Pepper spray at protests: Police blame violence. ‘This is a lie,’ Charlotte leader says
Hours after President Donald Trump was nominated for a second term inside the Charlotte Convention Center on Aug. 24, dozens of people gathered in an uptown park to protest.
Insults and shouts filled the air, along with a bright orange aerosol that left people coughing and their eyes stinging as they spit into the grass along 3rd Street, at Marshall Park.
The use of pepper spray by police against protesters that afternoon was the first of several times law enforcement officers used the irritant for crowd control that day and later said some protesters had turned violent.
But activists who took part in the protests say they weren’t the violent ones.
In one instance, video by photojournalist Jeff Taylor shows two people being directly targeted by an officer using pepper spray as they approached an injured woman on the ground to help her up.
The Observer has reviewed statements from CMPD officials during and after the protests, as well as video captured during protests and marches, which spanned more than six hours on Aug. 24. Details come from first-hand witness accounts, video footage and observations by reporters on the ground that night.
While some of those who have been criminally charged by police are accused of assaulting officers, videos from that afternoon and night show several people targeted or injured by pepper spray while not engaged in violence.
Witnesses told the Observer that some people were detained or sprayed during protests as they were blocked in by police officers on bikes. The night before, on Aug. 23, pepper spray was used on the crowd when protesters blocked an uptown intersection.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officials refused to give details on the specific uses of pepper spray during protests sparked by the city’s hosting of the Republican National Convention, citing each instance was under investigation.
Still, CMPD Police Chief Johnny Jennings said recently that officer actions are under review because the department internally investigates any use of force, including deployment of pepper spray.
Under CMPD policy, pepper spray is not permitted to be used against nonviolent demonstrators but the policy offers police wide discretion in whether the use is justified if officers perceive an “imminent threat.” Jennings said he believes some nonviolent protesters experienced “residual effects” from the waft of pepper spray in the air but that the use of the irritant was warranted.
“I’ve looked at the videos,” Jennings said at a news conference on Aug. 26.
“ … The people that were sprayed were involved in active aggression … assaulting officers or taking bicycles,” he said.
‘Amplifies the chaos’
According to CMPD’s directives, which outline the department’s policies, “OC spray” or pepper spray “will not be immediately deployed where a person or group of persons are participating in a passive nonviolent protest unless there is an imminent threat to the officer or another person’s safety.”
CMPD Deputy Chief Jeff Estes said what constitutes an “imminent threat” can hinge on several factors: how far protesters are from officers, the number of officers and protesters present and what kind of language protesters direct at police and whether they comply with police orders.
But witnesses who recently spoke with the Observer say they saw protesters hit with spray while trying to obey officers’ commands.
At Marshall Park, officers used pepper spray against a man CMPD officials accuse of grabbing an officer’s bicycle. Although the man is seen on video refusing to leave the roadway while officers had commanded him to “move back,” video captured in the moments leading up to the use of pepper spray show no direct contact between the man and the officer.
One clip from video footage captured by WCCB Charlotte shows the man standing face-to-face with an officer as the officer advances. It’s not clear whether the man grabs the bicycle or is hit with the bicycle. The view of the camera is partially blocked by a parked car.
Estes, in an interview with the Observer, said he thinks video of officers using pepper spray is an incomplete picture. He added that pepper spray is considered an intermediary step between officers giving verbal commands and officers going “hands on” to gain compliance.
“In other words, you can get irritated in your eyes, but officers and citizens don’t have to fight each other,” he said.
But City Council member Braxton Winston said he believes CMPD’s use of chemical agents is dangerous and unnecessary. Winston was one of several people hit with pepper spray during a protest on Aug. 24.
“Their only point is to inflict pain,” he said. “With these agents, it amplifies the chaos.”
Across the country, law enforcement agencies face intense scrutiny over how police officers use force or violence against citizens.
Police accounts and statements have increasingly come into question when analyzed alongside witness accounts and video footage. George Floyd, who died in June after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck, was originally reported to appear “to be suffering medical distress” after he resisted arrest and was handcuffed. Cellphone video showed Floyd pleading for air while officers stood by.
And just last week in Charlotte, after CMPD officials initially denied trapping protesters on 4th Street during an earlier Black Lives Matter protest, new video footage revealed officers expressing intentions to “bottle neck” and “hammer their ass with gas,” referring to protesters.
Jennings has since acknowledged that protesters found themselves unable to escape the tear gas but that was not the department’s intent.
That June 2 incident, combined with CMPD’s response to anti-RNC protests in late August, has reignited intense criticism of police from Winston and others.
The City Council member, now in his second term, has publicly accused the department of lying about officers’ justification for using pepper spray.
Other activists say police officials are too quick to use social media during protests to defend the use of force.
Marshall Park
By the time the Aug. 24 “Resist RNC 2020” event occurred, protesters had already been marching in the streets for three nights. During that time, CMPD officers had used pepper spray multiple times and arrested 11 protesters.
Just after the Charlotte portion of the RNC ended on Aug. 24, around 5:20 p.m., a group of people attending a “Resist RNC 2020” event in Marshall Park were met with counter-protesters, a small group of people with religious and anti-abortion messages.
Police officers on bicycles made a circle around the small group, who eventually left the park. Meanwhile more CMPD officers arrived to attempt to move anti-RNC protesters off the road.
Video shared with Bria Bell of WBTV, the Observer’s news partner, shows a man being hit with pepper spray while shouting at a line of officers on bicycles who had ordered the crowd to move back. In the short clip, the man is seen stepping back as officers advance. When the officers on bikes stop, the man steps forward again.
In the moment before the man is sprayed, a police officer steps from behind an officer on a bike and sticks his arm out and hits him with pepper spray. The Observer was unable to reach the protester.
Within the hour, CMPD tweeted that pepper spray had been used against a protester who was “choking a woman and assaulted an officer.” Later, the department clarified in a news statement that the protester was pepper sprayed after trying to grab an officer’s bicycle and that while officers were attempting to arrest him, he grabbed “a female’s neck and began to strangle her.”
Video of him in the seconds before being hit with pepper spray does not show him choking anyone or grabbing the officer’s bikes.
According to police, the man was charged with assault on a government official, resisting a public officer and disorderly conduct. He was not charged with assault on a female, “as the victim did not wish to pursue charges,” CMPD said.
Midnight Diner
Nearly four hours after the Marshall Park incident, a separate group of activists gathered in uptown. The group started marching from the park in the dark and headed south on Caldwell Street.
CMPD bicycle officers largely kept their distance, only blocking the entrances to Interstate 277.
The group stopped at one point on Carson Boulevard around 10 p.m. Standing on the road near the Midnight Diner, someone lit what appeared to be an American flag. Then, just as many protesters appeared to begin walking away from the burning flag, CMPD bicycle officers quickly rode up.
CMPD tweeted around the time that two protesters pushed an officer off his bike while the officer was attempting to extinguish a fire. Two arrests were made and pepper spray was used, police added.
Later, on Twitter, Winston, who had live-streamed the march on Facebook, responded simply: “This is a lie.”
Winston said that he saw an officer pedal quickly and intentionally “slam into (a protester) at full speed” and that the officer appeared to be “aiming right for this guy.” He said the officer then “jumped” on the protester.
“Why’d you run him over with the bike?” Winston is heard asking on video. “Y’all know that’s not policy,” he says as officers hold the man on the ground and arrest him.
Bystanders, including Katherine Wolff, tried to check on the man, but the police formed a perimeter around him.
Wolff said she was trying to get police, whom she witnessed “kneeling on his neck,” to leave the man alone when she was arrested. She can be seen on Winston’s video talking to officers behind the police line.
“There (was) nowhere I could go” when the officers told her to move, Wolff told the Observer later.
“There were bicycles and cops behind me, and they were deploying pepper spray. I wasn’t even given an option on how to get out.”
The next day, Winston tweeted that his skin was “still burning” from being hit with pepper spray.
CMPD, though, has defended the officers breaking up the group.
In an interview, Estes said police officers — who could not see fire clearly because they were not immediately nearby — have a responsibility to investigate any fires that protesters light. The fire could have been a Molotov cocktail or been a fire meant to burn down a building, which has happened at other protests across the country, he said.
“Is (the fire) for harm or is it an expression of free speech? We don’t know until we find out,” Estes said.
But activist and ACLU organizer Kristie Puckett-Williams, who was in the thick of protests on Aug. 24, said she didn’t even realize there was a fire until the next morning, when she saw videos of it on Twitter.
“That’s how small it was,” she said. “So how can they justify this?”
CMPD headquarters
Protests on Aug. 24 continued past midnight.
Making their way from South End, the march had thinned out by 1 a.m. and the group again met police — this time in front of CMPD’s headquarters.
At least two dozen officers on bicycles rushed in as someone attempted to bring down the flag in front of headquarters. According to CMPD, a woman was observed cutting the rope to the flag, but accounts differ. Multiple people were injured, including two people who were taken from the protest by ambulance.
Police said they used pepper spray when a woman was cutting the rope to a flag.
It’s unclear how many times pepper spray was used but one video shows a bicycle officer spraying an unidentified woman after bicycle officers surrounded an ongoing arrest, attempting to create distance between the tussle and bystanders.
The video shows an officer using his bike tire against her leg, and she appears to crawl away after she is sprayed. When two other protesters move toward her and lean down to help her off the ground and away from the road, an officer steps forward and hits them with pepper spray, too.
According to witnesses and video from the incident, CMPD officers forcefully tried to move the crowd across the street, away from the flagpole and police headquarters.
The Observer spoke with one woman, who did not want to be named, was said she was injured and her knee dislocated while she was trying to move away from the area police were attempting to clear. She was also charged with resisting arrest although she said she was trying to comply but was blocked from crossing the street as police faced off with protesters.
Puckett-Williams said she heard her screaming, and Puckett-Williams implored a Black female officer to help.
The officer asked Puckett-Williams to move the crowd to the sidewalk so an ambulance could arrive.
Days later, Puckett-Williams said the events of that Monday night are being misrepresented by law enforcement.
“People are simply out there to exercise their First Amendment right,” she said. “Police are using that as a justification for their brutality.”
Estes, though, said CMPD tries to get out a “fair and balanced narrative” when writing press releases and tweets during protests, which can take time especially when summarizing the perspectives of multiple officers.
Puckett-Williams, who has long spoken out against police brutality, said misleading Tweets harm the community, and that damage is “irreparable.”
“They throw their rock and hide their hands,” she said. “They don’t have to lie. What can happen to them? Who in this city is going to do anything about it?”
