Over 12 hours of body cam footage from the Aston Park Christmas night crackdown shows police bigotry, casual cruelty and an open attack on the rights of journalists and protesters

Above: Blade journalist Matilda Bliss is hauled into the detention wagon on Dec. 25, 2021. Her press i.d. is clearly visible. Bliss, a trans woman, was intentionally placed on the ‘male” side of the wagon by a blatantly bigoted officer. Image from police body cam footage

Blade journalist Matilda Bliss contributed to this article

Well over a year after protesters, mutual aid workers and journalists were arrested at the Aston Park camp on Christmas 2021, an alliance of civil liberties and press freedom organizations secured a legal order releasing over 12 hours of body camera footage.

What the videos, which you can watch here, show is absolutely damning. In this article we’ll be looking at a lot of different aspects of a very chaotic event, tying together multiple videos for a clearer picture of what happened. While the basic facts have been apparent since that night, the footage has made the depth of the Asheville Police Department’s deceit and cruelty starkly obvious.

Aston Park is a common site for houseless camps, protest and mutual aid. Indeed police carried out a previous raid in April of that year at the bidding of wealthy transplants.

In the days leading up to Dec. 25, 2021 the Aston Park Build, intended to provide mutual aid and draw attention to city hall’s horrific treatment of the unhoused, emerged at the site. Banners and art tied the violence facing houseless communities to wider issues of gentrification, housing and tourism run amok. Police also visited repeatedly, often threatening arrests on trumped up charges.

On Christmas Day locals — including unhoused folks as well as those supporting them — gathered there to share food, celebrate and put up tents in a time where shelter was particularly scarce.

APD policy at the time was to give such camps on city land a seven-day notice before eviction, but the police who stopped by about a half hour before the park’s closing time that night were a good deal more belligerent. One (as seen in video 1) snapped “”get out of my face” when someone started filming him and the officers refused to identify themselves until repeatedly pressed. Shortly after they came back in force. While the APD would later claim they were merely enforcing the law, they broke their own rules in evicting the camp that quickly and proceeded to violate the First Amendment repeatedly.

Even some of the police questioned why they were there, but the orders had come from the very top: the commander of the raid told another officer “the deputy chief would have my head” if they didn’t carry out an immediate crackdown.

The cops targeted Blade journalists Veronica Coit and Matilda Bliss first, despite both repeatedly identifying themselves as press. They did this specifically because our journalists were recording their actions, something officers repeatedly refer to in the body cam footage when planning the arrests.

Nearly the entire Asheville police force was on site that night, with just six cops left for the rest of the city. They proceeded to threaten one person in a tent — an older houseless man — into leaving, then dragged others remaining in their tents out and arrested them.

At the same time other cops pushed people remaining in the area to the edge of the park, where one unhoused person vocally called them out on the damage they were doing while others frantically tried to find their friends — connections disrupted by the APD’s sudden attack.

The police on this perimeter kept forcing it out to make observing the rest of the cops’ actions more difficult. As those on the outskirts of the park called them out on what they were inflicting the police openly considered arresting them too. They ran down a list of potential charges — ranging from flimsy to outright false. But the protesters’ solid tactical position and the lack of available officers hampered that effort. The APD was unable to carry out further arrests that night.

Then there’s the casual cruelty and bigotry. Police were openly transphobic towards Bliss, a trans woman, and made a deliberate effort to send her to the men’s side of the jail. They threw away an entire table of food laid out for the hungry and then bragged about the nice meals they had, paid for by public funds, waiting back at their district headquarters.

Over a year later, with the footage only released thanks to a legal order obtained by the ACLU, Committee to Protect Journalists and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, police commanders still see nothing wrong. In a recent interview on the Overlook podcast APD Chief David Zack claimed the footage showed “the officers handled themselves very professionally.”

There is, as the saying goes, no reforming this.

In the coming weeks the APD would arrest 16 locals and hit them with false “felony littering” charges for having supplies in a public park. The arrest of our reporters is sadly not an isolated occurrence, but part of a larger crackdown on mutual aid and any dissent against city hall’s wannabe police state.

Blade journalists, with the help of community members, have now reviewed in detail every minute of the body cam footage. In a time when establishment media are renewing the drumbeat for an even harsher police regime in our city, they are a stark reminder of who the APD actually are.

Police directly and repeatedly targeted journalists for doing their jobs

When Asheville police officers arrived in force in Aston Park on Christmas Night they quickly singled out Blade journalists.

Lt. Mike McClanahan commanded the Christmas night crackdown on the Aston Park camp that our journalists were covering. His body cam video, number 2 on the list of those released by city hall, is here.

As McClanahan walked up the hill to the camp (the other cops, who had the initial belligerent reactions to being filmed, had been there about 30 minutes before) both journalists were clearly observing from a distance, recording and taking photos.

One of the first things he does in the footage is directly tell Coit to leave.

“I’m working,” they reply.

“Not in the park you’re not,” he said.

“Yes I am.”

“You will be arrested for trespassing if you do not leave the park.”

Then, at 1:55 in McClanahan’s video, he approaches Bliss, whose press identification is prominently displayed and who clearly says “I’m here as press, I’m just covering the events.”

“Well the park is closed and you can leave the property.”

“I’m covering the event.”

“That’s nice, you need to leave the park.”

“Being press doesn’t excuse you from a second-degree trespass charge,” another officer then says.

Around the same time, in 1:57 in one video from an unidentified officer, (number 11 in the city’s release), an unidentified officer points Coit out to the others and directly says “she’s taking pictures.”

At 17:32 in McClanahan’s video, as he’s planning the arrests an officer says “why don’t we do the standing [our journalists] first, since they’re videotaping?”

Another officer expresses doubts, but McClanahan confirms the order.

As the cops then move towards Coit, the body cam video from their unnamed arresting officer shows them inform the police “I’m a member of the press, I’m covering a story.”

“You still have to leave the park,” the cop demands.

On the video Coit asserts their First Amendment rights to observe the police no less than five times in a single interaction. They even pointed out that monitoring the police is “what the press is supposed to be responsible for.”

That video is 4 on the published list. Coit’s arrest starts around 4:25.

One of the officers even walks back to McClanahan after Coit made this clear. In her video (25 on the list), at 19:40 she directly says of Coit “she’s saying she’s press; we can’t make her leave.”

“Yes we can,” McClanahan snaps back. Officers then move in to arrest Coit, while they repeatedly invoked their rights. As police clapped them in handcuffs for the second time in two years for doing their job, they exclaimed “whoa! Are you serious?”

After Coit was arrested, one officer openly says “this is your other member of the press. I wonder if he is, uh, gonna wise up,” the officer says at the 20:20 mark in video 14, referring to Bliss, a trans woman. This was a direct attempt at intimidation, hoping the arrest of her friend and colleague would scare Bliss away.

Instead she kept doing her job: recording and taking photos until the police put her in handcuffs. When they moved towards her after Coit’s arrest and demanded she leave the park, which would have left her unable to cover the actions of the police, Bliss held up her press identification and said “I am clearly marked with identification as press.”

“Clearly you are trespassing,” McClanahan replies. “At this point you are under arrest.”

Our journalists were openly targeted because the police didn’t like their coverage.

Recently, in that interview on the Overlook podcast, when host Matt Peiken pressed about police demands for journalists to leave the park APD Chief Zack claimed that “there was a park, and there’s a sidewalk, and the same thing could have been accomplished from an area that was not subject to the ordinance.”

But Aston Park is at the top of a hill and police were demanding journalists leave the park entirely; too far to still monitor what was going on.

We decided to test Zack’s assertion. In other body cam videos (about 22 minutes into video 5 offers a good example) one can clearly see exactly what police meant by “leave the park” as they pushed anyone still observing their crackdown to a public sidewalk far at the bottom of the hill.

The photo below is taken from that sidewalk, while I’m standing on the outskirts of where the Aston Park camp was located. I wore my press i.d. and waved so I’d be easier to see.

Keep in mind that’s on a clear day; the Aston Park crackdown took place after 10 p.m. at night.

Cops lie.

If Zack is claiming that our reporters could have simply stepped back to one of the sidewalks within the park he’s lying there too: Coit was arrested while asserting their press rights from such a sidewalk. Throughout the videos police clearly demand anyone observing their actions or even trying to walk through the park on those pathways leave the area entirely.

In the same interview Zack also offered a bluntly authoritarian rationale for the arrest of our journalists, asserting that they automatically had to leave an area if the police wished.

“When we tell you it’s past curfew, whether you call yourself a journalist or not, when we tell you ‘you’re breaking the law, it’s time to go, it’s time to go.’”

He later added that “maybe it was the journalists who were the problem” and dismissed Coit and Bliss’ arrests as a unique incident.

It’s not. In August 2020 — also during Zack’s reign over the APD — Asheville police dragged Coit out of their vehicle, assaulted and arrested them, with their press i.d. prominently displayed while they were covering a protest march. Those charges were later dropped.

In an official September 2020 survey APD officers listed “no scrutiny from media” as a major priority. They certainly act like it.

The arrests of our journalists violated even legally-established press freedoms on numerous fronts, according to multiple lawyers and advocates who are experts in those fields. Multiple international press freedom organizations have condemned the APD’s actions.

In an Asheville Citizen-Times article shortly after the release of the body cam footage, “ACLU staff attorney Muneeba S. Talukder said it was clear the journalists identified themselves as press several times ‘and the journalists were not obstructing the police in any way.’”

As Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation later wrote:

The First Amendment requires the government to let reporters gather news firsthand — not rely on self-serving spin from official sources. Courts tolerate restrictions on reporters’ access to public land only in exceptional circumstances, like serious public safety risks, and even then restrictions must be narrow enough to avoid unduly interfering with newsgathering.

…Journalists should be commended, not prosecuted, when they document police actions, whether the police like it or not. As one appellate court explained, a police officer “is not a law unto himself; he cannot give an order that has no colorable legal basis and then arrest a person who defies it.”

Bliss and Coit still face trespassing charges for doing their jobs. They go to trial April 19.

There were multiple houseless people at the camp, and they were no fans of the cops

As Asheville police raided the Aston Park camp that Christmas Night they encountered not just mutual aid workers, protesters and journalists, but unhoused locals as well.

This contradicts the police’s initial talking points: first that no houseless people were in the camp, later that only one was and the protesters had “deceived” him. Drawing on old “outside agitator” tropes, the APD has peddled a false narrative of docile unhoused people happy to follow their commands, with the only problems caused by those meddling anarchists.

This is, to put it nicely, complete horseshit. The body cam videos show multiple unhoused folks there that Christmas night: camped out, grabbing food or visiting friends. Their reactions varied, but none were pleased to see the cops.

One even confronted the police with the strongest denunciation they’d receive all night. When some of the cops had pushed many people in the camp back to the edge of the park, a houseless man directly called them out on the damage they were doing.

The exchange shows up in multiple videos (the most complete recording starts around 9:40 in video 8), when he asks the police to just notify those there that the park is closed but not evict people on christmas night.

“How many more bodies are you going to find in the river before you stop kicking people out of safe places?” he asks them.

“We don’t work that part of the city, we work this area,” one of the officers replies.

“Well, how are you going to live with yourself when something happens to one of these girls because you kicked them out of the damn park?”

“So…” the cop says.

“So? There ain’t no ‘so.’ They fighting for their damn life out here, so that’s all you’ve got to say? ‘The park closes at 10.’ So?”

“The camps are where we’re getting all these rapes,” another officer claims, a talking point they would press publicly in the weeks after the Aston eviction, and one that would be repeatedly debunked. The same method the APD was using to blame camps for violence could also blame breweries and restaurants.

One of the protesters in the background shouts “seven days notice,” referring to the APD breaking their own rules to carry out the Christmas eviction.

Another cop claims the APD can reduce violence against the houseless but the man wasn’t having it.

“Yeah, by building a safe-ass shelter for everybody but y’all won’t do that so I don’t know what to tell you.”

Out of excuses the officer falls back on the oldest one, “that’s not something I control.”

“We ain’t got nowhere safe to go,” the man replies.

“The last thing we want to do is be out here.”

“Well that’s great; don’t be out here.”

At the same time an unhoused person approaches the area, looking to set up a tent near a friend who was in the camp but had probably left when the cops started to move in. A cop (the one in video 8) confronts him.

“It closed at 10, so unfortunately I’m going to have to ask you to find somewhere else to tent tonight.”

The unhoused person says he won’t set up one, but asked to look for his friend.

“Nah, if you stay people will think they can just stay around, we’re trying to get people off the property because the park closes at 10.” The officer then borderline threatens to take the man to jail for trespassing.

This illustrates another of the many dangers posed by the APD’s rampant camp evictions. Those in dire poverty depend on networks of support and aid to survive. Repeatedly kicking them from place to place breaks those networks.

The other houseless man then confronts the cop, saying “you’re missing the point, some of these people might not return, that’s the point. You’re basically kicking us out to go find our deaths somewhere.”

None of the other interactions can be called positive either. The reactions from houseless people in the park range from simple exclamations of “leave me alone, man!” to questions about whether a person’s tent will be removed if she helps her friend pack up. “I don’t need your help. I just need to know.”

Cops pointed to one specific interaction with an unhoused person, in the trial of one of the defendants who were dragged from their tents, as backing up their narrative. But closer review of this interaction — in video 25 starting at the 3:35 mark and resuming at 11:35 — tells a different story. Cops threatened an older houseless person with medical issues with a trip to jail and repeatedly tried to intimidate him.

After a sergeant opens his tent she asks, “have I seen you over by [Aston] towers before? Hey, can you talk to me please?”

“It’s time to go, buddy,” she continues. “Where am I going?” he replies, half awake.

“So they didn’t get permission to do all this?” he asks. Cops would later try to portray this as proof he’d been “tricked” by mutual aid workers. But in context it’s a lot more ambiguous. According to city ordinance at the time, police evictions of camps on city owned land required seven day notice, which is what he may have been referring to.

“Did they tell you that?” the officer asks.

The person replies with something unintelligible. Moments pass with little response, and the officer asks again if others had told him he could camp at Aston. After not receiving the answers she wants, she berates the man to move and asks him if he needs medical attention.

Eventually he loses patience with the officer and at 13:45 he says, “Well, I’ve got medical issues, but…they’d give me a bill, but hold on and let me get my [unintelligible] together and I’ll get up. Why don’t you go talk to somebody else.”

Even though the police didn’t arrest him, he along with everyone else camping in the park was evicted, and cops were the ones who chose to do it. Later the officers tried to press him to say the protesters had deceived him, but he refused, keeping his replies non-committal (“people think they’re doing a good thing”) when prompted, until he’d left behind the crowd of armed bigots with the ability to throw him into the deadliest jail in the state.

There’s little that more thoroughly reveals the true nature of policing than cameras capturing 12 hours of cops evicting a camp. What police can hide in shiny press releases pumped through the networks of friendly establishment media and talking heads falls apart in moments.

Indeed, one can see them starting to assemble the same lies they’re still using over a year later.

“This is hilarious,” said the officer in video 14 at the 6 minute mark as police were unzipping tents and shining bright lights in the faces of occupants on Christmas. “No one here is homeless.”

In conversation with other cops, he’d then stereotype unhoused people for nearly ten minutes.

Unhoused people “say ‘Okay’ and then they pack up and move on,” says the nearby cop in reference to some houseless individuals’ response to an armed paramilitary moving into their communities and demanding they leave.

“Homeless people don’t protest things either,” he said, erasing years of activism. Unhoused people have taken part in nearly every major local justice movement in memory, and indeed a houseless person was calling out their actions that very night.

“Homeless people don’t wear masks,” he’d continue. “They’ve got to carry everything on their back, and so they’re not carrying a stupid piece of cloth,” as if masks are heavy. Covid has killed more cops than anything else since 2020, and yet they keep running towards those bullets.

“They’re not wearing one unless they’re given one, whether it’s a doctor or a shelter or a service provider.” Later a cop said an unhoused person would wear a mask, but only a “basic mask.”

“They’re not going to camp right here in the open,” the conversation continued as if the destruction of the Lexington Avenue camp on the coldest night of 2021 never happened.

“Sometimes we’re the only thing between them and freezing to death,” he’d say, though the APD are notorious for repeatedly evicting camps just before frigid weather. He says this into his camera, while escorting a person he dragged out of a tent moments earlier into the police van.

Police ignored their own rules to target protesters, and wanted to arrest more

The attitudes of the police towards protest are clear from the earliest moments of some of the body cam videos, as the unnamed officer who arrested Coit starts video 4 by telling the trainee with her: “they’ll usually give like disperse commands for protests and then it’ll be up to whoever’s in charge to say when, usually we’ll grab instigators first.”

She doesn’t specify what makes a person an “instigator” in the minds of the Asheville police, but their actions that night give a pretty clear idea: anyone who vocally opposes them or says something they don’t like. Whether dragging people out of tents or planning to arrest protesters just for shouting things they didn’t like, officers were repeatedly hostile to any dissent.

Ironically, according to the APD’s own rules in place at the time the arrests never should have happened. Instead the camp — which clearly contained multiple unhoused people alongside their supporters — should have received a 7-day notice. This was what had happened in April 2021, when cops evicted a camp in the same park where both unhoused people and their supporters were present.

Why were they ignoring it? Well even some of the police were wondering. The unnamed officer wearing the body cam in video 6 recounts (around 4 minutes in) a conversation she had with the commander.

“I asked McClanahan: what would happen if we literally just didn’t give them an audience? He said ‘well the deputy chief would have my head,’” she said. “We don’t care, they don’t care. Why are we here?”

That deputy chief was likely James Baumstark, notorious for presiding over the APD’s 2020 crackdowns, which included tear-gassing anti-racist protests and infamously ransacking a medic station. He was also accused of covering up a sex trafficking ring at a former police command job in a recent federal lawsuit, though it was rejected based on a technicality. He still has his job.

At the crest of the hill, Lt. McClanahan bellowed, “We don’t want to have to arrest anyone for trespassing.”

“You don’t have to,” came the response. “You can choose not to do it.”

“Y’all should go to your families, it’s Christmas. What the fuck,” said another, exasperated.

“All y’all are offering is an ambulance, I mean shit,” one followed as McClanahan and other officers were pressuring the unhoused person who claimed he had medical issues to leave.

“Are you evicting us? Are you giving us seven days?” another asked.

McClanahan dodged the question and told them they could leave the park “without any consequence.” And he was met by, “No there is consequence. It’s called homeless. That’s the fucking consequence that y’all are inflicting on people.”

“There’s nowhere to go in Asheville. Nowhere,” a person said speaking to the fact that by 10:20 at night, shelters were no longer open. “You can open up these hotels. Open them up and give them to us.”

Others asked if the police were going to provide those in the camp with a list of resources, which city officials have repeatedly claim police are supposed to do when telling houseless people to leave a location. Keep in mind that at this point multiple unhoused people were still in the park.

“Y’all are supposed to give us seven days before evicting us. Where’s that? Is this you giving us that, is this you giving us a warning and are going to come back in seven days?” They asked. “Are you going to give us seven days,” they followed yet again.

“No ma’am,” replied McClanahan.

Before leaving view of the eviction with several others, one person said, “It is not about a fucking job, because you choose to do it every single day. You are an agent in your own fucking autonomy. Make a decision.”

And the police followed with decisions made with clear intention. With fewer people at the crest of the hill, the lieutenant resumed threatening those in tents.

“Where’s our seven day notice,” followed a tent occupant.

At that time, with the detention wagon and almost the entire police force, the APD cops were arresting our journalists.

With everyone who could document what would come handcuffed the lieutenant ordered the violent removal of those in tents.

“Whoever’s in this tent, it’s time to go to jail,” he said before the officers proceeded to drag everyone out.

After cops yanked the next person out as captured in video 11, the arrestee told the cops, “This isn’t going to hurt as much as the damage you inflict on our community.”

Cops arrested a third tent occupant, pulling them out by their feet. “Watch out, I’m allergic to pork,” they said. The cop in video 10 responded “So am I.”

And in the case of the fourth and final arrestee of the night as captured in 11, cops rested on the old standby used by fascist regimes, “I’m just doing my job partner.”

They were met with the obvious response: “That’s what the fucking Nazis said.”

“You feel good about this?” asked the person after they were towed out by their legs.

“I’m just doing my job,” repeated the cop. In video 14 an officer gets into the face of the person he arrested, “You’re new. You must not be a real homeless guy.”

One of those drug out of a tent, in handcuffs, starts singing “It’s beginning to look a lot like fascism,” soon joined by another arrestee.

The cops then hauled the rest of the six arrested into the wagon, where their actions would remain hidden for over a year.

‘We’ve got seven more spots to fill up. That’s how I look at it.’

As the cops were putting journalists in handcuffs and dragging locals out of tents, another confrontation was taking place. As we mentioned above, many others in the park — houseless and supporters alike — were gathered at the edge of the events. In addition to being called out by some of the unhoused folks there, police also came close to trying to arrest more people that night.

Cops formed a line to keep arriving protesters from reaching (and potentially filming) what was about to happen at the top of the hill. “I think they’re just trying to get video,” said the main cop recorded in video 13.

In addition to a houseless person calling the cops out on their actions, as mentioned above, others facing off with the police shouted “class traitors,” told them to quit their jobs and asked them why they weren’t at home instead of arresting people just to keep a park empty. There were also invocations of a slogan on one of the camp’s banners: “sanctuary camping now, APD suck it.” A number of good old fashioned shouts of “fuck you” rang out.

“I feel like this is Pack Square in 2020,” the officer who recorded video 7 says during these interactions, referring to a brutal crackdown on anti-racist protests that included tear-gassing hundreds and shattering the skull of one local with a riot round.

“You are going to be so ashamed of what you’re doing here in a few years,” one protester shouted. “You get that you’re on the wrong side of history. You’re fucking racist pieces of shit, this is the side you’re on every time.”

“They called me racist; I’m not racist I’ve got a Black little sister,” one of the cops muttered in response.

Keep in mind, all the line of people were doing was standing at a distance, shouting things the cops didn’t like. Contrary to what the APD — and plenty of their far-right supporters — might believe, it’s not illegal to hate the police. If it were they’d have to arrest most of the city.

Around 21:30 in video 8 some of the officers begin discussing how they can excuse arresting them anyway.

“We can get them for disorderly conduct,” one says.

“Disorderly and trespassing,” another replies.

“If she makes a threat, we can get communicating threats,” the offer recording video 8 adds, referring to one particularly vocal protester. “Intimidation…”

“So make a beeline for them and just grab them?” another officer on the line asks in video 7.

“Nah they’ll just run,” another says.

“If we’ve got to arrest somebody we’re arresting the loudest one.”

The police then move into a line to push the remaining people, already far back from the camp site, onto the street, shouting “exit the park.” They move back, with some shouting at the cops to “quit your jobs.”

At this point the protesters were indisputably on a public street, doing nothing more than telling the cops to quit, but they still kept talking about which ones they were targeting for arrest.

After the arrests of our journalists, the cops pushed the protesters down the hill. The officer in video 13 whispered, “We’ve got seven more spots to fill up. That’s how I look at it.”

Around 32 minutes into video 7, one of the protesters tells the cops “your department doesn’t give a shit about you either. You step out of line, you get tired of this white supremacist bullshit, you’re out.”

“Dude, she’s got a point,” one of the cops says.

“They’ve made a couple of valid points,” another adds.

But that didn’t stop them from continuing to plot to arrest the protesters. Around 43:49 in video 8 one of the cops point out two particularly vocal protesters and says “they’ve been the loudest, so those two will be the ones we grab.”

“Damn I forgot my flex cuffs” another says.

But they were hesitant, knowing the protesters had an easy route of escape and that they had a limited number of cops available. At one point in the back and forth the officers mention using cars to flank the protesters but clearly don’t have enough to do so.

Notably when police commanders whine about how many cops have quit, this — not stopping any actual violence — is what they’re wishing for. Less cops means it’s harder to crush dissent. That Christmas night the APD’s lack of manpower literally kept people out of jail.

At 49:24 in video 7 the officer claims, with no evidence, that one of the loudest protesters “will probably throw a can at someone. She throws a can at me she’s going to jail.”

“She throws a can at any of us she’s going to jail,” another officer adds.

“We might get into a scrum,” another says.

In none of the videos is there any sign any of the people facing off with the line of cops threw any objects or made any moves to. Their confrontations with the police were purely verbal, and they moved back any time the officers advanced. What this shows instead is cops eager to arrest protesters and trying to make up a reason.

“I think we’ve got enough to do disorderly conduct on one and do inciting a riot on all and that’s a felony,” said the officer in video 14.

This is literally how police think through their actions. Over the next few weeks, the APD would begin arresting people at their workplaces, in their homes, and on the side of the road on absurd felony littering charges.

For all the ranting about ‘law and order,’ this is how it actually works in practice. For the cops no laws — from their own rules requiring a 7-day notice to the First Amendment freedoms of protest, assembly and press — matter. The law is just a tool they can use against those they don’t like, picking from any charges they can make up an excuse for or just fabricate out of thin air.

To any of us who’ve had to deal with the APD this isn’t surprising. The law is just a facade for cops to do what they wish, and the events of that Christmas night made that crystal clear.

APD officers were openly transphobic towards a Blade journalist

When police arrested Coit (they/them) and Bliss (she/they) they repeatedly misgendered both. But body cam footage revealed that the treatment of Bliss — a trans woman — was blatantly, intentionally bigoted, including putting her on the “male” side of the detention wagon in an attempt to send her to the “men’s” side of the jail.

Matilda’s press identification says “Matilda Bliss” and the drivers license she carried in her pocket included the “F” gender marker, but none of this mattered to cops, especially the officer wearing the body camera in video 14, who expressed open transphobia throughout the night.

Coit had just been arrested after repeatedly asserting their rights as press.

After she also asserted her rights repeatedly Bliss was cuffed, hauled away and placed in what would be the “male side” of the van. The officer placing her in it opens up the “female side” and starts to direct her towards that end of the vehicle before stopping and placing her on the other side.

Another officer even tried to correct this bigotry, noting “isn’t Matilda a female?” But the cop putting her in the van dismissed this correction and again asserted he was putting Bliss in the “male” side of the wagon. Due to this, when they arrived at the jail only Bliss repeatedly asserting she was a woman and pointing to her license prevented her from being confined in the men’s side of the detention facility. The cops knew what they were doing.

Walking back to the top of the hill to drag people out of tents the footage shows a different officer, a woman, say “the other one was Matilda.”

“The one we arrested?” the officer whose body camera is recording video 14 replies incredulously. “Is that what he said or…”

“That’s what it said on the [license].”

Talking with others over the next 20 minutes the arresting officer would repeatedly, pointedly misgender Bliss. “Press ID said ‘Miranda’ or something, some female’s name. So I didn’t know if it was a given name or I don’t know,” he would say in discussion of her property at 35:20.

“This is the first press guy we arrested’s bag. The press ID only says ‘Matilda.’ But I have him on the male side,” he said while handing over Matilda’s bag to a different officer minutes later. “I’ll call in if I get a better ID.”

“Never a dull moment,” he says to another cop, chuckling as they walk to their vehicles to leave the scene.

Every member of the Blade journalism co-op is trans or non-binary. We know the “they are not who they say they are” treatment all too well, and we know the poverty and violence that goes along with erasing our lives and identities. Whether it’s about our gender, our experiences or our status as reporters Asheville’s government doesn’t like us, believe us, or think we are who we say we are. We know this, and we act accordingly.

The officers who made arrests and served evictions at Aston Park were transphobic, or casually stood by and let that bigotry happen. The fact that our reporters were arrested at all and are still facing charges 15 months later reeks, and not just of a state crackdown on journalists who somehow “aren’t who they say they are.”

Cops threw away food for the hungry, joked about it and acted like, well, bastards

After those in the camp had been hauled off to jail or pushed out of the park police engaged in one of the most callous acts all evening: throwing away a table of food, meant for locals, as they cracked jokes about it.

“Let’s get the food items in the trash, gone,” the officer in video 4 says just minutes after arresting a journalist. She and the other cops proceed to spread holiday cheer by throwing away a full table of food laid out for the unhoused and other community members in one of Asheville’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

“Is that chili?” the officer recording video 7 asks about 43 minutes in.

“Some beef stew or something” another replies.

“That don’t look too bad,” he says.

Some of the other police even wonder if they should throw all this food away, but McClanahan confirms the order to dispose of “all consumables or things of non-value.”

After that the cops stand around, joking with each other. “Whatever happened to the spirit of christmas,” one says after spending the holiday punishing people for daring to eat food and sleep in a park.

The assembled cops then brag about the meals city hall bought them (with public dollars, naturally) that await them back at their headquarters.

“We got 12 Bones, and then day shift got steaks from the Chop House,” the officer recordng video 4 says.

When another officer complains his district just got sandwiches, she says “well if you’re hungry come by Baker [district], we’ve got 12 Bones and lots of dessert.”

It’s far from the worst thing the APD did that night. But the casual cruelty embodies who they are and what they do.

‘Quit your jobs’

Much is made of how many Asheville police have quit, how they don’t feel sufficiently appreciated by the population of the city (something they define as things like “knowing your decisions will not be scrutinized”).

Indeed, during the camp eviction one officer shook his head at what the protesters were shouting at him and noted “I’ve been called ‘pig’ a lot in the last five years.”

But their actions, day in and out, create that situation.

Locals get together to make art, speak out and share supplies. The police charge them with a felony. People gather on a holiday for shelter and company. The police attack and arrest them. When journalists from a community-supported organization try to cover their actions the police haul them away in handcuffs. The community lays out food for the hungry and the cops throw it in the trash.

And all this to make the rich sleep more soundly and keep a park empty.

The cops also lied, as cops do. Indeed, you can see the attempts to craft those lies emerge on the night itself, as the police denied the obvious presence of houseless people at the camp and tried to intimidate one unhoused man into backing up their narrative. They then ran down a list of false charges they could try to pin on protesters for saying things they didn’t like.

The next month Capt. Mike Lamb spoke to city council. The arrests were justified, he claimed, because those in the park were only “activists, anarchists” with all the unhoused people happy to cooperate with the police. In addition to being untrue, that’s an APD commander openly telling city hall that the cops treat groups differently when they don’t like their politics.

Lamb is blatantly reactionary; he recently told a far-right business group that the problem with Asheville is its “permissive environment.” He was the first police official to threaten protesters at an earlier Aston Park Build event with false “felony littering” charges for having art and aid supplies on public land.

In his recent Overlook interview Zack also claimed the the police tear-gassing crowds with children and assaulting anti-racist demonstrations in 2020 “saved this city.” From whom? For whom?

Whether it’s Lamb, Zack, deputy chief Baumstark, who from video appears to have ordered the raid, or night shift commander McClanahan who carried it out, these are APD’s leaders. And the violent corruption clearly trickles down from there.

Remember their behavior was so blatant that Christmas night that even some cops questioned why they were there, why Bliss was being misgendered and why journalists were being arrested. But one shouldn’t cut those officers any slack; they still chose to carry out their orders.

If the Asheville police wonder why locals hate them all they have to do is look in the mirror.

If this is what the police do to journalists and locals in public, knowing they’ll be recorded, think of what they do when the cameras are off, to those with less of a public platform. This kind of deep-seated cruelty can’t be trained away. The police are a thoroughly evil institution. They will remain that way until the day they’re completely dismantled.

If anyone ever wonders why the Blade are abolitionists, why we openly express anger in our reporting, this is why.

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Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 15 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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