Charlottesville Residents Slam City’s Report On Response To Neo-Nazi March
Image by Getty Images
By Aiden Pink December 5, 2017
Residents of Charlottesville, Virginia slammed the city’s official report on its response to the white supremacist rally in August, saying that the report does not address the issue of racism.
“It falls woefully short,” local activist Don Gathers told a City Council meeting on Monday, according to The Washington Post. “You don’t address the specific issue that brought the Nazis here in the first place.”
The 207-page independent report, compiled by former U.S. attorney Timothy Heaphy, found that the Charlottesville Police Department failed to properly train its officers or prepare them to respond to the rally and the clashes between protesters and counter-protesters, and that they didn’t reach out to other cities that had experience in dealing with similar events.
Body camera footage showed one officer asking, “Do you know what we’re supposed to do?” Another responded, “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”
Residents at the meeting called for the resignation of mayor Mike Signer and other city officials.
“I’m sorry,” Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy said. “We let you all down.”
A city council member asked Heaphy why issues of race weren’t included in the report. Heaphy responded that race had nothing to do with how the city prepared for the rally, and thus was “beyond” his mandate.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
