David Zack, the widely-hated police chief, is finally on his way out. Behind his ouster, his horrific time in power and what city hall’s not talking about

Above: APD police chief David Zack. Official city photo

Editor’s note: This piece was updated Dec. 17 to reflect additional information about Zack’s ouster and the prevalence of “thin blue line” imagery among APD cops during his reign.

In the grand tradition of Asheville city hall the end of police chief David Zack’s career arrived not with a bang or with a whimper but with a bureaucratic fuck-up.

On the morning of Tuesday, Dec. 12, Zack told his pet reporter — John Boyle of the Asheville Watchdog — that he was considering leaving the job, but might not, and definitely wouldn’t make any decision until after the new year.

This miraculously changed over the course of the day as the official position of city hall transformed into “nah, he’s done.” Within hours Zack had told APD commanders he was leaving and the p.r. flacks pushed out a statement (at 4:59 p.m., naturally) announcing that he’d be gone after a “transition” shortly in the new year.

By Thursday afternoon that had changed again, with a city hall statement to WLOS declaring that Zack would be on “personal leave” for the remainder of his time, and that the city manager would appoint an interim chief after the holidays.

What they didn’t mention is that his departure follows the Nov. 2 arrest of his wife, far-right realtor Clarissa Hyatt-Zack, for careening down Hendersonville Road drunk out of her mind and slamming her truck into another vehicle. Considering she’s loudly pushed for the homeless to be thrown in jail for such awful crimes as having a can of beer it wasn’t, to put it mildly, a good look.

There was more. For a time Zack had seemed the strange exception to the mass exodus of city hall officials (and cops). But outside of the far-right and the chamber of commerce he’s widely despised. He started his reign by blanketing downtown in tear gas and launching an infamous attack on a medic station. He went on to direct relentless raids on homeless camps (including on Christmas), retaliate against protesters and arrest journalists. City hall is currently facing a major ACLU lawsuit thanks to his department’s actions.

Despite nearly half the police force bolting from their jobs as the public turned decisively against them, at Zack’s insistence the APD budget steadily became more bloated than ever, with zero transparency about where those millions are going.

Asheville’s elites certainly aren’t averse to slush funds and violent crackdowns. But somehow Zack also found time to publicly feud with the sheriff, district attorney, judges and a council member who dared to ask tepid questions about what was happening to all that money.

This is far from a complete list. Honestly, what’s surprising isn’t that Zack is finally being pushed out but that it took so damn long.

Of course, that not’s what city hall said. Instead he was heading into graceful retirement (and, by coincidence, never setting foot in the office again). The Watchdog and WLOS dutifully didn’t even mention Hyatt-Zack’s DWI arrest when they reported that the police chief was on his way out.

It’s worth remembering what happened to the last few police chiefs, and how city hall explained their departures. Tammy Hooper resigned “to pursue consulting opportunities.” William Anderson “retired.” Same for Bill Hogan and Will Annarino.

This is Asheville, after all. No one in city hall ever gets driven out due to scandal or public anger. They all peacefully retire or go on to better things, and the emperor always has a fine set of clothes.

A cloud of tear gas

In a town where journalism’s often treated as just another marketing department, honest political obituaries are hard to come by. This situation definitely needs one, because Zack’s horrible tenure reveals a lot about the city’s emerging police state and an increasingly reactionary local government.

David Zack started his career as a prison guard — the worst of the worst even among cops — at the notorious Attica and Sing Sing prisons, before joining the Cheektowaga, N.Y. police department and eventually becoming chief.

He left that spot to come to Asheville in February 2020. This followed previous police chief Chris Bailey leaving, after just two months, when it emerged that his record included felony domestic violence charges. That meant he couldn’t meet even North Carolina’s miserably low standards for being a cop. The official city hall announcement declared Bailey had “given notice of his resignation for personal reasons which need his attention.” Apparently he was a bit young to “retire.”

The public got an early sign of what was to come in late May 2020, when police commanders told city council that they blamed problems with fireworks in West Asheville on the mostly Black residents of Pisgah View, even though locals repeatedly said they believed the problem was coming from tourists staying at airbnbs.

About a week later Asheville had the most prolonged anti-racist uprising in its history, part of the wave of demonstrations that swept the nation. Zack’s APD reacted with brutal violence, tear-gassing crowds (including children) and attacking anti-racist protests. This included the infamous raid on a medic station, where officers slashed open water bottles and made international news for their viciousness. Zack would initially defend the destruction, only backing down under massive public pressure. He was still defending the APD tear-gassing downtown earlier this year, when he asserted that they’d “saved this city.” APD Sgt. Brett Foust is currently facing a federal lawsuit for firing a riot round into a protester’s head.

That July Zack also spearheaded a deliberate campaign, working with the right-wing ColePro p.r. firm, to falsely depict Asheville as overrun by violent crime and then blame Black communities for it. This was intentionally crafted to deflect attention from the APD’s brutality and excuse their long history of racism.

A list of talking points drafted up by then-APD p.r. flack Christina Hallingse after conversations with Zack and ColePro clearly laid out that the goal was to emphasize “racial disparities in crime” to excuse “proactive enforcement measures” that would “disproportionately” target “communities of color.”

ColePro, who have a long record around the country of covering up police brutality, would then lead a racist smear campaign that tried to portray the town as awash in gun violence, even as the APD’s own numbers found violent crime was steadily dropping. APD press releases in the coming year and a half focused on Black people charged with crimes 54 percent of the time (about 11 percent of the city’s population is Black) while downplaying or outright ignoring violence committed by white suspects.

This only stopped after a 2021 Blade investigation revealed the extent of these lies and the planning behind them. Hallingse was kicked out of the APD shortly after, but Zack stayed in office and ColePro kept its lucrative contract.

To be clear: the APD has always been a deeply bigoted institution whose real purpose is to violently enforce the status quo. That is the point of it; the police will remain a threat to the public until the day they’re abolished.

But somehow Zack found ways to make all this even worse, including when it came to the APD’s ties with the far-right.

In late June 2020 police chatted amiably with an armed klan member harassing anti-racist protesters and didn’t press charges (it’s illegal to carry a firearm at a protest in N.C.) until faced with public backlash.

Throughout that summer the APD continued its crackdowns. In August they did a mass round-up of protesters picketing a hotel and made a point of releasing particularly detailed personal information so the far-right could harass them. They also dragged Blade reporter Veronica Coit out of their vehicle, assaulted and arrested them.

When local Fraternal Order of Police president Rondell Lance attacked protesters and pretended to still be a cop, the APD refused to press charges (a local attorney later did).

During Zack’s time the APD openly echoed far-right talking points even more often. In September 2020 Zack tried to blame protesters for a hunting knife dropped by Trump supporters. When that didn’t work they lied that a dirt-filled coffin put on the doorstep of the police station, and tombstones listing Black people killed by the police dropped on city council member’s lawns, were direct threats.

When far-right harasser Chad Nesbitt stumbled and struck his head on a parking meter when his armed “security” tried to push into a crowd of protesters, the police echoed his unhinged claims that anti-fascists had attacked him.

Importantly Mayor Esther Manheimer and city council started backing Zack on these easily-debunked lies. They would stick by him for several bitter years to come.

A petty police state

Things didn’t get better in 2021, as the APD evicted a houseless camp on Feb. 1 just before the coldest night of the year. They did this with so little notice that even service providers that usually worked with the city were left scrambling. City hall claimed this was due to vague safety concerns but public records later revealed the crackdown was sparked by a rich person literally complaining that homeless people shouldn’t be allowed to exist near tourists.

In April 2021 the police sent nearly their entire on-duty force to crack down on a houseless camp at Aston Park, and on the locals who’d organized to support the people there. They ended up hauling one homeless person and a medic to jail, the latter on charges so thin that even a judge quickly threw them out.

Over the year the APD would escalate their attacks on the homeless, despite CDC rules declaring that camps on public land should be provided with services and sanitation rather than evicted.

Zack wasn’t solely responsible for this, of course. The mayor, many on council and city manager Debra Campbell enthusiastically signed off on his actions. Campbell even directly ordered the April raid (though Zack was fully on board with it) and exclaimed “Yippee!” in a text message when he told her about the arrests. Emails and text messages later obtained by the Blade and Sunshine Request open records group showed police and officials eager to please a handful of conservative gentrifiers.

In October 2021 a federal lawsuit credibly alleged that deputy chief James Baumstark covered up a rape trafficking ring during his time as a police commander in Fairfax County, Va. Zack refused to fire him and Baumstark was eventually acquitted on a technicality. He retired in August 2023, and both Zack and Campbell attended his going-away party.

During this same era “thin blue line” and Punisher symbols began spreading among the APD. Many departments banned these after they were used by fascists in the Charlottesville attacks, but not Asheville. While they’d been present before, they increased exponentially during Zack’s time in office.

That December, as locals formed the Aston Park Build to protest the increasingly vicious crackdowns on the unhoused, police harassed them and threatened felony charges for such terrible acts as having art supplies in a public park.

When a houseless camp emerged there alongside mutual aid services on Christmas Day, Zack’s department celebrated the holiday by sending in cops to drag people out of their tents, throw the food locals had laid out for the hungry in the trash and arrest two Blade journalists for covering it. For good measure the police were blatantly bigoted towards Blade reporter Matilda Bliss, a trans woman, as later revealed in body camera footage.

The APD followed up this particular act of petty cruelty by charging multiple people with “felony littering” for simply being at the Aston Park Build, arresting them in a series of raids. The charges were so blatantly retaliatory that even the city’s own solid waste manager would later declare in internal emails that Zack was lying, that “clearly these folks weren’t littering” and their charges were just political persecution. She even added that when actual incidents of felony littering, by businesses, were brought to the APD’s attention they refused to press charges.

In early 2022 Zack’s officers also got an illegal search warrant for Blade journalist Matilda Bliss’ phone, which they’d seized during the Christmas raid, due to her supposed ties to “anarchist extremist groups.” Their supposed proof was a social justice events calendar she ran.

The APD then summarily banned our reporters and the protesters from city land, many without ever notifying them. This policy was so arbitrary and draconian that it became the target of an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of many of the mutual aid workers.

That same year Zack’s department shifted from falsely blaming Black people for violence and started blaming homeless camps (Asheville’s houseless population is disproportionately Black, so there is some overlap in these bigotries). These were smeared as the cause of everything from assault to rape, with talking points that were quickly debunked as blatantly untrue.

The one bright spot during this era was the fact that for all his fascist ambitions, Zack also had a far weaker hand. Due to defiance in the streets, increasing debunking of their propaganda and widespread public hatred of the APD cops were leaving in droves. Over 40 percent of the department hit the bricks since he took over as chief and they’ve been blessedly unable to replenish their losses.

While the APD still does a lot of damage, it just doesn’t have the ability to carry out as much day to day repression as it would like. When a pro-abortion demonstration took over the interstate in 2022, for example, the police couldn’t do much more than form a line of cop cars and ask them to leave.

The fact that about half the force left didn’t stop Zack from pushing for massive budget increases. One might think that with the APD losing that many cops, and being unable to replace them, they’d need less money. But starting in 2021 the department would receive large budget hikes each year.

This raises the question of where all that extra cash went, as overtime alone doesn’t begin to explain it. In 2022 city council member Kim Roney asked to see more information about this during meetings of council’s Public Safety Committee. In response Zack had the mayor remove her from the board. Roney, ever the coward, thanked Manheimer and dutifully voted for the police budget hike in 2023.

Early this year, Zack directed that the APD pull their live crime stat tracker, which happened to show that violent crime had sharply decreased. Backed by conservative reporter John Boyle, who once declared a Pride flag on city hall an example of Asheville going “too far left,” Zack began spinning a narrative that downtown was overrun by violent homeless people. Coincidentally the crime stats he presented steadily worsened in every presentation, right up until the budget vote.

Over the year Boyle would increasingly act as a personal p.r. hack for Zack, giving him a microphone to attack any official or population he wished without challenge or serious question. With the backing of the chamber of commerce this was spun as a real danger rather than a manufactured panic.

Zack’s push was backed by the Coalition for Public Safety, a clique who’ve made a habit of harassing anyone who doesn’t love the police department. Earlier this year they unsuccessfully tried to shut down Asheville FM for running a show featuring abolitionist viewpoints. Clarissa Hyatt-Zack, who the police chief married in mid-2022, was a major figure in this group.

They’re also far-right and overwhelmingly white, primarily composed of gentry like realtors and landlords who have an open and virulent hatred of the poor. Honor Moor, the main spokesperson for the group since Hyatt-Zack resigned after her DWI, has openly praised figures like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Moor, naturally, is sad to see Zack go.

Hyatt-Zack’s bigotry wasn’t new. Then going by Clarissa Marshall, she was part of a previous far-right effort in 2021 urging crackdowns on the homeless because they were making it harder for her and her wealthy friends to sell properties to millionaires. For the police chief it must have been love at first sight.

Notably when Hyatt-Zack and other far-right figures pushed the city to shut down its Ramada Inn shelter, the city manager and mayor did their bidding in late 2021.

The 2023 budget saw a massive, $5 million increase to the department’s budget pass with no opposition on council. Zack used part of it to buy a drone fleet, which the APD promptly sent to surveil the opening of an anarchist bookstore they didn’t like.

In the latter half of this year the APD has finally dropped all pretense and started “special operations” targeting people simply for being homeless or asking for aid. These involve pulling officers from around the city to carry out mass arrests, usually on minor trespassing or panhandling charges, with the goal of sending homeless people to jail.

According to sources who’ve directly spoken to police commanders, the orders for these sweeps come directly from Zack, who thinks the APD’s been too “soft” on the homeless. Those commanders even claimed that they didn’t care about the increased overcrowding in the jail they were causing.

But for all the attempts to make Zack, his wife, a few far-right realtors and the chamber of commerce seem like a grassroots movement his actions have proven incredibly unpopular, within the city and without.

The APD’s insistence on persecuting our journalists drew condemnation from press freedom and civil liberties groups around the world. Their crackdowns on mutual aid have already embroiled them in a major lawsuit. Closer to home, attempts over the past two years to ban sharing food in parks or giving direct aid to the poor have been soundly defeated after massive public opposition. They might have matching shirts and money to waste on billboards, but it’s clear that the Coalition for Public Safety is badly outnumbered.

As the police’s draconian cruelty became even more blatant it started to contradict city hall’s own messaging, which falsely claimed they were focused on housing the homeless rather than penalizing them. On Oct. 10 Campbell would even declare that “we’re not criminalizing people for being poor.” Just over a month later Zack’s APD would brag about hunting the homeless with drones.

Zack also made a habit of picking fights with other officials, even those in law enforcement. In addition to his obsession with shutting down even mild criticism from government officials, he went after District Attorney Todd Williams in 2021 for dismissing many of the APD’s dubious charges against homeless people. Zack also blasted judges and magistrates for not keeping more of the homeless in the deadliest jail in the state (see a theme here?) and for (in one judge’s case) criticizing police conduct in the brutal arrest of Devon Whitmire this summer.

More recently he started feuding with Sheriff Quentin Miller. In October Zack snapped at the sheriff’s office during a presentation, claiming they weren’t sending officers to back up the APD on its anti-homeless patrols. In November, his department played a key role in shutting down city offices due to far-right fearmongering about a minor pro-Palestine protest.

So city hall was heading into an election year with most of the town hating Zack’s guts while he racked up lawsuits, increasingly contradicted their p.r. spin and seemed to determine to pick a fight with every single other government official in the country. Out he went.

Asheville hates the APD

Faced with ever more cops quitting, Zack has constantly blamed the media and the mysterious “anti-police” sentiment of the city itself. In an interview earlier this year he asserted Blade reporters deserved to be arrested, because “maybe it was the journalists that were the problem.”

The APD shares that attitude, with an official survey of officers in late 2020 listing “no scrutiny from media” and “knowing your decisions will not be scrutinized” as major priorities. The two deputy chiefs Zack promoted — Mike Lamb and Jackie Stepp — are as bad as he is. Lamb’s been at the forefront of attacks on protests and the homeless; he was the first to threaten felony littering charges for those in Aston Park. Stepp started her career with the APD trying to ban busking and has only gotten worse since.

But every single police department is an infighting shitshow — hierarchies full of petty, vindictive cowards tend to be — so the public will hopefully get some breathing room as Zack’s would-be successors fight for position.

As a side note: to the extent we’ve played a role in revealing the truth about the APD to the wider public, we’re proud. If that leads to more cops leaving, then that’s good. They won’t be missed.

It’s worth remembering what happened to the last few APD chiefs. In 2004 Will Annarino “retired” after a barrage of criticism for crackdowns on anti-war protests the previous year. Bill Hogan “retired” in 2011 after guns, drugs and money went missing from the evidence room. William Anderson “retired” after putting his hand on the scales when his son got arrested in a drunken car wreck, getting caught surveilling protesters and facing factional strife from a particularly racist clique within the APD.

Tammy Hooper resigned in 2018 “to pursue consulting opportunities.” Purely coincidentally, this followed massive public outrage over her covering up the racist police assault on Johnnie Rush and her invoking openly bigoted tropes to oppose mild NAACP-backed reforms. During her reign the APD also had the worst racial disparities in traffic stops of any major department in the state (which takes some work). Purely a coincidence, I’m sure.

The city gave her an extra $118,000, surely out of the goodness of their hearts and not as hush money to avoid further scandal.

Then, as now, the motto of city hall is “everything is fine, goddammit.” Perhaps nowadays combined with a bit more tear gas.

Zack’s been deeply unpopular pretty much since summer 2020 — tear-gassing thousands of people will do that — so it’s worth looking at why city hall kept him on for as long as it did.

Since 2020 Asheville city council has gone in a sharply conservative direction, focused on openly favoring hotels, airbnbs and big business while cracking down on dissent and visible poverty. The massive demonstrations that year showed council, and the gentry they serve, that they are loathed by many of the people who actually live here.

When elites lose the facade of legitimacy, force and fear are pretty much all they have left. So the sudden exodus of police, combined with facing real public anger, terrified them. Without a large police force cities are far harder to gentrify, resistance (and journalists they don’t like) harder to attack. Without cops with guns backing her up the mayor is just a whiny karen with a gavel.

So the frantic shoveling of resources to the police, along with giving Zack carte blanche no matter how much p.r. and legal trouble he caused, were a desperate attempt to preserve a key prop to their power. The worry was that Zack being pushed out would mean even more cops quitting, and they can’t have that.

As much of the city’s been steadily alienated, city hall’s increasingly leaned on the right-wing and the gentry (and especially the right-wing gentry) for support. Rhetoric aside, this is frankly where most of council and the upper ranks of city staff feel more comfortable anyway. After all, Campbell started her tenure as city manager promising hyper-conservative business groups like CIBO she’d do their bidding.

This attempted realignment hasn’t entirely worked. A slew of far-right candidates still ran in 2022 insisting council were secret anarchists who’d defunded the police (oh, if only). But some longtime conservative zealots like Nesbitt are also praising the current council for their round-ups of the homeless, even publicly saying that Manheimer owes her seat to conservatives.

Outright classism was another reason city hall supported Zack. Asheville has become so badly gentrified that it’s one of the least affordable cities in the country. That means a lot of people have ended up on the streets. Liberal and conservative gentry, as a rule, both hate the poor. They hate seeing them even more. They are absolutely incandescent with rage when anyone holds a demonstration they can’t easily ignore.

So for a long time they were happy to let a creature like Zack run amok as long as it meant the filthy rabble were getting punished. Conservatives like the Coalition for Public Safety said this openly, “progressive” gentry more quietly.

Yet when he finally leaves early next year local officials will still be stuck with a city that justifiably hates the police — and them — more than ever. According to a recent article in the Citizen-Times, attrition among the APD has recently ticked up again; now 42 percent of their positions are vacant.

The fact is that Asheville hates the APD for good reason, and the organization most responsible for that is the APD. Every single police chief back to the early 2000s has left amid scandal. For every outrage that goes public there are a hundred more acts of cruelty and corruption that don’t. While those may not make the headlines, people remember what was done to them. So do their families, friends and communities.

Our city does not need the police. We never have and we never will. So good riddance to David Zack, and may the rest of the cops follow him out the door.

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Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 16 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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