Miles Pearce performs at Pippin Hill Farm on Sunday. Publicity image.
The range of guitarist Miles Pearce’s talent is as breathtaking as his euphoric playing. He traverses the fretboard through classical, jazz, folk, Hindustani classical, flamenco, Brazilian samba, Argentine tango, South Indian Karnatic vocal, and West African rhythms—and if that’s not enough, he also lists experimental music on his bio. Pearce teaches privately and online, and he performs frequently on local stages. As wineries and patios have reopened, his calendar is filling up with gigs at idyllic outdoor settings, including a Father’s Day set of Spanish music at Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards. Learn more about Pearce’s music at driftwoodradio.com, and inquire about lessons at fretboard101.com.
What is the best advice you’ve received about guitar playing?
The best advice I ever received about guitar playing was from my friend and mentor Berto Salés of Beleza. [He said] to set aside some time to stretch your hands and fingers every day, especially if you are pushing yourself a lot technically. It took a hand injury and six months off from performing to realize how important this is.
How do beginning players stay motivated?
The best way to stay motivated as a beginning guitar student is to learn songs and styles that inspire you, and focus on taking one small step forward at a time. It’s also important to remember that it takes a little time. If you have trouble playing a new song or technique the first 20 or 40 times, it doesn’t mean you suck. Most new skills on the guitar require a lot of repetition, so keep going even if it doesn’t feel natural at first.
How are you using your talents during the quarantine?
I’ve been using my time during the quarantine to create new tabs and tutorials for the Fretboard101 online guitar program, and compose original music.
Miles Pearce performs on Sunday at 1pm. Pippin Hill Farm, 5022 Plank Rd., North Garden. pippinhillfarm.com.
It’s been a busy spring for local beekeepers like Brooke Savage, who is hoping to prevent swarming by splitting hives before the bees feel overcrowded. Image: Eze Amos
While we humans have been preoccupied this spring, with pandemic worries and urgent national conversations, the natural world has seen other dramas unfold that most of us haven’t even noticed. Unless you’re a beekeeper, you wouldn’t know that this has been a very odd spring for honeybees.
Carrie Meslar is the managing director of the Elysium Honey Company, and she says that this year, the company’s beekeepers have reported an uptick in the number of swarms—big groups of bees leaving a hive to seek out a new home base. “They’ve never seen anything like this,” says Meslar.
A swarm happens when bees feel overcrowded in their hive. The queen leaves, taking thousands of the workers with her, and they gather in a bristly bunch on a tree or a fence post. To learn about what happens next is to gain some serious respect for the complexity and intelligence of these tiny and intensely social creatures.
“They send out scouts,” Meslar explains. “These bees go out and look for a good location for the hive.” Upon returning, the scouts communicate through dances about what they’ve found, and then—(get this!)—“a voting process takes place amongst the bees. When they reach an agreement, tens of thousands of bees leave to go and settle in a new place.”
It’s astounding, and on its own, it’s a “natural and good process,” says Meslar. “It means the colony is robust and healthy.” For beekeepers, say Karen and Ken Hall (both officers with the Central Virginia Beekeeping Association), swarming is “largely a management issue”—something to be avoided with proper attention to one’s hives.
“You want to mitigate it because you could lose half of your bees,” says Meslar. The departing swarm not only represents a loss of workforce; it actually takes away quite a bit of honey, transported inside the bees themselves. So, ideally, beekeepers hope to prevent swarming by splitting hives before the bees get crowded.
Ken Hall says there’s no hard data on whether this really has been a big year for swarming, but it’s plausible because of the weather patterns we experienced this spring. Warm temperatures in the first three months of 2020 meant some things bloomed early. “The red maple bloom was 12 days earlier than last year,” he says. But then the weather cooled and later blooms, like tulip poplar and black locust—both major food sources for bees—slowed down. In the gap between those two events, bees were very busy reproducing and gathering pollen and nectar, and hives may have gotten crowded, like a family house that’s suddenly too full of kids and all their stuff.
If bees do swarm, keepers try to capture them by gently brushing the bees into a box. That might sound death-defying, but Karen Hall says bees in a swarm pose very little danger to people. “A swarm has no colony and nothing to protect, so they are really very docile,” she says. Euphoric, even, because they’re full of honey.
The key to the operation is to capture the queen. “We watch the bees,” says Ken Hall, “and as soon as we have the queen in the box we can start to tell she’s there. They produce a pheromone as a homing scent, and the bees have to raise their abdomens high in the air to expose the gland. When we have the queen in, all of a sudden there are a lot of bees around the entrance with their abdomens raised.”
It must be a triumphant feeling for a beekeeper when that happens, but the bees aren’t aware that their colony has just been saved from an untimely demise. “A colony requires human intervention to survive,” says Karen Hall. “Effectively, your feral colonies succumb in about 14 months.”
The murder hornets—headline-grabbing, invasive species with the ability to wipe out hives, currently found only in the Pacific Northwest—are the latest potential threat to wild bees, but Meslar says they aren’t a huge worry for local beekeepers. “There are a number of simple methods we can implement to keep hives safe. The most common is a cage that sits at the exit. The holes are big enough so that bees can come and go, but it prevents the hornets from getting access into the hive.”
A more serious problem is the Varroa mite, a parasite that feeds on adult bees and larvae, making them vulnerable to certain viral diseases. Then there’s the issue of pesticides. Whether sprayed on a large scale over commercial orchards, or spritzed by homeowners onto one dandelion at a time, they can be carried back to hives by industrious bees.
The upshot is that people and honeybees need each other. They pollinate our food crops, and we safeguard their colonies—in an intricate dance, all happening amidst the unpredictability of climate change. “From year to year right now, the intensity of the differences is much more marked than it was 10 years ago,” says Meslar. “None of the years are middle of the road; everything is sort of extreme.”
Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, thinks Juneteenth should be a national holiday. PC: Eze Amos
Since press time, Governor Ralph Northam has proposed legislation to make Juneteenth a paid state holiday. If it passes, all state employees would get the day off.
With additional reporting by Erin O’Hare
Every July 4, people across the country don their red, white, and blue; pull out their grills; and watch fireworks with family and friends, in celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But there is another independence day that’s often overlooked: Juneteenth.
Also known as Freedom Day or Jubilee Day, Juneteenth commemorates the day—June 19, 1865—that Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved people there that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed them, and the Civil War was over. Though President Abraham Lincoln signed the document two and a half years earlier, slave owners had to free their slaves themselves, and some did not until Union troops forced them to. Union troops in Texas, the most remote slave state, were not strong enough to enforce the order until Granger’s arrival—marking an effective end to slavery in the United States.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Charlottesville’s first known public Juneteenth celebration, which was held in a recreation center on Ninth Street, and hosted by Tamyra Turner, a professor at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and Maxine Holland.
PVCC hosted Juneteenth celebrations for 15 years, but in 2016, in an effort to boost waning attendance, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center took over, and brought the events to a more central location in town.
Bringing the holiday to downtown Charlottesville “has really revitalized it,” with attendance in the hundreds year after year, says the school’s Executive Director Andrea Douglas.
For the past few years, the JSAAHC’s Juneteenth party has included a ceremony honoring black community elders, music and dance from black artists, and educational programming. Douglas hoped to have a parade this year as well. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there won’t be “the kinds of events that we have had in the past,” says Douglas, who refused to “waste this anniversary.”
The Emancipation Proclamation was informed by the ideas of black people, especially Frederick Douglass. PC: File photo
Friday evening, in lieu of its in-person celebrations, the JSAAHC will host an online lecture centered around the Emancipation Proclamation. Holland, with assistance from C.R. Gibbs, Richelle Claiborne, and Ti Ames, will explore the document and the history of Juneteenth, as well as its various components and deeper meaning.
“We had always wanted to focus on the Emancipation Proclamation, because [it] is such an important document,” says Douglas. “In some ways, we think about it as Lincoln’s document, but it was a document that was worked on, and informed, by the ideas of black people—Frederick Douglass in particular.”
And in light of the ongoing protests demanding an end to police brutality and justice for the murders of black people across the country, Douglas says there will be opportunity to discuss “the nuances of what it means to be free,” including the conceptof freedom for black people in America today, and how, in many ways, they are still fighting for it.
Historian Hari Jones, former assistant director and curator at the African American Civil War Freedom Foundation and Museum, will also give a video presentation that dives into the history of Juneteenth and how the Lost Cause myth has impacted how it’s celebrated today.
Though Juneteenth at the JSAAHC will look a bit different this year, the spirit remains the same. And Douglas and others will continue to advocate for Juneteenth to become a national holiday.
Douglas wonders why, as a country, we celebrate July 4, one of the first big moments in American history, but we skip over Juneteenth, the “next main event.” It’s “the very thing that suggests that America made a huge shift…the shift that says that the confederacy, the secession, the papers of secession, those states that seceded, now lost the war,” she says.
While Charlottesville has taken steps towards acknowledging its troubled past by creating Liberation and Freedom Day, the U.S. cannot “fully engage in the truth of our history” until it officially recognizes Juneteenth, she adds. “It should be equally a national holiday as July 4—because it’s the same thing. It’s just how you want to see it.”
Ahead of Thursday night’s meeting, city school board member Lashundra Bryson Morsberger tweeted her support for kicking cops out of schools. PC: Eze Amos
In light of the ongoing protests against police brutality and systemic racism, school districts across the country have cut ties with police—including here in Charlottesville.
On June 11, Charlottesville City Schools announced it was discontinuing its memorandum of understanding with the Charlottesville Police Department, ending its current school resource officer program. Instead, the district says it will put the $300,000 allocated for its four SROs toward a new “school safety model.” Albemarle County Public Schools will also reexamine its relationship with police.
The decision was a hot topic during the city’s school board meeting, held later that evening. Many parents, teachers, and other community members hopped on the Zoom call, and all but one voiced their support of the decision to end the memorandum.
“The removal of SROs is an evidence-based decision,” said Christa Bennett, who has two children in the school district. “There is no evidence that they prevent more violence than they cause, and in some cases, [they] are contributing to a school-to-prison pipeline:” higher rates of suspensions, expulsions, and arrests for students of color (though they do not misbehave more than their white peers).
When her child attended Jackson-Via Elementary, Robin Francis claimed she witnessed this violence firsthand, when an SRO got physical with a small black child unnecessarily on two occasions. As a person of color, the incidents were “terrifying” for Francis to watch, and reinforced her belief that SROs “do not encourage a sense of community—[but] create a sense of fear.”
Putting police in schools has had a “direct effect on [the] educational progress, and mental and physical health” of black students, added Amy Woolard, an attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center. Studies show police presence causes a drop in test scores, high school graduation rates, and college attendance rates for young African Americans, among other negative consequences.
Over the summer, the school board plans to host several feedback sessions, during which it will get input from the community, and the new program will be implemented by August 19, when the new school year begins.
While it remains unclear what the program will look like, CCS school board member Lashundra Bryson Morsberger hopes it will be supportive, rather than punitive, and thinks a lot more black counselors, social workers, and other support staff should be hired.
“Police in schools only serves to expose black children to the criminal justice system at a time when they should be able to make mistakes and learn from them, instead of being put into the system,” she says. “Security and safety can be accomplished in many ways, but it has to start with people from this community who know our kids and live in the same communities and neighborhoods.”
Leading up to its decision to dump the memorandum of understanding, CCS received hundreds of emails from students, parents, teachers, activists, and other community members calling for the removal of SROs, according to CCS Superintendent Dr. Rosa Atkins. Its equity committee, along with individual school board members, also reached out to many people and organizations to get their thoughts, both positive and negative.
Supporters of SRO programs argue that they keep schools safe, and help build relationships between students and law enforcement, which can prevent crime and acts of violence.
“On several occasions, the school resource officers were enlisted to ensure [my daughter’s] safety,” said Laura Brown, the only person who spoke against CCS’ removal of SROs during Thursday’s meeting. As Brown and the staff at Burnley-Moran Elementary worked to develop a treatment plan for her daughter, who is mixed race and has special needs, “the SROs were nothing but positive with her and provided her with much-needed security and reassurance.”
Others see the programs as a waste of money, among other criticisms. According to the Justice Policy Institute, most situations involving SROs can be handled by school officials. Though SROs have been ushered into nearly half of the nation’s schools to prevent mass shootings, they’ve also been present at many of the schools where shootings have occurred.
Many, including the Charlottesville Black Lives Matter chapter, have called on CCS to use the extra $300,000 to hire more teachers and counselors—particularly those of color. It could also fund the recently eliminated elementary Spanish program and other positions that were cut, suggested several parents.
After receiving numerous messages from the community calling for the removal of cops from schools, the Albemarle County School Board discussed its SRO program during its meeting Thursday evening. But ACPS plans to finish revising its memorandum of understanding with the Albemarle County Police Department, and may conduct an independent review of the program before moving forward with a decision, as suggested by the district’s Superintendent Matt Haas.
While the county school board agreed to discuss the issue again during its June 18 meeting, most of its members, including Judy Le and Katrina Callsen, supported removing the district’s five SROs, and funding mental health resources.
“I hear our black brothers and sisters, some of whom have been risking their lives in the streets for weeks to protest the generations of trauma from overpolicing and brutality,” said Le, who represents the Rivanna District. “How can being faced with the embodiment of that trauma every day make for a safe and positive learning environment?”
“When I’ve asked questions about it in our division, I’ve been assured that there are infrequent arrests made in our schools, which is great,” she added. “But it leads me to ask: ‘Why do we have the SROs at all? Why are we paying $265,000 for them each year?’”
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How much do cops cost kids?
By Ben Hitchcock
Charlottesville City Schools and the Charlottesville Police Department have discontinued the school resource officer program, which means that the $300,000 the schools were paying the police department can now be put toward other ends.
The school district’s total budget is well over $80 million, so $300,000 for cops in schools might not seem like much. But vast portions of those millions are tied up in fixed costs like real estate and building maintenance. The actual, everyday experience of students is determined, in large part, by budget decisions made on the margins.
For example, earlier this year, when the coronavirus’ economic downturn forced the district to tighten its budget by $1.16 million, CCS decided to cut, among other things, the entire elementary school Spanish program. Eliminating Spanish for elementary schoolers saved city schools $500,340.
The school district’s preliminary funding request for the 2020-21 fiscal year, released in January, gives a loose sense of the district’s aspirations, and also how much those aspirations might cost. CCS and the city spent the ensuing months haggling over whether these additions would be possible. This isn’t meant to suggest that the elimination of the SRO program means these positions will be filled, but the numbers below show the scale of the SRO program in comparison to the district’s other unfulfilled needs.
$300,000
School resource officers program
$97,076
Engineering teacher for Buford
$97,076
English language learners teacher
$75,820
Specialist for annual giving to solicit donations from affluent town residents
$43,470
Part-time orchestra teacher for Walker Upper Elementary
$41,525
Support for social-emotional learning program at Clark Elementary
As the leading man in The King of Staten Island, Pete Davidson taps into Judd Apatow's magic touch. Universal Pictures
Pete Davidson is the neighborhood kid everyone hopes will get his act together, except that neighborhood is national TV, and “everyone” is literally everyone. His appeal reminds us of the lovable bullshitter in our family who’s always ready with a joke but can’t keep a job—only Davidson’s comedy is full of hard truths instead of bullshit, and the man never stops working.
The King of Staten Island is not Davidson’s first film, but it is the most definitive statement of him as a comedic actor outside of standup. It follows his own life so closely that it can hardly be called semi-autobiographical. Instead, think of it as a glimpse into an alternate reality where Davidson never found success in comedy. His character Scott still has all of the intelligence, humor, mental illness, and childhood trauma as the actor portraying him, but where Davidson honed his craft, Scott’s is questionable. The character’s dream of a tattoo restaurant is not only a dubious idea, he doesn’t even have enough focus to become a tattooist’s apprentice. Davidson found an outlet, Scott never did.
Directed by Judd Apatow from a script by Davidson, Apatow, and “Saturday Night Live” writer Dave Sirus, The King of Staten Island is never quite as funny as it should be. It’s not as deep as it wants to be, yet for all of its 136 minutes, you can’t stop watching.
Scott lives at home with his mother Margie (Marisa Tomei) and sister Claire (Maude Apatow). His father was a firefighter who died on the job when Scott was 7. Now in his mid-20s, he’s constantly high on drugs of varying intensity with his friends. He’s a lot to handle but utterly charming, and sympathies run deep for the hardship he’s faced; so much so that no one has the heart to tell him what a weird idea a tattoo restaurant is.
When Claire graduates high school, Margie’s life is at a standstill, and she agrees to a date for the first time in years. Ray (Bill Burr) is also a fireman, and the two met when Scott attempted to tattoo Ray’s young son. Margie, with Ray’s support, insists that Scott get a job and begin looking for his own apartment. In Scott’s heart, he is aware of his problems and wants the best for his mom, but in action, he rejects the upheaval and blames Ray for sabotaging his life. To Scott, the fact that Ray is a firefighter is even more reason to resent him as an interloper who will only subject Margie to the same pain she felt all those years ago.
In some ways, The King of Staten Island is classic Apatow: A famous or up-and-coming comedian with something to prove in a story that balances lowbrow gags with surprising maturity. He turned Steve Carell and Seth Rogen into leading men with The 40-Year-Old-Virgin and Knocked Up, and showed us a new side of Adam Sandler in Funny People. Though Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck and the Knocked Up spin-off This Is 40 didn’t reach the same heights as Apatow’s other work, he has always remained too invested in his characters to let his stories succumb to pat, unearned morals. While The King of Staten Island’s ending is less satisfying than it might have been, Apatow comes by it honestly.
The film stands apart from other Apatow projects in a few notable ways. The director has often joked that the “written by” credit on his films is questionable, given the amount of improvisation on his sets, and the filmmaking reflects this, with stationary cameras and the editing based mostly around who is speaking and not what is happening. The King of Staten Island shows another side of Apatow, as a director in control of his film. There is much more attention paid to how a scene is filmed, blocked, and edited to reflect shifting attitudes and power dynamics. When Margie tells Scott about her new boyfriend and his profession, Scott instantly stands up while she remains seated, and the handheld camera captures the chaos of the moment. He is attempting to dominate the room and will prevent her from settling into her decision if it means getting his way. Later, after he’s been kicked out, he visits in an attempt to convey that he’s grown up and should be allowed back in. Margie, already day drunk and having a blast with her friend, is unfazed, calmly walking him to the door with a sympathetic tone before locking him out. In this scene, the camera and blocking is sympathetic to her, and the motion lulls us into believing she’ll have a dialogue with him, enhancing the surprise.
Any flaws in The King of Staten Island are easily forgiven for its sincerity, its good intentions, its excellent supporting cast, and the willingness of its star and director to expand their creative boundaries. Davidson portrays a version of himself, but he is not phoning it in;, he builds an interesting dynamic with his co-stars rather than dominating the scenes. Whether it’s worth more than two hours will be up to the viewer, but despite its appearances, it is not more of the same from either Davidson or Apatow.
UVA sent its Class of 2020 off into the world (virtually) on May 16. Graduating during a pandemic, with record levels of unemployment and an economic depression likely to last for a long time, means an uncertain future for all of them. But young people entering the medical field are facing unique challenges—from disrupted training to health concerns.
Preparation is an integral part of becoming a nurse or doctor, and many fourth-year med students around the country got a head start, graduating early so they could jump in and help at overwhelmed ERs during the coronavirus crisis. But UVA students who were just completing their undergraduate studies, or still in medical school, have missed out on training opportunities.
Michelle Eckstein, who graduated this spring with a degree in nursing, will begin her job as a nurse at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital later this summer. With the continuing pressures on health systems due to the coronavirus, though, she’s afraid the orientation—which usually lasts three months—will not be as robust as usual. “I’m just concerned that I won’t get the one-on-one help, or focus on what I feel like I need in order to feel responsible and ready to be on my own as a nurse,” Eckstein says.
Her practicum, which would have given her more hands-on experience, was also canceled this spring. But Eckstein recognizes she will still be able to do her job. “I know that I am able and competent to continue to learn how to be a nurse, and I’ll be fine,” she says. But she feels the loss of “that extra cushion of your personal confidence.”
Medical students at UVA also missed practice in the field. Clinical rotations, normally an integral part of training for third- and fourth-year med students, were suspended during the crisis. The training was replaced with an online curriculum, including a course on the history of pandemics. Rising fourth-year Nico Aldredge says that, while these were great courses, “obviously it’s always better to be in the hospital learning.”
COVID-19 also put a hold on hospital employment opportunities, as Charlottesville hospitals restricted non-essential workers during the crisis. Mariam Gbadamosi, who recently earned her bachelor’s degree in human biology from UVA, was working as a scribe at the university medical center’s emergency department, where she was responsible for managing documents for physicians. She was furloughed in March, and has not only missed out on hospital work experience, but also the money for her medical school applications. Between the application fee, buying materials to study, and traveling for interviews, Gbadamosi says the process can add up to thousands of dollars. “[I’m] definitely hoping to… return to work soon so that I can cover those costs for just the application cycle,” she says.
In addition to worries over job insecurity and preparation for the workforce, recent grads entering the medical sector also face health concerns. Summer Rice, who just graduated from UVA with a nursing degree, has a job lined up as an operating room nurse. But with Type 1 diabetes, she is at a higher risk for coronavirus infection. “There’s not a huge risk,” Rice says. “But in general, yeah, I’m worried for my own health.”
Aldredge acknowledges that there is always a risk, even for young and healthy workers. “I’m 20 years old, but who knows if I were to get the coronavirus—if I would be that one-half percent of people that get critically ill and get intubated and potentially die,” he says. “You don’t know if you’re going to be that person.”
“We need equity,” 19-year-old Joshua St. Hill told a crowd of roughly a thousand people Sunday night at the UVA Rotunda. “We can’t take our foot off the gas.”
Keeping their foot on the gas is exactly what protesters in Charlottesville have been doing over the past two weeks, since the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. In a city that, despite the events of 2017, is not noted for its activism, residents here have turned out by the hundreds and thousands to protest racism and police brutality, at massive marches on May 30, June 7, and June 8, and at other smaller demonstrations too.
Nationwide, as protests have continued night after night, and police in many cities have responded with brutal force as damning as Bull Connor’s fire hoses and attack dogs, there’s a feeling that a tipping point has been reached, that things might actually change. In Minneapolis, the City Council has vowed to dismantle the police force. In New York and L.A., mayors have pledged to cut police budgets and move the money to community programs. And in Richmond, leaders are calling for a police civilian review board and a new way of responding to calls involving mental health crises.
In Charlottesville, City Council appointed the final member of our Police Civilian Review Board last week, though it has so far ignored activists’ demands to implement the stricter bylaws an initial board submitted last September. School board members have endorsed pulling cops from our public schools. Council members have been meeting about removing Confederate statues from downtown. And Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley has vowed to continue the progressive criminal justice reforms put in place to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, like limiting pretrial detention and supporting alternatives to incarceration.
Whether these and other changes will stick depends, in part, on whether residents will keep paying attention, and keep the pressure on, in the weeks and months ahead.
“We can’t use Black Lives Matter as a hashtag,” PVCC student Tyler Tinsley said on Sunday, at the march he helped organize. “We gotta keep doing it every day.”
The nation is up in arms. After the murder of George Floyd, protesters filled the streets of Charlottesville, Richmond, Washington D.C., and cities across the country, demonstrating against police brutality. As the smoke clears in coming weeks, these activists will look to translate the energy of the protests into lasting change.
“I think we’re in a similar position now, nationwide, as Charlottesville was in 2017,” says Sarah Burke, a criminal defense investigator and member of Charlottesville’s initial Police Civilian Review Board. “People are rightfully questioning a lot of police policy and action, and demanding change.”
Charlottesville residents might be familiar with the type of reforms other cities are now demanding. At the behest of protesters, a majority of Richmond City Council members have committed to the creation of that city’s own police civilian review board, which would provide oversight in a variety of different ways, including giving people a forum to lodge complaints about the police mistreatment of residents. After the Unite the Right rally in 2017, Charlottesville City Council made the same commitment, passing a resolution calling for the institution of a strong CRB.
Charlottesville’s council began by putting together an initial board, a mixture of criminal justice experts and black community leaders, tasked with researching best practices and community needs and then drafting bylaws for a permanent body. Last Monday, two and a half years after Unite the Right, the official CRB’s last member was finally appointed. The executive director position has yet to be filled, and the adoption of the board’s bylaws remains contentious.
The evolution of the CRB provides a snapshot of police-community relations in Charlottesville, and also shows what it takes to transform a dramatic, flashpoint event into lasting institutional change.
Trust issues
“We did this for the community,” says Gloria Beard, a long-time Charlottesville resident and member of the initial CRB. “We promised the community that they would have somebody they could go to for complaints. Most of them don’t feel good going to the police department.”
In a letter from the initial CRB to the police department this week, which Burke and Beard signed, the board writes, “Police killings, police beatings, and militarized police presence are nothing new to many of us. This community understands those problems, because it has been in this fight for years, even decades.”
Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney says she understands where people like Beard are coming from.
“There have been recognized failures for a very long time—including those failures in 2017—to understand what race relationships look like,” Brackney says.
“We’ve been trying to build trust in this community since I arrived,” says Brackney, who took over as chief in the summer of 2018. “What are those areas that we absolutely know build trust and legitimacy in communities? One is transparency.”
Rashall Brackney. Photo: Eze Amos
The chief says the department is posting “unprecedented” amounts of internal data on its website, for all to see, including internal affairs inquiries, charging data, use of force, and “investigative detentions” (stop-and-frisks).
That might not tell the whole story, though. “Data is only as good as what you collect,” Burke says. “Right now, for example, all the stop-and-frisk data that we get is in a PowerPoint presentation, filtered through whatever lens the police department filters it through. It’s not necessarily that it’s wrong, we just don’t know.”
Another recent sticking point is the department’s budget—the police department gets around $18 million per year from a cash-strapped city government. Last week, Charlottesville resident Matthew Gillikin sent an email asking the police department for “the most detailed budget you have,” and was directed to a seven-line summary in the full city budget; when he tweeted that he hadn’t received enough information, the department’s official account responded, “It’s not clear why you would accuse us of being unhelpful.” (C-VILLE has also requested a full budget, but it was not available by press time.)
The department has recently made other unforced, trust-busting errors. Last year, the police hung cameras in the majority-black public housing neighborhood Westhaven, without notifying residents of the surveillance; then they took the cameras down and dodged questions about why they had been put up in the first place. And until December, the department’s fleet included a gray Dodge Challenger (the same make, model, and color as the car used to kill Heather Heyer), complete with Blue Lives Matter decaling.
In the last two weeks, demand for information about the police department’s practices has only increased. “I’m getting hundreds of emails right now, [asking] what are your policies, do your officers have body-worn cameras,” Brackney says. “If you looked on our website, you could see and answer those questions yourselves.”
At the end of last week, the department sent out an email in response to “numerous media and community requests” for information about its policies. The release reveals that officers receive only two hours of state-mandated “cultural diversity/bias-based policing” training every other year.
With regards to transparency, “The efforts [Brackney] has made have certainly been in the right direction,” says Burke. “I just don’t think it’s anywhere near enough.”
The hold up
These questions about data dissemination and trust-building could be addressed by a powerful review board. The process of instituting a CRB has been convoluted, however.
The initial CRB, appointed in the summer of 2018, spent a year researching civilian oversight and, last September, submitted a set of bylaws that had “real teeth,” says Burke. Over the next three months, City Council passed around the bylaws, rewrote portions of them, and eventually voted through a weaker set of rules than the CRB had proposed.
The initial board members argue that the new bylaws give too much power to the executive director, a full-time staff member who would be hired by the city manager. The new bylaws also remove the requirement that the police department attend community listening sessions, remove the ability for the CRB to review complaints that are sustained by the police department, and don’t give the board access to raw stop-and-frisk and use of force data.
The new bylaws were adopted 4-1, with then-vice mayor Wes Bellamy opposing.
Since then, three new members have come on council, and the initial review board members, as well as a number of community activists, have called for the new council to vote again on the original bylaws.
“The problem for me is an issue of political will,” says local activist Walt Heinecke, who has forcefully advocated for the adoption of the initial bylaws. Heinecke notes that Michael Payne, Sena Magill, and Lloyd Snook all expressed support for the initial bylaws during their council campaigns, but that Snook no longer supports revisiting the issue.
Other councilors want to let the incoming board members write their own rules, rather than impose the initial board’s deeply researched guidelines. “What we’ve said all along is that the new board members can tell us how they function best,” said Mayor Nikuyah Walker at council’s most recent meeting.
Refusing to revisit the initial bylaws is “a major abrogation of council’s responsibility to establish the strongest possible ordinance and bylaws that will protect black and brown bodies in our community,” Heinecke says.
Brackney, for her part, has been lukewarm on the CRB in the past. In a 2019 interview with C-VILLE, she said, “I’ve never been able to understand or get a clear answer as to why there was the development of a Civilian Review Board here.”
Now, she says, “I don’t know what the next steps are. I’m not as familiar with the individual members [of the new board] to understand collectively what their work might look like as a team. I would be remiss if I tried to get ahead of that without engaging with that board first.”
And so, two years in, the struggle to translate energy and uprising into tangible change is still ongoing. Beard says the city’s efforts at real post-2017 reform are “a work in progress.”
The rest of the nation seems poised to embark on this journey now, too. This week has galvanized change across the country, and prompted new questions here in Charlottesville. (Already, the police department and city school system have trashed their agreement that place officers in schools.) Will the national uprisings push Charlottesville’s justice reform further forward?
“I pray,” says Beard. “I pray hard. It needs to happen. And soon.”
This article was updated on 6/11/20 to correct Sarah Burke’s title and clarify the type of data released by the police department.
Tune in to Save the Music with Michael Clem and Rusty Speidel on Sunday. Publicity image
In session: Tracing Rusty Speidel’s music career is like coloring a zentangle. It twists, turns, and flows into many shapes, connects to a greater body of work, and the results are dependably creative and beautiful. Speidel (right) is a session musician, producer, arranger, and a founding member of SGGL (Speidel, Michael Goggin, Tom Goodrich, and Michael Lille), a popular local band that took off from UVA in the ’80s and toured the East Coast extensively. He’s played with Ellis Paul, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Martin Sexton, Sugarland, and Sarah White, to name a few. This time out, he will perform with another local heavyweight—Michael Clem (founder of Eddie from Ohio and more) for the Front Porch Save the Music series.
An hour of laughter: These aren’t the funniest of times, but given the circumstances, a little laughter is more important than ever. Comedians Chris Alan and Winston Hodges have you covered with their Zoom Comedy Hour. Beaming live sets and gags online, the popular local comedians bring their regular standup gig to your living room, and deliver punchlines “almost every Monday.”
