Speakers call on Chapel Hill to use police money to build up minority communities
Growing up in a mostly white neighborhood, Emile Charles didn’t see many police passing through, he said, but fear is his companion when he leaves to walk or drive around town.
“I don’t know whether an interaction will end in a traffic stop or end with me getting abused or even worse, but not uncommon in any way, getting killed,” said Charles, a Black graduate of East Chapel Hill High School who will be a freshman at UNC this fall.
It’s not something that he wants his brother, or his sister, or his future children to face, Charles told the Chapel Hill Town Council on Wednesday. Abolish the police, he urged, and invest the money in Black-owned businesses and historically Black neighborhoods, and in local Black students who are suspended 13.9 times more often than their white peers.
The council spent more than three hours Wednesday listening to nearly 60 mostly high school and college-age speakers ask them to defund the Chapel Hill Police Department. Other speakers recounted how police have worked with the town’s Black community or asked for more information or a stronger culture of compassionate policing.
Next week, Mayor Pam Hemminger said, the town and community leaders will begin a public conversation about recent events, “complex systematic issues” and calls for change. There will be more than one town hall meeting, she said.
“I have faith in our community, as I know the council does, that we will make sure at this moment that we move forward together, and we ask everyone to be respectful of one another as we undertake the important work that we know we have to do,” Hemminger said.
Facing COVID-19 and racism
State Sen. Valerie Foushee, an Orange County Democrat, opened Wednesday’s conversation by noting “these are difficult days for many in our community” dealing with COVID-19, as they also face the “raw exposure of racism that continues to undermine our society.”
Reciting the names of some killed by police, from George Floyd, to Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin, Foushee urged the council to closely examine how every decision it makes could affect those without power and visibility.
“For many people of color, the pain of recent weeks has been deeply personal but not new,” said Foushee, a retired Chapel Hill Police Department administrator. “We have felt this fear, this hopelessness and this heartbreak before. The question is, what we will do now that so many of our allies are feeling it, too?”
There’s still work to be done, Police Chief Chris Blue said, but the town is working to address social and racial justice issues and reduce the use of force and bias in policing.
Among those steps, he and Loryn Clark, the town’s executive director for Housing and Community, noted, are the Police Department Crisis Unit, Criminal Justice Debt Fund, Good Neighbor Initiative, Orange County Bias-Free Policing Coalition, affordable housing and support for community and human services agencies, the Northside Neighborhood Initiative and Building Integrated Communities.
There also are ways to get involved, Blue said, from the Community Policing Advisory Committee, which wants take on a greater role, to the Community Police Academy, which is normally held twice a year.
The number of warrantless searches has fallen and the gap in the number of white vs. Black and Hispanic drivers being stopped and searched has narrowed, he said. There’s also been a 45% drop in marijuana charges, which historically affect people of color, he said, as well as declines in the number of criminal charges, arrests and use-of-force incidents.
Quarterly reports by the Chapel Hill Police Department since January 2016 show a decline in the number of white and Black drivers stopped and in the number subsequently searched. However, more Black drivers continue to be searched than white drivers, which indicates that a discrepancy may still exist.
Reports also show a 45% decline in marijuana charges filed between January 2016 and September 2019.
Intervention must come sooner
Michael Conroy, a UNC social work student, noted that most people in prisons and jails have experienced either homelessness, addiction, mental illness, instability or trauma.
Orange County has a lot of good programs, he said, but non-police professionals and services should be intervening instead of police. Conroy suggested diverting some police funds to public resources and reducing law enforcement’s role in non-criminal situations.
“The jails can’t be the only or main entry point to receive services,” Conroy said. “That’s just too downstream of intervention, and being in the jail also makes every one of those five categories worse and has lasting harmful impacts on the people in terms of losing employability, the financial costs, and also the psychological toll of being in jail.”
Chapel Hill anticipates using roughly a quarter of its $66.4 million general fund budget next year for the Police Department.
The $16.1 million police budget includes over $2 million for planning-related inspections services, Town Manager Maurice Jones said. Nearly 89% of the rest pays for employee salaries and benefits, including health insurance and retirement, which will cost more next year.
The actual amount for police operations has been cut 6.4% because of COVID-19 revenue shortfalls, leaving only $1.7 million for police department operations, he said.
Speakers urged the council to do more.
Defunding presents an opportunity to make a “bold change,” said George Barrett, associate director of the Marian Cheek Jackson Center in Chapel Hill.
“The world is changing. COVID and the recent uprising are signs that things will not go back to the way they used to be,” he said. “If our community, which we preach to the world as progressive, has to change with the world, we cannot continue to invest Black taxpayer dollars in a police system that murders us.”
This story was originally published June 12, 2020 at 2:55 PM.
