8/30: Police Are Politicians in Portsmouth, Virginia -- Again -- and Again -- and Again

8/30/20 

After 127 years, those resolute Confederates fell.

There is, in Portsmouth, VA, a 127-year-old Confederate monument that looms over downtown on a spot once used for whipping enslaved people in public. The monument has four figures facing outward around an obelisk, a potent symbol of that era's unyielding Jim-Crow culture. For three years, the city council has been talking about taking it down.

On June 10th, a peaceful protest was underway when Virginia Senator Louise Lucas, who is Black, got a call telling her that two protestors had been arrested for trespassing. She went to the site, and, Huffpo says, told the gathering that they had a right to be on public land and that it was illegal to permanently damage the memorial.

Some protestors took that as an okay to paint the monument. That night, they vandalized it with spray paint, decapitated two bronzes, and knocked over a third, which landed on a protestor and injured him badly. The police did little or nothing.

The next day, Lucas called for the resignation of police chief Angela Green, saying she hadn't done her job to protect the statues and the protesters.

Within a few weeks, a white police sergeant wrote to town officials to say he thought Lucas' criticisms were "absolutely disgusting and offensive." Weeks later, on the day that the Virginia Senate was slated to debate police reform, that same police sergeant filed felony charges against 14 people, including Lucas, for conspiracy to cause injury to a monument.

Because of Virginia's quirky magistrate system, the sergeant was able to bypass the local prosecutor, a reformist. The charges named the prosecutor as a witness in a probable effort to keep her sidelined.

Portsmouth's vice-mayor, who is Lucas' daughter, had backed up her mother's statement. She also said Lucas didn't have authority over the police chief, because the chief's orders come from the city manager.

A white citizen responded by suing Lucas's daughter under an arcane state law. He'd gotten the idea from a Facebook page.

But here's the real problem: This story is a serial. The Virginian-Pilot, a regional newspaper based in Norfolk, identified a “clear pattern” in which the police repeatedly "hounded" Portsmouth’s Black elected officials out of power.

According to a summary by the New Republic magazine, the Virginian-Pilot cited former Police Chief Tonya Chapman, the first Black woman to lead a city police department in Virginia, over "concerns with leadership." Councilman Mark Whitaker fell to a federal forgery investigation "spurred by then-Sheriff Bill Watson," who didn't like Whitaker's politics. Former Mayor Kenny Wright was subject to "a low-speed car chase over an expired inspection sticker."

With so much political "success" behind their series of takedowns, Portsmouth police have little incentive to stop.

Since the June protest, the Portsmouth City Council have voted to remove the memorial and are figuring out exactly how to do it.

The city manager has said the police have no business investigating the protest because there is a conflict of interest. So on it goes.

Portsmouth's police have pushed elected and appointed officials out of office -- repeatedly. They're at it again, and they expect success. In Trump's America, who will stop them?

How could the police be chastened after a long history of undercutting Black politicians? Since these are civil rights matters, they presumably are federal cases, so they're subject to the vicissitudes of AG William Barr, and Virginia has had, and still has, racist laws on the books since the days of Thomas Jefferson. Where is the cavalry in the age of Donald Trump?

"Portsmouth, Virginia" by Dougtone is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/portsmouth_n_5f43dec4c5b6c00d03b20ca2