CMPD Lands a Few Blows

Charlotte cops beat the hell out of Christina Pierre, and now it’s time for the commonwealth to take a few blows.

By now the story is well known: On November 17, Pierre and Anthony Lee, Pierre’s partner and co-worker, sat at a public bus stop in Steele Creek after their shifts ended at a nearby Bojangles. Two Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers approached the pair — both of them Black and, given their place of employment and lack of personal transportation, neither of them seemingly in possession of wealth or the privilege and power that accompanies it — for suspicion of smoking marijuana, a harmless misdemeanor that, when committed by rich white kids who go to Myers Park High School or aging hippies who live in trendy neighborhoods, is rarely met with interference from state agents, a technical infraction so insignificant that Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather previously announced his office won’t prosecute it. (Within days of Pierre’s arrest for simple possession, assault on a government official, and resisting arrest, Merriweather, to his credit, announced he was dropping all charges against her because “the State does not have a reasonable likelihood of success at any potential trial on this matter.”)

Despite the harmlessness of Pierre’s behavior, our publicly funded, modern-day Inquisitors, armed with nearly unbridled, unbounded discretion to harass, heckle, and hound, and committed to continuing the long-established tradition of racialized enforcement of our drug laws, gratuitously initiated an arrest less than thirty seconds after approaching Pierre, who, eschewing servility and showing an admirable fighting spirit befitting free people confronted with the arbitrary exercise of power, resisted. In the scuffle that followed, one cop — still publicly unidentified — punched Pierre in the face, sending her to the ground. As onlookers yelled at officers to stop beating Pierre — there’s hope yet for the republic! — the police piled on: Eyewitness footage and video from the cops’ body cameras, which a judge recently ordered released, show about a half-dozen officers on or around Pierre, while one of them, Vincent Pistone, kneed or punched her seventeen times with so-called “compliance strikes.”

Fourteen of those strikes came after Pierre’s hands were already behind her back, but Pistone kept hitting her while his colleagues kept screaming, “Put your hands behind your back!” Officers had physically overpowered Pierre, and she had done what they wanted her to do, but they continued to act as though she hadn’t, trying by the force of their words and deeds to create a reality governed not by the truth, but by their own will to power — as when, for example, the Minneapolis police initially said only that George Floyd suffered “medical distress” during his arrest, skipping over the nine-and-a-half minutes Derek Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck — and then daring us, like the Party in 1984, “to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears,” knowing many of us will gladly go along with this “most essential command.”

Like when high-ranking CMPD officials conspired in the summer of 2020 to assault people marching through the streets of uptown Charlotte to protest Floyd’s murder. Camera footage and CMPD radio traffic confirm beyond any doubt that the cops conspired to deliberately trap protesters and then attack them with tear gas and pepper balls. The evidence was damning, but CMPD, relying on widespread credulity before the altar of official violence, insisted otherwise, enlisting the help of then-Councilman Larken Egleston, who chaired the city’s public safety committee, to run interference for the department by trying to persuade his constituents that CMPD’s preferred narrative was right and their own eyes and ears were wrong.

Or when CMPD Officer David Guerra shot and killed Ruben Galindo in 2017 after Galindo raised his hands in what a federal appellate court earlier this year called “a position of surrender.” Though body camera footage clearly captured Galindo’s compliance with officers’ commands — slowly raising both hands above his head before a bullet ripped through him — Guerra claimed he perceived an imminent lethal threat. U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad went along with the official story, deciding in 2021 to reject the evidence of his eyes and ears so he could accept Guerra’s claim of self-defense and toss out the lawsuit brought against CMPD for killing Galindo, which the appellate court reinstated.

Of course, Pierre’s beating is not only well-known, but familiar: We’ve seen it all before, again and again and again. The consequences for the victims of police violence range from inconvenience and embarrassment to injury and death — in addition to learning the lesson that those in positions of relative power see them as so much civic trash. The consequences for law enforcement, on the other hand, are almost always non-existent; on the rare occasions when there are any consequences, they usually rank as mere nuisances. (CMPD concluded Officer Pistone hit Pierre fourteen times too many and suspended him for forty hours. No other officers involved in the assault, including the one who decked Pierre, were disciplined.)

We, as a political community, have decided police violence is an inescapable part of our common life, maybe even a rightful source of civic pride, proof in some people’s minds that we stand for law and order. Police brutality has become an American tradition, like fireworks on the Fourth of July or the president throwing out the first pitch or the slavish worship of the armed forces at professional sporting events, a ritual to which we’ve accommodated ourselves, some celebrating it — “That’ll teach them! Fuck around and find out!” — others shaking their heads while resigning themselves to its inevitability, like taxes or traffic, and only a relative handful recognizing it for the evil it is and convinced of both the need to eliminate it and our ability to do so: If conservatives and Republicans offer meaningless thoughts and prayers after mass shooting, liberals and Democrats offer empty gestures of performative concern — “Look at the Black Lives Matter sign in my yard!” — after incidents of police brutality. Policy changes that might prevent the recurrence of needless violence are rarely considered and even less often adopted.

Notwithstanding our occasional symbolic feints of concern and meaningless talk of minimalist reform — always followed by a settling in to the same old, same old — and because we’ve shown by our inaction that we’re not serious about ending police violence, it’s utterly unremarkable when someone like Pierre finds herself on the receiving end of officers’ fists. Of course they beat her. That’s just what happens here: Cops beat people, especially if they are Black, brown, or poor, and then we back the blue — whatever else that bit of agitprop means, our city’s commitment to its police department will pour $335 million into CMPD this fiscal year, about 40% of the city’s general fund — eagerly and anxiously casting agents of state violence as our society’s heroes and protectors. (What does it say about us as a people, about our hopes and aspirations and fears, about the soundness and strength of those habits of mind and character necessary to sustain democracy and freedom, about what we think is possible as a community, that we allow institutions of violence — law enforcement and the military — to play such prominent roles in our civic imaginations and government budgets?)

Though Pierre’s beating is unlikely to result in real changes to law enforcement — surely even the appearance of change will be ephemeral — CMPD has gotten some bad press, so the agency is in full spin mode, publicly seeking to justify or distract from its officers’ violence while waiting for people’s attention to drift, as it inevitably will, so the cops can get back to the work of targeting poor people with virtual impunity. (Plenty of residents in my neighborhood — most of them white and at least middle class, vice presidents of whatever at whichever bank — regularly break the law by sipping craft beer while pushing their kids down public sidewalks in costly strollers, but, unlike Pierre, few of them get punched in the face and thrown to the ground.)

Part of the department’s public relations campaign comes packaged in the language of therapy. A week after the cops beat Pierre, five CMPD officers appeared at a forum sponsored by the Urban League of Central Carolinas Young Professionals to “share[] their perspective on mental health in the profession, job pressures and keeping community ties strong,” according to the Charlotte Observer. And while according the organizers the event’s purpose was to “offer[] a platform to ask questions, share concerns, and build connections that strengthen community bonds,” its real function was to provide a forum in which CMPD could cast itself in the role of victim and thereby generate sympathy for the cops who beat up a woman on the side of the road — and those who will beat up the next woman on the side of the next road.

Officers told those gathered at the event that their work is dangerous, according to the Observer, an old stand-by used to bolster cops’ jealously guarded, expertly curated public image as danger-defying protectors of the civil peace — a tale that, if believed, they hope will convince us to give them a pass whenever they smack someone around in public, but a narrative with less truth to it than law enforcement would like everyone to think: Federal statistics show loggers, drivers, ranchers, miners, construction laborers, painters, line workers, and people performing a host of other hum-drum occupations essential to our comfort and convenience have higher on-the-job fatality rates than law enforcement, which isn’t among the twenty-five most deadly jobs in the country. (The next time we, as a community, want to thank deserving people for their service, or host local heroes at a Panthers or Hornets or Knights game, or commemorate those who strive daily to make our lives better in the face of persistent danger to themselves, let’s celebrate immigrant framers and roofers from Latin America.)

These statistics track our community’s own experience. At least nine construction laborers in Charlotte died on the job this year, three in January when scaffolding collapsed at an apartment building under construction; another four the same month in an automobile accident; and two more in May when an apartment project caught fire. (These are just the ones that made the news.) You have to go back thirty-two years to tally up as many on-the-job deaths in Charlotte law enforcement, the most recent fatality in the CMPD ranks occurring in December 2021, when a vehicle struck Officer Mia Godwin while she tended to an accident scene on I-85 — her death prompting a carefully crafted display of public mourning intended to serve the function of any state funeral: showcasing and reinforcing the glory and greatness of the government — or, in this case, the government agency — for whom Godwin worked, a stage-managed spectacle that threatened to deprive Godwin of her full humanity by reducing her to a mere prop in the ceaseless public relations battle CMPD wages against the community.

If we begin, though, with the idea that law enforcement’s public relations imperative is not to speak the truth, but to tell a compelling, self-serving story without regard for the truth, then the statistics become irrelevant: feelings and impressions matter most — and there lies the way to replace politics with therapy.

“Twenty-five years ago, you didn’t talk about your feelings as an officer,” CMPD Maj. Jackie Bryley told attendees at the Urban League event. Aping the attitude of a wife batterer, Bryley’s discussion of mental health treatment for cops suggested the officers who assaulted Pierre were the real victims — well-funded, well-positioned, and well-protected, but somehow still victims — forced to carry the burden of knowing they are sometimes made to beat a woman who’s just trying to get home at the end of her day. Why, Bryley seemed to ask, do people like Pierre make us hurt them? Don’t they know how hard that is on us? Fortunately, she explained, times have changed: If an officer feels bad after beating up a woman waiting for the bus, resources are now available to help him process his emotions and get back to work.

When therapeutic concerns displace political ones, questions of right and wrong, considerations of power and its uses, deliberations about what counts as justice, disappear behind an amoral fog of empty sentiment that obscures bad acts and shields bad actors.

In its work to create an emotional smokescreen, CMPD can usually count on help from elected representatives, whose reactions to police violence, when not affirmatively or silently supportive, are often limited to expressions of sappy maudlinism coupled with a generalized regret that our officers were placed in a situation in which they had no choice but to inflict violence.

None of our elected leaders responded to Pierre’s beating with a simple declarative statement: “This was wrong.” Such observations, if made, possess a certain ethical freight: If we admit something is wrong, it follows that we have some obligation to make it right. Not so if something is just hard to swallow or difficult to stomach — emotional reactions, not ethical conclusions, that may prompt introspection and reflection, but not action.

Councilman Tariq Bokhari, for example, told the Observer that the footage of cops beating Pierre and threatening to crush her under the weight of several armed men is “tough video to watch.” The solution? Not restraint by law enforcement or the abandonment of a failed model of policing or an insistence that the cops leave people alone when they’re not bothering anybody, but subservience to the agents of state violence: “I can only hope this serves as a PSA for our community: you need to comply when an officer asks you to do something,” Bokhari said, mouthing a morality suitable for subjects or slaves, not free citizens, and, by counseling compliance before those who arbitrarily exercise power, endorsing the primacy of authority over freedom

CMPD Chief Johnny Jennings echoed Bokhari: “This video is not easy to watch,” he said after a bystander’s footage of Pierre’s beating went viral. His emotional observation was meant to create the impression of sympathy for the victim of his officers’ violence — even as Jennings laid the groundwork to conclude that almost every action his officers took, including slugging Pierre in the face, was justified. He’s since clarified that his officers reserve the right to continue harassing people like they did Pierre, which will inevitably result in more viral videos of more beatings at more bus stops, and said it was “insulting” and “disappointing” for the district attorney to drop the charges against Pierre — not the observations of a man displaying genuine remorse for his officers’ behavior, and for good reason: He feels none.

“We can’t live in a society where we allow people to assault officers. If we do that, it’s going to be a society I don’t think we’ll want to live in,” Jennings said at a post-beating new conference, forgetting not only that his officers were the aggressors, but that obedience doesn’t count as an unqualified good here, a nation born of self-defensive assaults on the powers, prerogatives, and persons of the duly constituted authorities, episodes of disobedience, now memorialized throughout the country, in which ordinary people whom we now revere as heroes fought back against government agents whose behavior was abusive or illegitimate: America, at its best, is a place that meets arbitrary power not with compliance, but resistance, something Jennings might remember if he looked at the CMPD emblem on his uniform: a hornet’s nest, paying tribute to the (likely apocryphal) observation by British General Cornwallis that during the Revolutionary War, Charlotte was a “hornet’s nest of rebellion.” As the Observer reported in 2019, “The phrase is well-loved because it speaks to Charlotte’s history as a place where locals don’t bend to the will of an aggressor simply because they are asked.” Well-loved in lore, it seems, if not always in life.

Council’s newest member, Tiawana Brown, a formerly incarcerated person, offered only a slightly more critical perspective than Bokhari. “I didn’t like the video at all,” she said. “I think things could have been done differently.” She then expressed confidence in Jennings, who immediately after Pierre’s assault tried to sanitize his officers’ actions by labeling the punches she received to her body as “compliance strikes,” pseudo-scientific nonsense that seeks by force of specious expertise to transform a beating into something other than a beating, a deployment of euphemism in service to violence and cruelty. (One expert quoted by the Observer contradicted CMPD’s argument regarding the appropriateness of hitting Pierre to gain compliance: “Strikes are not generally considered acceptable as a compliance tool,” said Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.)

Even if our public discussions about law enforcement’s most recent abuses somehow escape the pull of the therapeutic, they are unlikely to exceed the propagandistic and are almost certainly fated to be little more than the kind of pretense we saw, for example, when Charlotte’s much-touted campaign to “reimagine” law enforcement after George Floyd’s murder fizzled into virtual nothingness or when elected officials ignored the gravity and consequence of a city-commissioned study that found CMPD targets people of color.

When law enforcement’s usual grip on our imaginations falters following episodes of especially egregious behavior — or following episodes of ordinarily egregiously behavior documented in especially public ways — the police will often put on a show of performative apologetics to suggest real policy change is at long last coming, that people minding their own business at bus stops across the city need no longer fear the truncheon. But it’s just that: a show, a political illusionist act meant to fool the audience — us, the public — into mistaking cosmetic changes for real ones. And there’s a catch: The act cannot be disrupted by those who do not wish to be fooled, who do not suffer from the credulousness of those who want to believe, who need to believe, so they can avoid any challenge or disruption to their own sense of comfort and security. Audience participation in these performances must be well-regulated, skeptics either kept away or allowed to participate only under circumstances that tend to silence or blunt their critique.

After Pierre’s beating, Jennings announced the formation of the Community and Police Collaboration Group, which is ostensibly charged with “mak[ing] recommendations for potential policy changes,” but, as with the previous “reimagining” of Charlotte law enforcement, seems likely to become just the latest gimmick in CMPD’s neverending public relations efforts, the discussion of potential change fated to mask maintenance of the status quo. Indeed, just by creating the group, Jennings can claim his department is committed to community dialogue and collaboration, empty jargon he no doubt hopes to use to fool the public and the group’s participants — especially the well-intentioned ones who seek real change and whose involvement might lend the project credibility, but who risk becoming pawns in CMPD’s work to do nothing more than shore up its public image and rehabilitate its reputation.

The group is slated to start meeting this month, but only those hand-picked by CMPD to participate will be allowed to attend: Confirming the importance law enforcement places on controlling these performances, the committee will gather in secret, Jennings informed media outlets last week, justifying his plans for closed-door meetings by invoking the need for openness. “I want these group discussions to be exactly open and free,” he told the Observer. While Jennings promised to share “the outcome” of the group’s work, he said he “certainly” doesn’t want its conversations to be public. “If members of the group found their comments being publicized, they might feel less free to have those discussions,” he explained. Openness requires secrecy; secrecy is openness. (Despite Jennings’s insistence on secrecy, reporters could muster the spirit Pierre displayed and simply resist: Show up at the group’s meetings, sit down, start recording, take notes, and refuse to leave. Put Jennings and CMPD to a choice: Let us stay or take us out in cuffs. If, with no media megaphone to protect her, Pierre found it in her to resist, surely our local journalists can find it in themselves to do the same.)

Jennings’s argument on behalf of secrecy suffers not only from doublespeak, but faithlessness in democracy and civic cowardice. Self-government should be done in the open, and its participants should expect and embrace publicity and criticism: Democracy’s garrulousness, talking through the vexing problems of our common life, conversations in which anger and frustration should sometimes play a part and voices should sometimes be raised, discussions in which people honestly and unapologetically express genuine, sometimes irreconcilable disagreements, is a vital part of good self-government. To feel the sting of criticism can help us to develop better ideas and craft smarter policies. Therein lies the need for a little nerve: Democracy requires a firmness of character to meet the possibility — over a lifetime, the certainty — that friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens will find our ideas wanting and our judgments wrong. To publicly stake out a position or suggest a plan of action that may be not only rejected, but scorned, requires courage, a burden we should be willing to gladly bear for the chance at achieving real self-government — the sort of government we don’t have in Charlotte.

In this year’s municipal elections, 85% of the city’s voters withheld their consent by choosing not to vote. (In the primary contests, more than 95% of voters didn’t participate.) The outcome of the mayoral race was preordained, as were the results in the contests for the four at-large Council seats and six of the seven district seats, five of which had only one candidate on the ballot. This would alarm any community committed to real self-government: Democracy without widespread popular participation is more lie than truth, a mere husk, a charade in which a cadre of well-credentialed buraeucrats and well-positioned elites exercise influence and power while mistaking their political acquaintances for the people.

Our acceptance of this state of affairs suggests we don’t want a real democracy, but an over-managed technocracy in which members of the governing class — self-regarding experts and highly trained professionals, people like Jennings — are rightly left to perform the work of government while viewing the people not as the font of legitimate authority and essential participants in the community’s work, but, especially when they occasionally overcome their apathy and insist on participating on their own terms, as something between an inconvenience to be carefully navigated and a mob to be firmly controlled.

We saw this attitude, for example, at last week’s City Council meeting, when speakers packed the meeting chamber to talk about the war between Israel and Hamas. As Council wrapped up a business session in a nearby room, Mayor Vi Lyles alerted her colleagues that people had filled the chamber and the maximum number had signed up to speak during the public comment period. Then, as reported by Queen City Nerve, Lyles “announced that if any council member felt unsafe at any time during the public forum that the entire council would stand and exit the chambers together” — a plan animated by a simple idea: Beware the unwashed masses! (Our governing class craves order. Anything less managed than a shopping mall or more raucous than a Presbyterian church service unnerves them.) There were no threats of bodily harm, no reports of weapons or violence or property damage, just a large group of passionate people who temporarily ditched their disengagement — admittedly without corporate sponsorship by a responsible, respectable organization like the chamber of commerce — and who, because they were not docile, were viewed by members of the governing class as dangerous, a troublesome rabble and an imminent threat from which our elected officials might need to flee.

And flee they did. Once the forum began, tempers flared and at least one speaker disrupted the meeting’s regular order. Others eventually interrupted the proceeding with chants of “Shame!” Lyles and her colleagues, according to Queen City News, “evacuated” the meeting chamber, responding to rowdy constituents like they would to a bomb threat or an active shooter and displaying an inchoate, fight-or-flight fear of the people, tainted with disdain and dismissiveness, that, when it inevitably filters down to rank-and-file employees like the cops who beat Christina Pierre, teaches the lesson that poor people waiting for the bus, if insufficiently submissive or obsequious, should be treated as a problem to be punched in the face and thrown to the ground.