tried to make sure some specific individuals attended.

Steady Collective’s Hillary Brown, who’s repeatedly criticized local government for worsening the overdose crisis, wrote in a Facebook post shortly after the meeting that the APD particularly sought out them and others critical of the city’s actions in West Asheville.

“On two occasions APD officers came to Firestorm looking for me to ’invite’ me to this meeting. Firestorm employees were asked by police to attend,” they wrote. “We were there as were folks from 12 Baskets. We all agreed that we would be there to take notes and get a read on the situation, see if we were about to face another situation like what we experienced in August of 2018 with the notices of violation.”

There, the police touted massively-increased foot patrols and encouraged residents to call them even if they just felt uncomfortable or unsafe (a recipe for harassment, especially given the APD’s record).

“Police said over and over again that it wasn’t up to residents to decide if something was illegal. If it seemed wrong, just call police and they’ll sort it out,” Brown wrote. “They want to help residents and business owners ‘target harden’ their properties. Residents were thanked for locking their cars because people in WAVL still believe they live in a little mountain town and not an urban center and so they refuse to change any of their behaviors and take common sense precautions to secure their property and then they call police all the time when their wallets are taken from their unlocked vehicles.”

But, as at the downtown meeting in August, that wasn’t enough for the audience.

“Residents were angry and kept interrupting police to insist that more police were needed…a bigger policing budget, more officers on duty, more aggressive measures, longer jail stays, higher bails,” Brown recalled. “And then the ‘addict’ talk started. Drug users are responsible for all crimes. Needles are everywhere. People are shooting up everywhere. And it’s a brand new problem. And it’s all the syringe exchange’s fault.”

According to Brown, the crowd was “a room full of moneyed gentrifiers with accents that revealed their recent arrival to Appalachia from New York and Boston and California and Oregon.”

City manager Debra Campbell then directed Brown to come up to the front.

“For the last portion of the meeting this far-from-sympathetic room fired antagonistic question after antagonistic question. When I said that the city had already tried to regulate Steady out of existence and it was the only city in NC that had done that, people clapped and cheered,” they wrote. “They applauded an attempt to remove an overdose prevention program in a part of the city with the highest OD rate. People asked what they are supposed to tell their children when they have to ‘step around’ homeless people in the morning on their walk to school. A woman sitting next to a Firestorm rep said she hoped drug users die.”

The audience then pursued Brown, as “an angry person accused me of just reducing the harm of people dying but not reducing the harm of her bike being stolen off her porch. She said I didn’t care about her bike. I left with people still asking me questions I have answered hundreds of times. I tried to walk to a bar and people kept stopping me to ask just one more thing.”

Sometimes people just need a little more education. Sometimes people need to have the nature of the structurally created overdose crisis explained to them. When people clap for other humans death due to that crisis a little more education is not what’s needed. What is needed is not something I have to offer.”

The neighborhood group that wasn’t

The reaction seemed bizarre, as just over a year earlier a far larger crowd of locals had overwhelmingly backed Steady at a city meeting. Indeed, Brown’s post was widely shared and garnered mostly sympathetic reactions. Nor did the supposed public anger at crime seem to be boiling over anywhere else.

At a Nov. 5 meeting of the East West Asheville Neighborhood Association, the main concerns were safer sidewalks, intersections and potential destruction from the looming Interstate 26 project. An APD representative made a similar pitch to the Oct. 17 meeting (basically: call the cops if you ever feel unsafe) and, according to multiple attendees, didn’t get much traction. The next day, a West Asheville meeting of the city’s police committee saw every local who spoke on the topic in favor of Steady, asserting that they saved lives.

But around the same time Surrett was organizing “our little group” in downtown, an organization called the West Asheville Neighborhood Alliance — who it would later emerge was among the audience on Oct. 17 — started to call for more policing.

Despite the blasé-sounding name, the group wasn’t any of the area’s existing neighborhood or business associations, though its name and initials are confusingly similar to EWANA and the West Asheville Business Association (WABA). The Blade contacted multiple West Asheville residents involved in neighborhood groups in the area. Until the recent push for more cops and crackdowns, specifically directed at Firestorm and Steady, none had heard of WANA.

But at a Nov. 15 meeting of the Council of Independent Business Owners, the group stepped out from behind the shadows. CIBO is a far-right business organization that formed partly because they thought the local chamber of commerce wasn’t zealously conservative enough. Over the years I’ve seen CIBO members call for breaking graffiti artists’ arms and for the police to crush protest encampments by “lining up and doing a baton charge.”

There, it became very clear who was behind WANA. Three speakers represented the group at the CIBO meeting: John Miall, Sanjit Patel and Candace Painter.

Their ties with the neighborhoods they claimed to speak for was tenuous at best. Of the three, only Painter lives in West Asheville. Miall lives in North Asheville and Patel in South Asheville near Biltmore Forest. Miall was a conservative candidate for mayor in 2013 and for Council two years later, in the latter running as part of a quasi-slate of right wingers promising to “take our city back.” He lost badly both times.

Now Miall, according to accounts in both the Mountain Xpress and the far-right Asheville Daily Planet (which devoted no less than three articles in a single issue to the supposed “W Asheville crime wave”), called for state legislation that would essentially ban needle exchanges.

Then Patel and Painter took over the presentation, delving into far-right conspiracy territory. Firestorm and Steady weren’t just a bookstore/community space and a harm reduction organization. In WANA’s narrative, they were behind a secret left-wing conspiracy to crash the local economy.

Like at the downtown meeting the homeless were targeted simply for trying to exist in public space, with slides blaring captions like “transient on public sidewalk at Firestorm.”

“Firestorm is working to weaponize the needle exchange law to wreck our city,” one slide read. “Because they are doing it under the guise of social justice, our city council and mayor will do nothing.”

There was more. Patel claimed that Firestorm “has been brainwashing young children with books designed to teach them that white people are bad and have a responsibility to speak out against other white people.”

“They created Asheville Prison Books. The program distributes books with ideas to incite protests and violence in the prison system. They openly denounce prisons and claim it to be a racist construct ‘by the white man,'” the presentation continued.

In addition to such unthinkable activities as teaching kids that racism is bad and providing books for prisoners, Patel blamed a bookstore for every crime, including a murder, that happened along one of the busiest corridors in the city. He said he wanted to show how “unsavoury” those who worked and frequented Firestorm were (yes, that’s partly a not-so-subtle attack against queer people, the presentation was full of them).

He also claimed that the Grace Baptist meeting was “a good faith effort” and that the attendees were intimidated by those from Firestorm and Steady, while Painter asserted that the needle exchange was a secret plot “to make it so bad and have so much crime to make it so miserable” that gentrification is reversed.

Attorney Steve Aceto lauded the presentation, as many CIBO members did, asserting that “Anarchism is a religious cult, they agree with Marx.”

That sound you hear is literally every anarchist (or, hell, marxist) reading this doubling over with laughter. This stuff is out of a far-right fever dream and it was widely seen as such by the larger public as press accounts of the CIBO meeting made the rounds.

The idea of Firestorm — or Asheville’s anarchists in general — as being part of a centralized cult capable of single-handedly causing skyrocketing crime and crashing property values is beyond absurd. Even locals who aren’t personally anarchists have known the Firestorm collective as part of the larger community for well over a decade.

Plenty have directly seen the good they do, and seen some of the same people WANA’s now targeting work relentlessly to strengthen local communities in the face of some pretty harsh odds. If opposing gentrification and a racist police system while supporting harm reduction constitute a vast radical conspiracy, then nearly the whole damn town’s part of it.

‘Legitimate concerns’

While WANA’s presentation revealed that a lot of the supposed community push for more cops came from the far-right fringe, City Hall’s proceeding as if it represents some grassroots push. This past Tuesday, Dec. 17, at a meeting of Council’s Public Safety Committee, interim APD Chief Robert White claimed that locals were backing the department in its “West Asheville initiative.”

White claimed that the APD had responded to concerns about crime — largely “larcenies and breaking into cars” — with more foot patrols, canvassing door-to-door (yes, this means cops with guns showing up at people’s homes to pass out pamphlets and search for leads on minor thefts) and working extensively with business owners.

“There are a lot of legitimate concerns that business owners and residents have expressed to us,” White told the committee. Like Ball a few months earlier, he declined to specify which residents. “We have a problem when it comes to crime.”

When claimed that the APD wanted “to partner” with Steady and 12 Baskets, an especially strange statement given Brown’s condemnation of the police’s targeting of the group.

Of course, White pushed for even more funds and cops for the APD, claiming “the strength we have is not in a position to address all the issues we’re being faced with.”

Even more disturbingly, he wanted to the city to fund stipends for local “volunteers” to take over handling the initial police response to many property and nuisance crimes. This isn’t entirely a new idea. Largely the volunteer positions would get taken up by those sympathetic to well-off property owners or the far-right, who then get legal sanctions to target whom they please with police back-up.

The city and some downtown gentry tried to push a Business Improvement District in downtown back in 2012 that would have had a board packed with wealthy land owners along with its own tax revenue and private security force. That effort was defeated due to widespread public outrage, including Firestorm (then based in downtown) playing a key role in organizing against it.

Meanwhile, literal fascists are now backing the push for police crackdowns in Asheville. Earlier today, Andy Ngo, a far-right grifter who’s teamed up with violent gangs and helped literal nazi terrorists target leftists and journalists, highlighted the Daily Planet’s coverage of WANA’s screeds in a tweet targeting Firestorm.

That’s city government’s bedfellows in this particular effort. The local who dubbed the earlier downtown gentry meeting as “like a Klan rally” was prescient.

The “concerned citizens” behind this want the rest of us gone. They start with the homeless and drug users, with queers and anarchists and us “unsavoury” types. It does not end there. The city they want isn’t one anyone else will ever have a place in. So far, city government seems just fine with that. If you’re not, it’s time to decide how to fight back.

—

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.