Defacing Intelligent Discourse

The Asheville Fraternal Order of Police building

Monday's report by local North Carolina ABC affiliate station WLOS that an as-yet unnamed individual spray-painted 'Black Lives Matter' on the front exterior of the Asheville Fraternal Order of Police building is troubling.

It reflects the deep divisions resulting from the videotape of ex-APD officer Chris Hickman beating, tasing and choking Johnnie Rush last August after stopping him for jaywalking.

As WLOS reported, the defacing of the Asheville FOP building (pictured above) happened early Monday morning, and though the suspect also vandalized the windows of an AFOP van and attempted to disable security cameras, he was still caught on tape.

Local news affiliates who covered the story report that he appears to be a white guy wearing a hoodie.

According to local NC television affiliate WSPA, the AFOP president Rondell Lance told reporters that he'd personally already condemned the actions of Chris Hickman.

Lance also said he doesn't believe the building was defaced by anyone associated with the Asheville chapter of Black Lives Matter.

He believes it was someone with their own agenda trying to further fuel divisiveness.

Now as I write this on Thursday night, not a whole lot is known about this guy is; or why he did this.

A BLM protest in Minnesota in spring, 2015

But he clearly wasn't dispatched by Black Lives Matter to spray paint a police organization's building with the name of their organization.

According to their Webpage, the Black Lives Matter mission statement reads (in part): "The Black Lives Matter Global Network is a chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes."

The phony, one-dimensional descriptions of BLM peddled by opportunistic conservative ex-politician blowhards like Chris Christie and Fear Meister Rudy Giuliani, or the usual media suspects of quack, right-wing media like Laura Ingraham, Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, demonize BLM as some kind of violent terrorist splinter cell.

But in reality BLM is actually about peaceful, non-violent dissent, organized community action and education -  not spray-painting police property in the dead of night.

As a lover of the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, I'm all for Freedom of Expression in all it's many forms.

But to me, defacing property with spray paint, or anything else for that matter, is just plain wrong.

And it's vandalism, like the kind we saw on the walls of schools, people's vehicles and homes in the days following Trump's election in November, 2016 - including the swastikas some right-wing derelict spray painted on the walls of my elementary school in Bethesda, Maryland.

Some of the thousands of students who walked out
of school to protest gun violence on Wednesday 

If someone wants to use writing to express their opposition about something, by all means put it on a sign, in an op-ed, book, magazine, social media platform or blog.

Hell, you can write on yourself (or your own property) if you want to, but to me it's just low-rent to deface public or private property with your own personal agenda.

If you want to protest something, engage in peaceful organized resistance like students across the U.S. did on Wednesday to advocate for stricter gun control laws.

There's little question that those students were, in part, inspired by the BLM-organized marches and protests that have taken place in cities and towns across America over the past four years - sparked by the outrage over the judicial system holding no one legally accountable for the unjustified killings of unarmed African-American teenagers Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and so many others.

BLM's membership (and supporters) is made up of people of all races, so my guess would be that the individual in the hoodie who defaced the AFOP building early Monday is more than likely someone trying to steer anger over the Chris Hickman videotape onto the BLM movement.

BLM had nothing to do with Chris Hickman harassing, beating, tasing and choking Johnnie Rush as he was walking home from his job washing dishes last August.

As writer and Huffington Post contributor Gennette Cordova observed on her Twitter feed yesterday, "Video surveillance has shown that a white person did this, which all black people knew when they initially saw this story."

Whoever spray painted that building tried to use a lie to stir up the divisiveness and hatred regularly cultivated by Trump - in doing so he defaced intelligent discourse on issues that are critical to the American people as a whole.

This morning's Washington Post article about Cadet Bonespurs having bragged to a crowd of Republican donors in Missouri Wednesday night that he intentionally lied to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about the U.S. having a trade deficit with our neighbors to the north shows that the hoodie-guy in Asheville isn't the only one using a lie to sew division.

No doubt they both want to Make America Great Again.

The Price of Walking Home: Chris Hickman Charged

Ex-Asheville PD Officer Chris Hickman

The disturbing body cam footage of ex-Asheville PD officer Chris Hickman brutally punching, choking and tasing 33 year-old Johnnie Rush on the night of August 25, 2017 is a sobering reminder of the extent to which internalized racial bias continues to fuel the unnecessary use of excessive physical force by some members of the American law enforcement community.

Hickman's sarcastic and cynical taunting, and his sadistic beating of a citizen is egregious enough - after being choked into unconsciousness, Rush is lucky to be alive.

Small wonder this sickening example of police brutality took almost seven month's to be released.

But what makes this incident even more disturbing is the fact that Rush was simply walking home after a long shift washing dishes at a local Cracker Barrel restaurant.

He wasn't fleeing a bank robbery, running with a loaded gun in his hand, or trying to evade the police - the man was walking home from work.

Municipal ordinances that selectively target "Manner of Walking" have been the subject of this blog on more than one occasion - starting in the wake of the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown by ex-Ferguson PD officer Darren Wilson in August, 2014.

An in-depth investigation of the Ferguson Police Department's policing practices by the Department of Justice in 2015 found that a staggering 95% of people stopped by Ferguson PD officers for one of several "Manner of Walking" ordinances were African-American.

To put that statistic into perspective, according to 2010 Census data 67.4% of Ferguson residents were African-American, 29.3% were white.

The practice of some police officers essentially criminalizing individuals for walking down the street, or even allowing officers to randomly decide that the manner in which an individual walks merits suspicion, or justifies a legal excuse to stop and frisk someone, certainly isn't limited to Missouri.

For example back on October 19, 2016, I blogged about a white, plain-clothes Minnesota police officer Tim Olson being videotaped by a passing driver as he accosted and arrested an African-American man named Larnie Thomas who was walking along the side of the road in broad daylight.

Asheville (NC) Police Chief Tammy Hooper 

But the incident with Christopher Hickman is unusual in that it's a police stop based on how and where someone was walking - one that resulted in such a violent beating being caught on police videotape.

Local residents who packed the Asheville Citizens Police Advisory Committee meeting last Wednesday night, were understandably angered, confused and looking for answers about Hickman's conduct.

Like many over the past few days, I've been trying to figure out why Asheville, North Carolina police chief Tammy Hooper took five months to launch a criminal investigation - and given the potential legal liability based on Hickman's behavior, why the Asheville City Council was kept in the dark for months too.

In a thoughtful and detailed op-ed on the incident published in the Asheville Citizen Times last Friday, City Council member Vijay Kapoor noted that Chief Hooper immediately took Hickman's badge and gun after Johnnie Rush filed a use of force complaint the day after the incident and she watched the videotape.

As Kapoor notes, she also placed Hickman on administrative duty - this was all within about 24 hours of the incident taking place.

But if you take some time to read Kapoor's comments, the investigation seems to have morphed into an intentionally slow-footed combination of bureaucratic foot-dragging by the Asheville Police Department, the City Attorney's Office and the City Manager's Office.

If Chief Hooper felt that Hickman's behavior in the videotape was bad enough that it warranted taking his badge and gun and pulling him off the street - why didn't she push harder for an independent investigation?

Johnnie Rush after Hickman's beating 

Or report the incident to the City Council?

The result seems to be sort of a ping-pong match between an APD internal investigation and the District Attorney wavering on whether or not to file charges against Hickman - and nothing happened.

That is until the videotape was finally leaked to the Asheville Citizen Times in February six months after the incident and the story blew up.

With national media attention suddenly focused on Asheville's handling of the incident amid growing outrage over the videotaped beating of Johnnie Rush, charges were filed against Hickman last Thursday - including assault by strangulation and assault inflicting serious injury.

Additionally, as the Charlotte Observer reported on Monday, the Buncombe County DA's office quickly announced it is dropping charges against 17 different people arrested by Hickman.

The FBI is reportedly investigating the incident, but with Attorney General Jeff Sessions (a proven racist who scaled back DOJ investigations of racially-biased police departments) heading up the Department of Justice, it's highly doubtful anything substantive will come of that.

But the important thing is the truth came out, even if it did take six months for the video to finally be seen by the public and the Asheville City Council - and more importantly Christopher Hickman was taken off the street and forced to resign from the APD in January.

Time will tell what becomes of the assault charges filed against him.

Would any of this had happened had the body-cam footage not been leaked to the press?

Probably not.

Johnnie Rush would likely have been charged with trespassing, jaywalking and resisting arrest etc., his complaint likely would have been swept under the rug, and in the end it would have been the word of a black man in North Carolina against two white Asheville PD officers.

And no one would ever know the price he paid for walking home.