Despite some blatant APD spin, body cam footage confirms horrific police brutality against Devon Whitmire

Above: A screenshot from on of the body cam videos of Devon Whitmire’s May 13 arrest, showing officers pressing his throat into the pavement

Blade editor David Forbes contributed to this piece

[This piece directly discusses an incident of horrific, racist police brutality]

On May 25, Asheville city government released body camera videos from the violent arrest of Devon Whitmire after videos recorded by bystanders showed police pushing his throat into the curb while arresting him on a misdemeanor charge weeks earlier. Only the intervention of a Southside crowd yelling at the cops got them to stop crushing the breath out of him.

But there was, as with so many other things from city hall, a catch. Only recordings from two of the numerous Asheville police who were on site were actually released, and city hall pushed a video, misleadingly labeled “full video” on its youtube channel, that is heavily edited to excuse their brutality.

Importantly, key footage from the officer who placed her elbow on Whitmire’s neck, Shelby Middleton, is missing. The videos that were released provided important context concerning Whitmire’s mental health as well as some of the additional ways police brutalized him and tried to hide their actions. Additional information from family members has also undermined the police narrative by highlighting his mental health issues. This edited video was Asheville government’s clear attempt to quell local resistance and compassion by propagandizing their officers’ actions.

‘We were trying to get him to the hospital’

The footage reveals more about what happened in the minutes leading up to what would be the violent arrest of Whitmire, then wanted on a misdemeanor charge of communicating threats. This included him telling the officers crowding him, “would you back up so I can get my gun off of me,” which in context comes across as less a direct threat — one of Whitmire’s arms was in a sling following a recent injury — than a not particularly coherent remark from someone suffering from, as the police well knew, mental health episodes. Whitmire and his fiance would repeatedly shout that he had no gun and, indeed, none was ever found.

The videos also make crystal clear that police knew Whitmire was struggling with mental illness. This occurs in the 911 call with mention of “IVC” or “involuntary commitment.”

Whitmire’s mother Corita Whitmire after Whitmire’s June 2 bond clarified that she and others concerned with Whitmire’s behavior never wanted him in a jail cell, but in a hospital.

“We were just trying to get help getting him to the hospital because we knew he wasn’t going to go willingly,” Conita Whitmire in a June 3 Asheville Citizen-Times article published after Whitmire’s June 2 bond hearing, where his mental health was part of the discussion.

Body camera footage shows that after the arrest, police interacted with someone claiming to be Whitmire’s sister. She explained that Whitmire had recently finished a hospital stay and experiences “schizophrenia.”

During the June 2 bond hearing Whitmire’s public defender Brooks Kamczik pondered why police were able to “find him very quickly” to serve Whitmire’s warrant but not his involuntary commitment papers despite the latter coming first.

To anyone familiar with the record of the Asheville police, the answer should come as no surprise.

Footage of the arrest

“What was your justification for doing that? Even after they had him in cuffs.”
– Conita Whitmire, Devon Whitmire’s mother, a week after the release of body camera footage, as quoted in the Citizen-Times

The unedited videos added some additional context around officers’ actions and what cops, Whitmire, and neighbors were saying. In the video of officer Matthew Milillo, Whitmire struggling and spitting while pressed into the concrete, exclaims, “I’m gonna keep spittin’. You slammed my head on the ground.”

“He just assaulted me,” Milillo says to an onlooker who was shouting at the police.

“You assaulted him! You assaulted him on the concrete!” the person replies truthfully.

In Lt. Mike McClanahan’s body cam video, as the neighbors shout down officers’ violent treatment of Whitmire, the police commander repeatedly told Carrie Spiegle, Whitmire’s fiance, to “step back.” Spiegle was recording from a distance.

Shortly after McClanahan’s remarks an unidentified officer — whose body camera footage was also not released would — would get in front of Spiegle, attempting to block her from recording their brutalization of yet another Black man.

“Why the fuck is you blocking this shit?” Spiegle questioned repeatedly in the video she filmed.

McClanahan, infamously, also led the Christmas 2021 eviction of the Aston Park camp, ordering the arrests of journalists before dragging four locals from their tents.

When the lieutenant extracts a small bag of what appears to be marijuana from Whitmire’s pocket in the body camera footage, he then proclaims, “Bingo.” Notably, marijuana is a prescribed treatment for mental illnesses in many states and Whitmire has not been charged with drug possession.

After police loaded Whitmire into their vehicle, with his hands forced painfully above his head, an onlooker shouted, “Fuck y’all, protect and serve. Protect and serve my goddamn ass.”

“Get out of here, pigs!” shouted another as police vehicles began to depart. These few minutes make starkly clear that, contrary to APD propaganda, it’s not just a handful of local anarchists who hate the police.

When Lt. McClanahan spoke with Whitmire’s sister minutes later and learned of his potential schizophrenia, McClanahan claimed, falsely, that schizophrenia would “exponentially heighten” Whitmire’s resistance.

Furthermore Assistant District Attorney Katie Kurdys recounted Whitmire’s mental health history “specifically, multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, manic depression and hallucinations,” while attempting to increase Whitmire’s bond during his June 2 hearing. This is how local police and prosecutors respond to mental illness, as if it’s just another excuse for more punishment.

Cops, or better yet mental health professionals, easily could have approached Whitmire in a way that avoided launching him into what clearly appears to be a mental health episode. The APD chose not to. Indeed, even a judge would later criticize the police for immediately trying to seize him instead of de-escalating the situation.

Despite police attempts to cast themselves as the victims — they would later claim one officer who got a glancing blow to the leg from Whitmire had to go to the hospital — the only mention of an ambulance is in regards to transporting the person they were arresting.

The APD’s heavily-edited copaganda video tries to use captions to make this seem like something it clearly isn’t. “He vigorously resisted officers [sic] attempt to search him for a weapon, even after he was on the ground in handcuffs,” reads the screen as if nearly being murdered is something a Black local is supposed to accept with placid joy.

Even in the edited video, around the 13 minute mark, one can hear Whitmire’s labored breathing as his head is pressed into the curb.

“Why is you on him like that?!” Spiegle’s voice rises in the background. Officers claim they’re not choking him, and a different onlooker’s voice rings out, “Don’t do that!” Voices grow even louder.

This edited video then breaks from the impressive community resistance that probably saved Whitmire from serious injury or even death to show, in slow motion, an earlier instance of Whitmire attempting to break free after cops restrained him while standing.

Notably the APD recently renewed their contract with the right-wing Colepro media pr firm, who specializes in video editing and in 2020 helped them hatch racist propaganda to falsely paint Black communities as uniquely violent. The infamous business has acquired a long record across the country of outright lying or releasing heavily-distorted information to shield cops from clear instances of bigotry and brutality.

The edited video returns to a barrage of voices shouting down a mob of cops placing Whitmire into the police vehicle with arms painfully stretched above his head. “It don’t take all y’all to do that! Y’all are doing too much!” shouts a neighbor.

The edited video yet again breaks from fierce community resistance to return and attempt to prove that officer Middleton did not apply pressure to Whitmire’s neck, but by notably only showing that this did not occur at select moments. The video, plainly, doesn’t have the angle that Spiegle’s video provides, notably from 4:19 to 4:23 in that video (after the officer who was blocking her gave up and let her film).

The edited video suggests that because Whitmire could occasionally raise his neck from the concrete, he wasn’t actually being choked, but it’s more a sign that an elbow pressed into his neck had increasing force behind it. This could have even been Whitmire reflexively trying to stay alive. Without residents bombarding with their cries, this could have easily gotten a lot worse.

At the end of the day, the edited video still showed that Middleton and Milillo pressed Whitmire’s head into the curb and failed to show a continuous vantage point that disproved Spiegle’s video which clearly showed Middleton’s elbow pressed into Whitmire’s neck for moments at a time while officers piled on top of him.

“It’s not technically a chokehold because they were strangling him a different way” isn’t the defense the APD thinks it is.

It’s worth repeating that someone having a mental health episode, even one severe enough to require intervention, is not reason to endanger their life by pushing their throat into a curb.

The police’s other excuse is that they had no choice to use the brutal level of force they did because they thought Whitmire might have a gun. But this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny of the department’s record. When several armed members of far-right groups — including a literal klan member brandishing a rifle — showed up to a June 21, 2020 anti-racist protest, for example, Asheville police amiably chatted with them instead of disarming them. Charges were only filed after widespread public backlash.

‘Free Devon’

On May 23 Asheville city council held its budget hearing. They’re currently planning to give police millions more from the same reserves they repeatedly refused to tap to help locals during the worst of the pandemic. City hall instead looks to overfund a police force that’s lost almost half of its patrol officers — if the budget passes the APD budget will have jumped by 25 percent since 2020 — so that those who remain can terrorize locals like Devon Whitmire.

Outside of the June 2 bond hearing a small group continued to raise awareness around this glaring police brutality.

“He was most likely scared at the time,” Carrie Spiegle told the Blade at that protest, noting that he’d been in a mental health facility about three months ago.

She then discussed body camera footage she had seen during Whitmire’s May 22 bond hearing: “Either way you look at the video, you can see it was wrong.”

At Whitmire’s first bond hearing Judge Edwin Clontz claimed Whitmire shouldn’t have lied or resisted officers. But even Clontz could see that officers “didn’t act appropriately” when they refused to give Whitmire a chance to submit to arrest before officers put their hands on him. Then, after Whitmire was cuffed, they put their arms “across [Whitmire’s] face, then across his neck,” which Clontz also criticized.

Whitmire’s public defender Kamczik said that the neighbors, who Asheville police in their press statement called “hostile,” were “afraid that they are about to witness another Black man die at the hands of law enforcement officers.” And he maintained officers had Whitmire “in a position where his air supply could be cut off at several points in this interaction.”

Clontz concluded Whitmire’s first bond hearing by refusing to reduce the bond amount of $8,500.

Some of the APD’s far-right supporters have clamored for Spiegle to be hauled away in handcuffs on ‘interfering with an arrest’ charges, even though she was recording from a distance distance, acquiring footage that has been used in court. To the chagrin of cop supporters, the Citizen-Times has raised basic awareness around what happened to Whitmire, refusing to print police p.r. statements verbatim but also neglecting to recount some of the larger issues in the case.

And when the outlet published a very basic article reminding locals that it’s legal to film the police, supporters cancelled subscriptions and ranted about the “diminished” paper with an “agenda” running “click bait”.

“I was making my voice heard, staying a good enough distance,” Spiegle told the Blade.

As we well know, Asheville cops treat any scrutiny as automatically illegal and in a 2020 survey officers literally declared “knowing your decisions will not be scrutinized” as a major goal. Blade reporters, including this journalist, will go to trial next week to fight back against this exact police state bullshit.

She also made requests of locals who care for Devon and what happens to him while he awaits his trial in the deadliest jail in the state. “My number one goal is hitting his donations right now for his bail and bond. My number one goal is getting him out of there.”

On June 2 Kurdys suddenly sought to raise the bond amount, presumably in response to local’s attempts to free him from pretrial detention. Judge Calvin Hill refused to comply with this request. But like Clontz, he would not budge on the $8,500 bond total.

Spiegle, in an interview with the Blade, added that she definitely wants “a change in protocol with how they approach the Black community.”

When encountering police, Black people should “be treated just like the rest of us,” Spiegle explained.

Every Southside resident at the Erskine Walton complex who raised their voice on May 13 risked retaliation from the notoriously-vindictive housing authority that works closely with the APD. Even still, Spiegle acknowledged the potential to extend this episode of community defense and transparency beyond a single afternoon.

“I’m trying to encourage the community to speak up about their own instances every time and record every time and make sure that everything is being recollected every time,” she explained.

But her effort to raise awareness to around Whitmire’s case has been a struggle. “Emotionally it’s taking a toll.”

“I’ve received numerous threats and everything, but I’m not too worried about those. It’s not going to shut me up. It’s all they want from me, and I’m just going to keep fighting for Devon.”

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Matilda Bliss is a local writer, Blade reporter and activist. When she isn’t petsitting or making schedules of events, she strives to live an off-the-grid lifestyle and creates jewelry from local stones

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