‘We have been bamboozled.’ Charlotte not going far enough with reforms, critics say.

Since a video posted online showing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers using tear gas against a crowd of largely peaceful protesters, Charlotte City Council and Police Chief Kerr Putney have made a series of changes meant to boost public trust and accountability.

The City Council voted to stop the department from buying tear gas and ordered CMPD to adopt standards endorsed by a police watchdog group. Putney required officers to intervene when other cops engage in misconduct that “shocks the conscience.”

But even as calls for reform grow louder after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minnesota, some elected officials, a nationally known activist and leading community groups said they are increasingly concerned that City Council and CMPD are watering down measures that are supposed to reduce use of force by officers.

Leaders in cities such as Seattle, Pittsburgh, Portland and Washington, for example, have enacted or proposed limits on the use of tear gas.

Some Charlotte City Council members wanted to ban CMPD from deploying chemical agents after the video surfaced online June 2, but Mayor Vi Lyles and City Manager Marcus Jones have not moved to allow council to take a public vote, three officials told The Observer.

Charlotte City Council also approved a resolution earlier this month ordering CMPD to adopt eight rules from Campaign Zero, a policy initiative linked to the Black Lives Matter movement. The group lobbies police departments to prohibit chokeholds and strangleholds and require officers to de-escalate potentially violent encounters, among other steps.

CMPD tweeted Monday that the department has already implemented all of the recommended policies, in some cases as early as the 1980s.

But Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist with Campaign Zero, accused CMPD of trying to mislead the public. In several areas, CMPD policies do not conform to standards suggested in the initiative known as 8 Can’t Wait, Sinyangwe said.

“They are trying to pull a fast one,” Sinyangwe said. “There is no excuse for it.”

On June 4, Putney announced a new duty to intervene policy that requires police officers to intervene if another officer is engaged in “egregious behavior which shocks the conscience.”

Community activist Robert Dawkins had lobbied the department for such rules for about a year, but said he is now disappointed because the standard CMPD set is so high that the policy will impact few, if any, cases. Other cities require officers to intervene whenever they determine another officer is guilty of misconduct, Dawkins said.

“We have been bamboozled and hoodwinked,” Dawkins said. “City Council doesn’t know what CMPD is doing and they don’t want to know.”

CMPD did not make Putney available for an interview and the department did not answer written questions submitted by The Observer.

City administrators did not make Jones or Lyles available for interviews. City spokesperson Cory Burkarth refused comment.

Other city leaders appear split over whether CMPD has implemented strong enough reforms since 2016, when days of protests followed the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott.

Council member Braxton Winston said the council has not held the department accountable for failing to make systemic changes needed to mend deep rifts between CMPD and African Americans and other minority communities.

Winston lobbied council to create a committee responsible for examining and adjusting how CMPD spends money and creates policy.

“There was a lot of window dressing” after 2016, said Winston, who was arrested while participating in protests over Floyd’s death. “We have had a lot of conversation. We have not had comprehensive police reform.”

Council member Tariq Bokhari said CMPD has made major strides since 2016 and doesn’t deserve the criticism it has received in recent weeks.

“They have done everything they promised after 2016,” Bokhari said. “They have done exactly what we told them.”

Tense meeting

Protesters allege that on June 2 they were ambushed by officers and doused with tear gas that left them struggling to breathe, coughing and having burning sensations in their skin and eyes.

Video recorded by Queen City Nerve, an alternative newspaper, appears to show a mass of demonstrators walking near 4th and College streets in uptown when police released chemical agents on the crowd. Protesters turned to go in the other direction, but officers on that side blocked their path, also using chemical agents.

CMPD tweeted that officers had been attacked with rocks, bottles and chemical agents, but the video shows protesters marching peacefully and then fleeing once officers deployed tear gas.

When City Council met behind closed doors on June 3, some members said they wanted to vote to halt the use of chemical agents, said three officials who attended the meeting. They said some council members proposed the city place a police commander on administrative leave for ordering the use of tear gas during the confrontation.

City Attorney Patrick Baker told them they could not legally vote in the closed-session meeting, said officials who requested anonymity because the discussions were supposed to be confidential.

Baker did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Lyles and Jones — despite criticizing officers’ actions — prevented City Council from taking a public vote by refusing to put the issue on the board’s public meeting agenda, two officials said.

Under city rules, only the mayor and the city manager can unilaterally change the board’s agenda, which is a list of issues that council members vote on and discuss during public meetings. Typically, the mayor or city manager would add an item to the agenda when multiple officials voice concern about a topic, but Jones and Lyles have resisted doing so, two officials said.

City Council members can amend agendas during a meeting only with a unanimous vote. They could put the issues on a future agenda with a majority vote, but haven’t done so.

Bokhari and Ed Driggs, the council’s only Republicans, have staunchly defended CMPD, and other members believed they would not support a public discussion on the issue, officials said.

Bokhari and Driggs would not divulge details about the meeting, but said the department implemented strong reforms since 2016.

Driggs said he would need more information to determine whether officers were wrong to deploy tear gas against protesters. Still, he said, recent protests have remained far more peaceful than 2016.

“We are seeing the fruits of our outreach,” Driggs said. “This year isn’t comparable to 2016.”

Some elected officials questioned why CMPD and other police departments have dispersed crowds of protesters with gas banned in war zones and health experts warned that the chemicals’ effects on the respiratory system could worsen the spread of COVID-19.

City Council voted earlier this month to prohibit CMPD from buying chemical agents with money from next year’s budget. CMPD spent about $103,000 in fiscal year 2020.

But a spokesperson for CMPD said the department did not request any money to purchase chemical agents in next year’s budget and the department has said officers may still use gas the department has stockpiled.

The issue is emblematic of city council and CMPD’s habit of adopting policies that sound good, but have relatively small impacts on how officers conduct themselves, said Dawkins, the community activist.

“They aren’t firing anybody or putting heat on anybody,” Dawkins said. “There is no real oversight by City Council.”

Enough progress?

CMPD used an array of munitions — from tear gas to smoke canisters to sting grenades and nonlethal bullets — during protests that followed the killing of Scott in 2016.

The Police Foundation, a Washington-based non-profit that conducts research on law enforcement, reviewed CMPD’s performance during the 2016 protests and found that overall officers acted appropriately and within the department’s rules and procedures.

Since then, CMPD has enacted changes, including providing the public more information through social media and holding scores of community forums and public events.

In November, the department unveiled reforms in its use-of-force policy, which governs when and how law enforcement officers are allowed to use their gun, Taser or a chemical agent.

The changes turned de-escalation — a longtime policing tactic used by CMPD and law enforcement agencies around the nation to reduce the need for deadly force — into a specific written policy that could be enforced if an internal investigation shows an officer missed opportunities to avoid using force.

“A lot of good work has been done,” City Council member Malcolm Graham said. “We’ve got a lot more work to do.”

But police watchdog groups and others say City Council has not forced CMPD to go far enough with changes.

Charlotte has made “little to no progress” since the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, said Jorge Millares, the founder and executive director of Queen City Unity. Millares helped create Queen City Unity, a non-profit dedicated to promoting equity and equality in the city, in the wake of the 2016 protests that followed Scott’s death.

Millares wrote an open letter to city leaders recently calling for a “complete overhaul and transformation” of CMPD including the demilitarization of the department.

“We need immediate action. We’re not talking about another town hall. We’re not talking about another community forum,” he said. “The community has spoken. The community has been speaking for decades even before Keith Lamont Scott.”

Cities such as Minneapolis, Austin, St. Louis and Seattle have proposed spending less money on police. Activists are calling for the money to be re-directed to social causes like mental health programs, job training and education that can reduce reliance on law enforcement.

But earlier this month, Charlotte City Council approved a budget for next year that includes about $290 million for CMPD, or about 40 percent of the city’s $719 million general fund.

Police watchdogs excoriated the city for budgeting $4.7 million for a new helicopter for CMPD and listing the expense under “neighborhood development.”

“The city of Charlotte is trying to trick people into believing they’re not increasing the police budget by hiding purchases of police helicopters and other expenditures in the neighborhood budget,” Sinyangwe, the data scientist for Campaign Zero, said in a June 12 tweet.

Differing views

Protesters’ demands have evolved since a CMPD officer fatally shot Scott four years ago, said Stephen Rushin, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago who studies police reform.

Rushin said the conversation has shifted from improving policies and training to hard questions about the role law enforcement plays in society.

“I’ve noticed that there’s growing traction to police abolition or police defunding this time around, which is a pretty significant difference,” Rushin said.

Whether officers ultimately follow reforms comes down to “leadership, leadership, leadership” and a willingness from police chiefs to hold them accountable, said Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Putney has acknowledged CMPD made a mistake during the confrontation captured on video on June 2. He has asked the State Bureau of Investigation to conduct a probe to determine if laws were broken. CMPD is investigating whether department policies were violated.

But Putney defended the use of chemical agents and argued that the alternative is physical force and batons.

“Without the ability to disperse an angry or a violent crowd ... with chemical munitions, we’re going to harken back to what we experienced in the ‘50s and ‘60s of physical force, which is absolutely unacceptable to me,” he said, according to a June 5 Observer report.

Rev. Glencie Rhedrick disagrees with the chief’s view.

“My thoughts were, ‘here we go again,’” Rhedrick said about watching video of the June 2 incident for the first time. “I was on the front line in 2016.”

Rhedrick hasn’t gone to the front line of protests this time, due to COVID-19 concerns. But as a co-chairperson for Charlotte Clergy Coalition for Justice, she’s helping to coordinate clergy members on the scene – including one reverend who Rhedrick says was tear gassed June 2.

Looking back at the Keith Lamont Scott protests in 2016, Rhedrick said, there has been “little to no difference, little to no improvement.”

“Even with peaceful protests, you still disengage a chemical agent on a body of people who have the right to express themselves,” Rhedrick said. “So if we learned anything from 2016, we would not have come out with those measures.”

This story was originally published June 17, 2020 at 1:06 PM.