Yet another brutal APD ‘special operation’ arrests the homeless for being poor and asking for help. It’s past time to face the growing police state in our city

Above: Asheville police before raiding the Aston Park houseless camp in April 2021. In recent years the department and city hall have increased crackdowns and raids against the homeless. Photo by Veronica Coit

On Monday Asheville city officials crowed about a “special operation” targeting the dire threat of… poor people looking for a place to sleep. Some, horror of horrors, even asked for help.

No, reader, we are regrettably not making this up. An Oct. 30 APD press release bragged “APD Apprehends 49 Repeat Offenders in Special Operation.”

This wasn’t the first time. They carried out a previous “special operation,” announced on Oct. 9, which saw cops charge 62 people, most of them also just for crimes of poverty. The vast majority of council cheered that crackdown at their meeting the next night. In a hideous blend of suburban fascism and vague liberal bullshit, city manager Debra Campbell claimed that hitting the hungry with criminal charges for asking for food was a way of “starting a conversation.”

With that kind of endorsement the APD did it again, crowing about throwing the homeless in jail in military-style terms once reserved for assassinating insurgent leaders.

Police officials later revealed to right-wing TV station WLOS that the crackdown took place over 20 hours starting Oct. 20. The press release breathlessly declared that “the operation moved into the night to respond to violent crime hotspots.”

Yet the tally of arrests and charges tells a very different story. Of 49 people charged, 12 were primarily hit with second-degree trespassing charges. This is overwhelmingly used against homeless people simply trying to find a place to sleep. Another 12 were charged with panhandling; merely asking for cash or food. One was charged with both and another with the unforgivable act of trying to camp.

If you’re keeping count that makes 26 of the people charged in the “special operation,” well over half, were just hit with criminal charges for being poor in public. That’s it.

But there’s more. Another 11 were hit with trespassing charges combined with others related to substance use, mostly involving alcohol or low-level possession. All were non-violent in nature. One was simply accused of having an open container. Some were, heaven forefend, drunk in public. For those unfamiliar with our fair city, intoxication is highly encouraged — to the tune of countless millions in marketing a year — among tourists and the wealthy but suddenly a threat to public safety when it happens among the poor.

Indeed, shortly after this column’s initial publication, the news broke that Clarissa Hyatt-Zack, the police chief’s wife and a prominent figure on Asheville’s far-right, was arrested after colliding with another car while driving drunk. No word on if the APD will launch a military-style effort to crack down on drunken right-wing realtors, but we won’t hold our breath.

So of the 49 people charged in the APD’s most recent “special operation,” the vast majority were just targeted for being in poverty and/or non-violent substance use.

A handful of firearms charges, a few open warrants (only two alleging actual violence) and a few more drug charges round out the tally. The three handguns and handfuls of drugs they found were presumably too paltry to stage a photo spread out on the table.

To get this the APD deployed “41 Officers, Detectives, supervisors, rotated through the 20-hour operation. The staff that participated were from nearly every division in the department and worked outside their normal shifts.” This is at a time when the APD complains constantly about losing about half the police force in recent years, much of it due to the simple fact that they’re widely hated by much of the city.

City council recently revamped Asheville’s panhandling ban, worried about a very overdue legal challenge, but claimed — in the face of broad local opposition, including from civil rights lawyers — that it wasn’t seeking to expand the police’s authority or primarily use criminal charges to enforce it. Now, the APD are now openly bragging about doing so. They accepted without question that asking for help should be a criminal act if it makes the well-off uncomfortable.

The “special operations” represent a scrapping of the facade, already crumbling, that Asheville city hall’s response to homelessness is anything other than cruelty and open force. They want the poor punished and removed from sight so the rich don’t have to see them. While these are, in a way, an escalation they’re also bleakly unsurprising.

The APD’s standard excuse is that these actions are being done in response to “community concerns.” Yet every time the issue of further targeting the poor comes up at city council, for example, it’s met with overwhelming public opposition.

Government meetings are, by design, friendlier terrain for conservatives. Yet despite constant p.r. attempts to make it seem like a grassroots group, the far-right “Coalition for Public Safety” is always heavily outnumbered. They had to resort to putting up billboards cheerleading the APD (quickly tagged with graffiti) and harassing beloved community radio stations for daring to run criticisms of the police. By all evidence, outside of a handful of bigots and the wealthy, the wider community is staunchly against the APD’s crackdowns on the poor.

Even in the WLOS comments section, usually notoriously conservative, the responses to their latest “special operation” were often negative. “Criminalizing homelessness is not the answer” ran one, “arresting people for simply existing” another. One local asked “what kind of dystopian hell scape is Asheville becoming?”

It’s a good question.

This isn’t some local groundswell that the cops and city government are oh-so-reluctantly trying to respond to. Instead it’s a very deliberate campaign of repression directed from the very top.

Under Campbell’s administration the attacks on the homeless have gotten dramatically worse. Part of this is that Campbell is herself blatantly classist (she once texted “Yippee!” to the police chief upon hearing that protesters and homeless people were arrested in a raid). She has also, from the start, been particularly friendly to conservative business interests. This has coincided with a city council that’s also taken a sharp right-wing turn since 2020.

That has included dumping even the pretense of reining in police chief David Zack, who started his tenure leading the department with the destruction of medic stations and blanketing the town in tear gas. Instead of being fired city hall decided to essentially give him veto power over local government. Late last year he personally directed the removal of a council member from a committee overseeing his department, for the unforgivable act of mildly asking to see where all the APD’s money has gone. City hall’s given the department massive budget increases while it still has about half the officers it used to.

At the Oct. 10 meeting council didn’t just applaud Zack’s department for rounding up poor people, they even implied that the APD had the final say over if the city built a bike lane downtown or not.

So the arc during recent years has seen escalating crackdowns, camp sweeps right before freezing weather (literally because a single rich person complained about having to see tents), raiding camps on public lands even when CDC rules forbade it, arresting journalists for reporting on their actions. and pursuing mutual aid workers with false felony charges. That last one was so blatant even the city’s own solid waste manager said it was open retaliation and that the police department was lying.

Many of these actions have been widely condemned not just by locals, but by civil liberties groups as well. The city’s park ban, which allows individual cops and officials to ban locals in secret with no due process, has even drawn a lawsuit from the ACLU asserting that it’s blatantly unconstitutional. One of the individuals arrested in the latest “special operation” is charged with violating that ban.

While whitewashing the bigotry of the local far-right as mere concerned citizens is nothing new, this past year has seen this war on the poor receive an extra boost from conservative media, acting as the p.r. arm of a full-fledged fearmongering campaign waged by the police department, Chamber of Commerce and local gentry seeking to consolidate more power.

Part of this was so the APD could get a massive budget increase, which city council — including “abolitionist” Kim Roney — dutifully approved this summer. Ironically claims of escalating violent crime, which magically got worse and worse the closer the budget vote got, were used to justify the hike. Now that cash is being used to arrest homeless people for asking for change (and harass those trying to get them food and supplies).

It’s also being used to create that dystopian hellscape. In January Asheville city government joined the Fusus system to network surveillance cameras throughout the town together. When it was approved there was supposed to be a follow-up that would involve restrictions on its use and a public update. Neither ever happened, because council lets the cops do whatever they want. The company behind this is already making the news for the threat their system poses to even the most basic civil rights.

The APD’s also invested in a drone fleet, which they’ve used to surveil such terrible threats as the re-pening of a community bookstore. Given the extent of their “special operations” it’s likely that they’re also using these to target those sleeping in the streets.

The chamber is also using this fearmongering to scheme for a Business Improvement District, a privatized mini-government that gives the wealthy direct control over a chunk of tax money and their own private security force. A previous proposal for a BID was defeated in the early 2010s because it was incredibly unpopular, but they’re determined to bring it back. BIDs overwhelmingly further segregate cities and have been implicated in both extensive violations of civil rights and the destruction of small business.

As for the rest of us, we’re told that if we ever push back, if the cops and a few rabid business owners everything they want, it will endanger “public safety,” everything will shutter and downtown will immediately become a ghost town, tumbleweeds and all.

It’s a lie, of course, but police states are always built on them.

The paranoia over having to see poverty on the streets of Asheville is, of course, the wealthy horrified at the city they made. Rents, already bad, have gone up nearly 37 percent since the start of the pandemic. There are, by some measures, 14 people vying for every open rental unit.

You can’t gentrify a city so badly it becomes one of the least affordable places in the country and not have a hell of a lot of people end up on the street. They will keep ending up on the street until that changes.

All arresting them does is create more misery. But the cruelty, as they say, is the point.

I have lived and worked in downtown for the better part of two decades. I have walked around my neighborhood at all hours of the day and night. I can tally on one hand the number of incidents where I’ve even had to verbally de-escalate a confrontation with a homeless person.

By contrast the number of times I’ve seen shit-faced tourists pose a threat — including harassment, stalking, assault, shouting slurs or literally trying to run locals over — is far more than I can count. Yet that’s who our homeless neighbors are being arrested to appease.

I wish the presence of the homeless did actually drive out coked-up rich assholes the way the gentry and city council think it does. I wish they were filled with such fear upon walking through our town that they scurried for their luxury SUVs, never to return. If every business that catered to that kind of gentry trash closed their doors forever it would be a dream. They will not be missed. The tourism “boom” has made life in Asheville worse for the vast majority of people who live here.

The homeless are not the threat. They are not our enemy. They are not destroying Asheville. The unhoused do not kick locals out of their homes or devour neighborhoods with airbnbs. They aren’t the ones firing us for trying to unionize or carving up Black communities for cash. Panhandlers aren’t trying to massacre pride parties. The veteran holding a cardboard sign ain’t teargassing crowds full of children.

This town is being killed by those who go home to tacky mansions on gentrified streets and sleep, far too soundly, knowing the cops and local government are doing their dirty work. Let us hasten the day they wake up to find that the city is no longer theirs.

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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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