Inside Durham County’s split decision on $18M sheriff’s training center, gun range
A gun range and law enforcement training center costing over $18 million can be built in Durham, county commissioners decided late Monday night.
The Durham County Sheriff’s Office staved off a push from anti-police activists and frustrated elected leaders to secure a 3-2 vote on the construction.
“I’m sensitive as a Black man to the history of law enforcement in this country,” said Stephen Valentine, one of three newly elected commissioners to vote in favor.
“I’m also sensitive to the Black and brown children in our community that are losing their lives every day to gun violence,” he continued.
Commissioner Michelle Burton said she has heard from Durham residents, many of them older African Americans, who are more worried about that violence than what might be inflicted by law enforcement.
“There are 337,000 people who live in Durham County, and we all don’t think the same. We all have these different viewpoints,” she said.
Vice Chair Mike Lee spoke over a hostile crowd to say he doesn’t see a future without policing, even though he doesn’t support everything law enforcement does.
“The sheriff is an elected official,” Lee said. “Our job here is to provide the resources that he explains he needs in order to do the job he was elected to do.”
Sheriff Clarence Birkhead, in his second four-year term, did not speak Monday night.
On the opposite side of the debate were Commissioner Wendy Jacobs and Chair Nida Allam, who have held office since 2012 and 2020, respectively.
“I can’t in good conscience vote in favor of this funding when the community has repeatedly been asking for accountability and transparency into the Sheriff’s Office,” Allam said.
Jacobs said the Sheriff’s Office has been “historically well funded,” but slow to deliver on its promises.
“We’ve heard the sheriff say that he supports expansion of the HEART program,” she said. “The time for action is now. We cannot continue to pay just lip service to implementing best practices to serve our community.”
Protesters and supporters spoke
The Electra Road training grounds have been used since the mid-1980s for mandatory annual firearm qualifications, court-ordered auctions and bomb-squad detonations.
The renovations call for a new outdoor gun range and 10,000-square-foot classroom building with bathrooms, lockers and showers.
Protesters organized against the training center in the fall, labeling it “Cop City” to link it to an ongoing protest movement in Atlanta around a much larger police training facility under construction.
“If we want to actually protect Durham residents, we have to focus on prevention, not punishment,” said Meg Hopkins, organizer with the ACLU of North Carolina.
“In a time when the incoming presidential administration has been vocal about its desire to use local law enforcement as an instrument to harm and terrorize immigrant communities, we urge our leaders to commit to keeping our communities safe, not invest further in the very institution that is used to inflict harm,” she continued.
Many encouraged commissioners to instead expand the HEART program countywide. HEART is a city-run program that dispatches unarmed social work specialists to certain 911 calls.
Kara Martinez said when her 14-year-old stepchild experienced a mental health crisis, sheriff’s deputies were “sensitive and respectful,” but nonetheless handcuffed her and took her to the hospital. Another time, when the child was at her mother’s inside the city limits, a HEART counselor calmed her down in 20 minutes.
“Her kid was able to return to dinner and have a completely normal life again,” Martinez said, encouraging leaders to prioritize expanding HEART.
Supporters of the sheriff also spoke out, many emphasizing they wanted HEART expanded too.
“It’s a false narrative to say we can’t have all these things,” said Floyd McKissick Jr., chair of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, adding that he believed the training facility was “absolutely necessary.”
Expanding HEART countywide
Expanding HEART countywide could require consolidating the city’s and county’s 911 systems, and that’s one of the concerns Jacobs listed in voting no.
Jacobs said the 911 center at the Durham Police Department headquarters built in 2018 should be dispatching all the county’s 911 calls, but instead transfers calls for sheriff’s deputies to a separate communications center.
“It does not make sense to me that after seven years, we continue to fund a separate 911 center,” she said.
Allam said she’s been unable to reach Birkhead on the matter, and Community Safety and Wellness task force member Jennifer Carroll said the sheriff has refused to provide call data or discuss expanding HEART countywide, despite efforts dating to 2021.
