Charles Brown: "I was humiliated" by police
by Joe SchwartzArticle Tools
Charles Brown clasped his wife's hand as they walked to the podium at Monday night's Chapel Hill Town Council meeting. Until then, others had spoken for the reserved, young businessman. He had stood in the shadows at rallies highlighting his case of mistaken identity. But after an internal police investigation cleared officers of any wrongdoing, Brown stepped forward.
His voice quivering, Brown struggled to speak as he told elected officials what happened to him after he closed his downtown barbershop on June 1.
"When I walk by or I'm driving past there, it goes through my mind, it happens all over again. I was humiliated. I was embarrassed," he said, his wife's arm around him, consoling a soft-spoken man thrust unwillingly into the spotlight. "I just hope we get justice from this incident."
That Monday night in June, shortly before midnight, Brown had worked late at his shop, Precise Cutz & Styles, at 136 E. Rosemary St.,Just blocks away from his shop in front of Breadman's, officers stopped him as he walked toward his Carrboro home. He was bent over a squad car, handcuffed and detained for almost an hour, he says, because officers had confused him with Cumun Fearrington, who was wanted on a charge of failure to appear.
He paused often while speaking to the council, trying to summon the right words. As he concluded, a slow-building round of applause arose from the crowd, and Brown's wife, Truphenia, grasped the mic.
"My husband is a man of good morals," she said, her calm yet assured tone matching the mood. "He is not a liar. He is a good man who walked into a ready-made family of teenagers and an 11-year old son. I was the first person who he talked to after this incident. I heard the humiliation in his voice. It hurt me that I could not console him."
Brown's lawyer, Al McSurely, chairman of the state NAACP's legal redress committee, played a recording of the police traffic from the incident, in which officers run Brown's name through a criminal database, despite having already established him as the wrong man.
This was the NAACP's first chance to be heard before the council—more than two months after Brown filed a citizen complaint with the police department. Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy offered the NAACP the opportunity to speak, after receiving the group's response to the police investigation of the incident. The investigation dismissed Brown's claim that he was taunted and involuntarily detained for nearly an hour.
Foy made clear that the council won't judge how police handled the incident, and that making the investigation public should not be construed as its endorsement of the police department's point of view. He did, however, clearly sympathize with Brown over his ordeal.
"Mr. Brown, I think that you are due an apology," he 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."
That said, the question remains what will come of the apology. Unfortunately, that can't be answered by local elected leaders alone.
As part of its response to the police investigation, local NAACP President Michelle Cotton Laws called on town and police officials to examine the criminal justice system in Chapel Hill:
- to offer the NAACP a chance to publicly tell Brown's story to the council
- to conduct an independent review of the incident
- to provide an analysis of all arrests and incident reports with respect to race and location over the past five years
- to examine the climate for black-owned businesses
- to give a status update on the creation of a civilian review board.
The last request is the trickiest. For the town to establish such a board, it would need legislative approval to release confidential personnel records to a public body, but the proposal failed to gain traction in the statehouse this summer.
"The opposition was just astonishing," Councilman Ed Harrison said. "It was just something that was dead on arrival basically ... it never got put on an agenda, period."
Failing legislative authority, Councilman Mark Kleinschmidt pointed to discussion groups, a better community-policing model and an advisory board to allow citizens to help shape police department policy.
"I have faith that we are well intentioned," Kleinschmidt said. "We fail when we don't have a place to put this kind of complaint in our system. We need to create that place, even if the legislature isn't going to give us the review committee."
The council unanimously received and referred the petition to town staff for recommendations. Afterward, Cotton Laws said she felt the motion was appropriate, calling it "a move in the right direction."
The Browns were accepting and hopeful, albeit a bit confused by the process. Brown said he was so hurt by the police report that exonerated the officers that he considered moving his business.
"We didn't know if we wanted to continue owning a business in Chapel Hill," he said softly, as Truphinia adjusted the collar of his Carolina jacket. "I felt like we just needed to speak out."
⇒ Previous story: "After Chapel Hill police detain Charles Brown, a call for oversight"
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Don't move here to Durham, Mr. Brown; Durham is far, far worse. Raleigh, too(remember "Yolanda" -- not her, oops with her arm broken bty cops pilling her thru her car window as cops are wont to do here in Durham "We don't like 'Mexicans' dating 'our' women." & Ingram, shot in the back for walking home on a dirt path, and that engineer shot for being a Black man driving a white car?) Thank God (the real one) you live in Chapel Hill, and not almost anywhere else... Cops here have stopped me hundreds of times, & have strip-searched people in public at and coming from bus stops, and routinely attack so-called "Loiterers" at bus stops. ("Loitering" Durham means waiting at bus stops. without a "ticket" -- and even though they no longer sell, or accept tickets, neither money or a bus pass is acceptable.) Also, walking, talking, sitting or standing in Durham make you a criminal suspect, for which you can be treated as you were in Chapel Hill. The police attorney told me they (the police) wrote the anti-loitering ordinance[s] to get around the 4th Amendment, so we can stop & search people" (although even cops call it "harassment" officialluy they call it "pro-active interdictment" and at headquarters, I was told "If we had to go by the Constitution, we couldn't do our job." Of course, a "Sworn Officer" is sworn to support the Constitution of the United States of America the Supreme Law of the Land" inferior laws and ordinances "not with standing" but I've asked dozens of sworn officers what is their sworn oath of office is, and none of them knew -- none even knew (or remembered) that it had anything to do with the Constitution they swore an oath to support. When I've witnessed the oath, it's typically been treated like a celebration of status, with laughing, joking, backslapping and the like. When Nifong took his oath as DA, and again, when the current police chief took his oath, the oaths were delivered in secret. When kids from Hillside High wear their school colors (blue & white) off campus, they can be treated as gang suspects, because of ever-changing secret police rules about colors (clothing, and skin-color apartheid rules) like the secret 3-minute rule regarding "loitering". (Of course, Dukies wearing the same Blue-&-White are allowed to do so, but then teenagers from Duke U. wearing Blue-&-White typically have skin matching Blue and WHITE, unlike brown-skinned teenagers from Hillside.) Wearing red makes you a gang suspect, too, if you also wear brown skin, even if the red is the color of your work uniform. Also, wearing practically anything on your head (hooded sweat-shirt, stocking cap, even an old woman wearing a scarf -- "Ain't you never heard of Aunt Jemima, boy? Get out of my way!" 3 cheerts for that old lady and the crowd at the bus terminal that made that cop back down and let her on the bus to go home to the assisted living center behind St. Joseph's African Methodist Episcopal Church. And don't expect anything from any police review committee; here in Durham, they packed it with the clueless who, unlike me, have never had cops barge into their homes in the middle of the night without a warrant, put a gun to their head, slam them down on the ground, kick them, or slash a knife across their throat to warn them not to complain, or tell them "next time you won't just be beaten [it still hurts just to shake hands], we'll just shoot you down like a dog in the street -- no one will ever know -- we know where you live; year there's cops selling drugs; don't stick you're nose in it; it's none of your business." Don't report cops who take drugs and money from drug-dealer neighbors and then tell them "There's a 'secret' grand-jury indictment against you; there's gonna be a raid on your apartment tomorrow." Reporting police misconduct can get you killed. Thank God you live in Chapel Hill, and not almost anywhere else in the Carolinas... Keep your head down. As one laughing drug dealer told me after a cop caught him selling drugs near some politicians homes and told him he couldn't sell on that street corner: "You're more likely to get in trouble for attitude than anything you do. You've got to stoop & bow and say 'Yassuh yassuh [yessir, yessir], shuuffle, shuffle, shuffle, tappety-tap-tap." I've seen cops here arrest the innocent and let the guilty go free, and even arrest witnesses & subborn perjury. One woman was attacked at a fast-food restaurant by a stranger, a woman who saw her sitting there and beat her with a wooden shoe. (She mistook the woman for someone else who ratted her out for cheating.) The victim ran and the cop ridiculed the victim for NOT fighting back: "ChiCKEN! BAWK, bawk, bawk, BAWK!" -- and then arrested both of them for "an affray." You don't even have to complain about bad cops; even victims of crimes can be arrested for bothering the cops, or for filing criminal complaints against common thugs with criminal records, at which point you can be locked up for as long as possible without trial, in order to induce "plea-bargaining" because they punish the honest innocent for refusing to plead guilty; it's "inefficient" so they lock you up in sewer cell & tell other prisoners to commit sodomy, and when young kids are publicly gang-raped in the pod, and then after the bloody anal gang rape, the guard then tosses them a rag and says: clean yourselves up. One way to keep down the crime rate is to create hell on earth for those who report crimes, to "put the fear of God in them" -- as if cops are little godlings. "I am the Law" says cops; & even, by implication, they would have you believe "I am God." Thank God (the real one) you live in Chapel Hill, and not almost anywhere else...
hi i would be happy to support your efforts of going to legislatures to relook at what was presented this summer, and not taken seriously. thanks patrice you may contact me by e-mail at chuckandpatrice@yahoo.com
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