Attorneys are right to demand accountability from Charleston Police

Citing a slew of violent acts against Black community members, a group of West Virginia attorneys has called on Charleston City Council to investigate several police officers. 

They are right to demand real accountability.

Trent Redman, Rico Moore, Geoff Cullop, and Olobunmi Kusimo-Frazier raised the issue in a letter and in comments to city council at a Monday meeting. The incidents include punching a Black teenager in the face, forcibly pushing a Black woman to the ground to enter a home, and using a police vehicle to chase and strike a Black man on a scooter. 

“One thing about being an attorney here, everybody – especially in my community, the Black community – they know me,” Moore said, according to a Gazette-Mail story about the meeting. “I got tired of receiving phone calls, complaints about specific policemen, and we see this happen over and over. These officers, these individuals, get moved from place to place and the problem is never really addressed.” 

Moore continued: “This is not a situation where – as an attorney – I’m coming to you and I’m saying pay my clients. That’s not what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for is some real accountability from the city council and the police department.” 

Frazier described the incidents as “extrajudicial punishment.” Cullop called the behavior of the officers “sadistic.” 

This is far from the first time city officials have been made aware of this kind of horrific behavior. Unfortunately, officials’ past responses can only be described as performative.

These past measures have not fixed the long-standing issues of violence towards Black people by Charleston Police. It’s time for a reckoning. 

In 2016, a group called Call to Action for Racial Equality (CARE) conducted a study that found Black people account for 28-30 percent of arrests in Charleston despite making up just 12 percent of the city’s population. 

In response, the city planned implicit bias trainings, formed partnerships with some Black community leaders, and committed to collecting data about demographics (including race) during police encounters. (A follow up by ACLU-WV Investigative Reporter Kyle Vass in 2023 found that this data was only collected about 50 percent of the time since the city committed to the practice.)

In 2020 when Charleston Police brutalized an unarmed Black woman, Mayor Amy Goodwin assured the community that the city would do more to address racial profiling. The mayor formed a short-lived coalition without making any substantive changes to policing practices.

Clearly the measures attempted so far are insufficient. 

The officers involved in the incidents outlined in the attorneys’ letter previously served on the Special Enforcement Unit, which Police Chief Scott Dempsey said was disbanded in July. He added that the department is now assembling a “Strategic Response Unit” that will comprise different officers than the enforcement unit. 

A rebrand isn’t going to cut it here. The department needs to send a strong statement to the communities it polices if it wants to maintain any credibility whatsoever. 

Goodwin and Dempsey assure us that the incidents are being investigated, but investigated by whom? The same department that allowed them to happen in the first place? The same department that thought a sensitivity training would keep people safe from racist cops? 

Dozens of cities across the country have formed citizen review boards – bodies composed of everyday people who are able to review the actions of officers and, if necessary, recommend disciplinary action. But the West Virginia Legislature has forbidden citizen review boards from having any real power under the police civil service law. 

For example, Morgantown’s Civilian Police Review and Advisory Board, “doesn’t have the power to investigate specific incidents of police misconduct. The board looks at the overall policies and practices of the police department,” according to the city website. 

This law needs to change if we want to keep our communities safe from out-of-control cops. 

In the meantime, the attorneys who addressed the council are right. Real action needs to be taken, and these officers need to be held to the highest of standards. 

(Want to know who is policing your community? ACLU-WV has developed an interactive dashboard that tracks the employment histories of every police officer in the state, including whether an officer was investigated or terminated from previous positions. Learn more: https://www.acluwv.org/news/introducing-the-police-accountability-dashboard-a-tool-to-track-police-employment-in-wv/)