Charlottesville police inserted themselves into an election with a last-minute arrest

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 3:58 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Charlottesville police inserted themselves into an
election with a last-minute arrest
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Charlottesville police inserted themselves into an election with a
last-minute arrest
Before Charlottesville Was in the Spotlight, Police Arrested Their Most
Prominent Critic in the Middle of the Night
By Alex Emmons
Oct 12 2017
<
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/12/before-charlottesville-was-in-the-spotlight-police-arrested-their-most-prominent-critic-in-the-middle-of-the-night/
>

Jeff Fogel woke to the sound of someone furiously banging on his door. He
quickly threw on a T-shirt and pajama bottoms while the banging continued,
and stole a glance at his alarm clock before running downstairs. It was
12:30 a.m. in Charlottesville, Virginia.

When Fogel opened the door, he couldn’t believe what he saw. He was
face-to-face with five police officers on his front porch and behind them,
five police cars lit up the neighboring houses red and blue with their
flashing lights.

As one of the city’s leading defense attorneys, Fogel was on a first-name
basis with a lot of Charlottesville’s top cops, but he was confused about
why they would seek him out so late. As a joke, Fogel put out his hands,
wrists pressed together in a handcuff position. “Haha. You’re all here to
arrest me, right?”

It wasn’t a joke. “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he half-shouted.

The commotion woke up Fogel’s wife and houseguest, who both made their way
downstairs. Fogel turned around and shouted, “Hey everybody, come down and
see the brave men of the Charlottesville police department, coming to
arrest a 72-year-old man!”

The officers wouldn’t allow Fogel to get his keys or get dressed. Minutes
later, as he sat in the back seat of a police car, Fogel realized that
throughout his 48-year career as a civil rights attorney, he never
understood how much it hurt to be handcuffed. He also realized the arrest
would have reverberations. It was early June, and in less than two weeks,
voters in Charlottesville would go to the polls to decide on the city’s
next district attorney, with one of the candidates vowing to rein in police
abuse and roll back mass incarceration. That candidate was now bound for
the police station.

Two months later, Charlottesville became ground zero for the largest
demonstration by white supremacists in a decade. The world was shocked by
images of young men marching with tiki torches, chanting, “Jews will not
replace us,” and President Donald Trump’s contemptible response to their
hateful message.

But something else also shocked observers of the August demonstrations. The
police appeared uninterested in stopping violence between white
supremacists, many of whom came armed, and rival demonstrators. As the day
wound down, Heather Heyer, an antiracist demonstrator, was mowed down by a
car allegedly driven by white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr.

Charlottesville police, who declined to comment for this story, have denied
that the police were given an order to “stand down.” But according to
testimonials and videos from the day, officers passively stood by while
people were pepper-sprayed, beaten, and thrown to the ground. In a video
obtained by the New York Times, police did nothing even after a white
supremacist fired a gun in the direction of a black man.

The spectacle of Charlottesville police sparked a national discussion on
whether some police officers are sympathetic to a far-right, white
nationalist perspective. Two days after the demonstrations, the president
of a local police union in New Mexico was caught sharing an internet meme
joking about running over protesters. In September, the head of the
Pennsylvania police union called Black Lives Matter protesters “a pack of
rabid animals,” but he previously defended an officer whosported a Nazi
tattoo.

Nothing illustrates the point better than the case of DeAndre Harris, a
20-year-old Charlottesville local who turned up to protest hate groups in
his city. After the events in Charlottesville, a video emerged of Harris
falling to the ground and getting savagely beaten by six white nationalists
wielding baseball bats and two-by-fours. All of this happened in a parking
garage next to the police station, but no arrests were made at the time.

Charlottesville police would later arrest three of the men in connection to
the beating, but only after an internet campaign, led by The Intercept’s
Shaun King, identified them and pressured the police to apprehend them.

And now, police are about to arrest a fourth. On Tuesday, an unidentified
local magistrate in Charlottesville issued an arrest warrant for Harris as
well, making him a wanted man in connection to his well-documented beating.
According to theWashington Post, the magistrate issued the warrant after a
self-identified “southern nationalist” accused Harris of injuring him
during his own assault.

[snip]

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