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Mayor apologizes to Brown

Posted on October 15, 2009October 15, 2009 by Staff

By Rich Fowler
Staff Writer

Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy apologized to Charles Brown at Monday night’s town council meeting for the way Chapel Hill Police treated Brown when he was mistakenly arrested in June.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP president Michelle Laws, along with Brown, his wife, Truphenia, and NAACP legal redress chair Al McSurely, told Brown’s side of the story to council. After their presentation, Foy apologized.

Brown recounted how he had closed his barber shop on Rosemary Street at 11:30 p.m. on June 1 and started walking home along Rosemary Street when a Chapel Hill Police officer stopped him near Breadmen’s and placed him under arrest. The officer called him Mr. Fearrington, for whom there were outstanding warrants.
Brown said he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back and was kept at the trunk of a police cruiser for about 40 minutes until police checked his ID and ran a background check on him at 12:14 a.m.

Tapes released by the Chapel Hill Police to the NAACP indicate that at 12:14 a.m. a Chapel Hill Police officer called in to check Brown’s identity against a number of criminal databases and that the call ended at 12:30 a.m. Brown was released soon after the call ended. The internal police report released to the public by the town council claims that Brown was arrested right before the call was made at 12:14 a.m.

Brown also said that while he was held, he was taunted by some of the officers and that some of the taunts were racial in nature. The police report denies this.

McSurely disputed many of the findings in the police report, which exonerated all five officers involved, and Laws asked the council for a full, independent investigation into the matter.

Before apologizing to Brown, Foy said that he wanted to make sure that everyone understood that in releasing the police report the council was not deciding who was right and who was wrong. He said that the council wanted to get the information out to the public to encourage discussion.
“Mr. Brown, I think that you are due an apology,” Foy said. “I don’t think that anybody in our town should be treated this way. It’s an embarrassment that you had to go through this. That is very clear.

“I’m apologizing to you on behalf of the council and on behalf of all of the citizens of Chapel Hill. We do not want anybody mistreated, and we certainly don’t want people to feel unwelcome in our community.”

Last week, the NAACP sent a letter to the town that called for a status report on the civilian police review board, a five-year review of the arresting officers’ stops and arrests and a report on how black business owners have been treated by government and business organizations in Chapel Hill.

The council accepted the letter and Monday’s presentation as a petition and referred it to staff for further review. It also agreed to add Monday’s presentation to the research already done by a committee that’s working to create a citizens’ police advisory board and to try to bring people together to add to previous discussions on creating a board.

Council member Mark Kleinschmidt said that since the town can’t create a police review board like Winston-Salem’s that looks at personnel records, he felt it was time to do whatever it could short of that. He suggested creating an advisory board that would bring citizens into the police department’s policy-making process.
“We fail when we don’t have a place to put this kind of complaint in our system, and we need to create that place, even if the legislature isn’t going to give us the review committee,” Kleinschmidt said.

Council member Ed Harrison said that after talking to state Rep. Verla Insko, he believed that any police review board bill would have a hard time passing in the General Assembly. He said that the council should do the best it can without relying on the assembly to pass a bill.

Both Foy and Laws wanted to emphasize that they support the Chapel Hill Police Department.

“I don’t want there to be a misimpression that somehow or other I don’t support the police department,” Foy said. “I support our police department. We have an excellent police department, and you know that. But we agree, as Mark has said, that we need to have ways to implement policy changes and to communicate that to citizens of Chapel Hill.”

Laws said she had many friends in the police department and that she thought that 95 percent of the police officers in Chapel Hill do an excellent job.
“This is in no way about the NAACP against the Chapel Hill Police Department,” Laws said. “This is the NAACP standing and being for what is right and what is just. And in this instance, you had a few bad apples; you had a few police officers acting very inappropriately and very unjustly.”

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