Was UNC response to Silent Sam protests ‘heavy handed’? A town board wants answers

A town advisory board is calling out UNC Police for not addressing public concerns about how law enforcement handled the Silent Sam Confederate statue protests.

At a meeting Tuesday night, the Community Policing Advisory Committee discussed asking the Town Council for a third-party panel to investigate UNC’s multi-departmental response and to limit Chapel Hill police officers’ future involvement on campus to emergencies.

The committee charged a subgroup of its members in October with drafting the letter.

“We discussed how can Chapel Hill be safer,” said Calvin Deutschbein, a committee member involved in the subgroup. “One of the things that we kept coming back to is it would be nice to have more clarity about what’s happening, and it would be nice for there to be no more problems in the meantime.”

The university’s relative silence is in sharp contrast with how Chapel Hill police have responded, committee member Malcolm Hunter said.

“I think it’s a bad situation where you have university police that apparently do not feel accountable at all to the people they police, which is the staff, the students and the faculty,” Hunter said. “They don’t need to explain, they don’t need to do anything. I just don’t think that’s good for them.”

Student and community concerns arose this fall after four Silent Sam protests on campus in August and September where police used pepper spray, bike barricades and other tactics to control the crowd.

“The fact that people essentially came to us — came to Chapel Hill police — because the campus police weren’t talking says a lot,” committee member Liz Wayne said.

Several committee members have noted the police response to the protests exceeded community expectations for demonstrations. Police also have been accused of appearing to give special treatment to the Confederate counter-protesters — from how protest barricades were erected to the police escort for counter-protesters entering and leaving the protest site.

Protesters have cited the police presence on Aug. 20, when the statue was pulled down, as an appropriate response. Chapel Hill police phone and email records show officers were told to stand back from the crowd that night unless there was a public safety issue.

Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue has answered some questions in interviews and public forums. But he can’t tell people everything they want to know, he said, because UNC, not the town, was in charge. Chapel Hill police are only in charge when an event happens off campus, such as on Franklin Street.

Blue has directed most questions about the police response to UNC Police, who have declined to answer questions about the tactical response — including which agencies assisted the university.

A report could be included in the recommendation that Chancellor Carol Folt and the UNC Board of Trustees will make to the UNC Board of Governors for what to do with the 105-year-old Confederate statue, now expected Dec. 3.

The Board of Governors could discuss the recommendations at its Dec. 14 meeting.

The draft letter from the Community Policing Advisory Committee says the police response has damaged Chapel Hill’s and its police department’s reputations.

The committee will refine the letter Nov. 27 and also plans to hear more from Blue about his department’s after-action review, now underway. A police report to the Town Council has not yet been scheduled, but the committee plans to finalize its letter by December.

Blue suggested Tuesday that the board do the necessary investigation, in part, because it was formed for that role after the 2011 Yates Motor Co. raid on West Franklin Street.

In that incident, police wearing body armor and carrying semi-automatic rifles raided the building, arresting protesters and sparking public concern about militarization. The ensuing conversation led Chapel Hill police to revise special-response and use-of-force policies.

It also could take the town up to a year to seat a special investigative panel, said council member Allen Buansi, a committee liaison.

Blue said the public feedback this time, like how to better position barricades at protests, also has been helpful. He also liked the idea of having civilian monitors who can intervene before small conflicts get out of hand, he said.

“There are times that no matter how skilled our police officers are they’re not the right remedy,” Blue said. “I also think as a community, we ought to decide how we want to express our disagreements in a better way.”

Committee member Allan Chrisman pushed for the monitors as a way to keep the public safe while documenting what’s happening.

“I think the paradigm that we’ve been stuck with, which I think is not a good one, is that it’s all or none,” Chrisman said. “It’s heavy-handed police enforcement or it’s disengagement, and I think that that’s a mistake.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2018 at 3:32 PM with the headline "Was UNC response to Silent Sam protests ‘heavy handed’? A town board wants answers."