Council members showed some spine and some dignity during the contentious start of what could have been a very long meeting last night. The crowd in the audience spilled out into the hall and a conference room and even outside, the vast majority interested in a petition submitted by Jim Neal, calling for an independent, third-party investigation of how police handled the incident of miscreants breaking into the Yates building and announcing plans to, in effect, steal it from the owner.

Comments from the numerous people signed up to speak ranged from the common sense – if a reporter could go into the building and look around and talk to the trespassers, why couldn’t plainclothes police do the same undercover – to the off-beat – objecting to the UNC men’s basketball team playing on a military vessel – to the sarcastic – suggesting that a SWAT team be used to enforce parking and panhandling regulations. Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt had to remind the audience several times not to clap and cheer their favorite speakers, so most in the audience resorted to raising their arms and wiggling their fingers instead.

Once the speakers were done, Kleinschmidt seemed anxious to receive and refer, but Sally Greene wanted to talk. She voiced concern over a lack of trust between residents and the police who protect them, and she saw that tied to several incidents elsewhere in the nation where people were prohibited from videotaping police actions. Laurin Easthom proposed a resolution in which the town apologizes to the reporter detained. When Kleinschmidt said he wanted to wait until he heard what the internal investigation revealed, some audience members booed loudly.

That got the mayor’s hackles up. He not only told them who they were dealing with, he showed them as well. He has a 25-year record of striving to move civil rights issues forward. As a student, he occupied South Building on campus (where the chancellor and top administration have their offices) to pressure for a black cultural center; he made a career fighting for inmates on death row; he ordered protection for the Occupy Chapel Hill movement on Franklin Street. And he was not going to issue an official apology until all sides had weighed in.

Donna Bell asked how Neal’s investigation committee differed from the Police Advisory Committee. She did not support an ad hoc committee duplicating efforts the town already had in place. Penny Rich supported Bell, urging a measured response of using the system already in place. In the end, Greene, Easthom and Ed Harrison were the only votes to adopt Neal’s and Easthom’s proposed resolutions. The remaining six votes were to receive and refer.

Some in the audience began jeering at that, preventing council from continuing with the public hearing next on the agenda. Matt Czajkowski made a motion to briefly adjourn, which passed unanimously. Most council members walked off the dais. When the meeting resumed about five minutes later, the crowd had settled down and council settled into the next matter.

Clearly passions ran high, but council members disagreed with one another without snide remarks or caustic put-downs. They behaved like the people we wanted them to be when we elected them. Last night, they gave us good value for our tax dollars.
– Nancy Oates

You never hear of anarchists issuing toxic mortgage loans. Anarchists don’t seem prone to raiding investors’ funds and ruining a business while taking multimillion dollar bonuses. And you won’t find too many anarchists refusing health care to sick people as some insurance companies sure do.

And yet that word “anarchist” seems like the worst name you can call someone these days. That was the justification used by Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt and Police Chief Chris Blue for the police action/raid on the folks who had occupied the Yates Motor Co. building.

Some of the folks who broke into the Yates building may actually call themselves anarchists. But I’d bet they do so as a badge of pride because they see a society that has developed some pretty disturbing economic flaws that they would like to see fixed. In fact, they seem quite willing to endure the rancor and ridicule and dismissive behavior of the authorities and their neighbors just to point out those issues. They are impatient that change comes very slowly.

I guess anarchists don’t have the right of free speech that all us non-anarchists do, so if they try to distribute literature that points out disparities and calls for action in the streets, they lose their rights as Americans. One person’s education can be another person’s incitement to riot. Just look back at the segregation battles fought more than 50 years ago in this country. That was a social upheaval that was right and just, but man did it bring out the furies in normal folks. Maybe the economic injustices that these anarchists seek desperately to address will be viewed in the same light a half-century from now.

We all of us need a different way of viewing one another than what has become a standard system of labeling. Labels can be shorthand – with a single word folks can classify a person or political movement without having to delve further into personalities or issues. Labels can be an excuse not to evaluate and consider. Labeling someone an “anarchist” can allow some folks to insult and dismiss all sorts of issues and problems that we all must face, just as dismissing someone as a “liberal” or a “conservative” does the same damage to our sense of inquisitiveness and sense of right and wrong.

But using labels carries with it the danger of short-sighted simplification and can lead down a route such as that which resulted in Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South.

Best look beyond the labels at what’s behind these actions, rather than dismissing them as a bunch of kids running riot. What happened can be seen as either a nuisance or a harbinger. The police action could be a sign that things are changing for the worse. I’d like to know more about the events before I dismiss them.

The police don’t always get it right, just as bankers and politicians and businessfolk sometimes screw up to the detriment of us all. It’s quite all right to question the police, whether we agree with their actions or not. And as long as the police must explain their actions, no matter how far-fetched those explanations are, then we can rest assured that we still live in the United States of America, not Syria.
–Don Evans

The Yates building arrests raise several issues that Don and I view differently. Should Joe Riddle, who owns the Yates building and pays property taxes on it every year, be forced to find a tenant for it? Should police have given the trespassers more notice before coming in to arrest them? Should reporters break the law in the name of covering a story? And, having broken the law, should they be given special treatment because they have press ID?

We watched some council members at Monday night’s meeting tentatively and respectfully question Police Chief Chris Blue about why he used a tactical team armed with assault rifles to vacate the squatters who had broken into a building on West Franklin Street owned by Riddle, who lives in Fayetteville.

Donna Bell, who showed her pragmatism a couple of times Monday night, defended Chapel Hill’s finest by noting that, although residents want the police to protect them, their rights and their property, some people were “ambivalent about the force police have to use to keep us safe.” Bell, who admitted that she had protested in her day, pointed out that police needed to be prepared for a range of eventualities to prevent an officer or a civilian from being hurt or killed.

(I recall a retired FBI agent tell of hunting a fugitive in a rural area early in his career. As the rookie, the FBI agent was sent up into the barn lofts first to see whether the armed fugitive was hiding there. Every time he started up the ladder, he knew he might be climbing to his death.)

Don believes police should have arrested perpetrators only as they left the building, but that would have incentivized people in the building to stay. And as the trespassers got more frustrated, alone with their rocks and flammable materials and printouts of how to flip police cars, the situation could easily escalate. Police acted prudently by letting anyone who had a change of heart about breaking-and-entering to leave without penalty. Once the numbers inside dwindled to a manageable group, police went in and made the arrests.

Chapel Hill News employees Mark Schultz (photo credits in the N&O indicate he was inside the building taking photos of the other trespassers) and Katelyn Ferral (who admitted she had been in the building illegally) also trespassed. Schultz evidently left before police entered the building. Ferral was still on the scene and said she was wearing press ID. Freelance writer Josh Davis would not have had any press ID, and the newspaper was negligent if it had assigned him that story, instead of sending an employee. Both reportedly were detained but not arrested, which I believe was the correct response. Had they been inside the building when police entered, they should have been arrested and charged along with the rest of the trespassers.

Don says Ferral and Schultz were not breaking the law unless police had told them to leave and they refused. He also objects to police and Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt labeling the trespassers as “anarchists” to turn the public sentiment against them. And he thinks I am a “tool of the Man.”

This has led to interesting discussions in our household. What do you think?
– Nancy Oates