Police failure at Charlottesville

White Supremacists Were Ready for Violence in Charlottesville. The Police Were Not.

It appears they put their own safety well above the safety of the public and the maintenance of public order.

The police badly mishandled white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Va., in August, failing to give officers needed training, gear and marching orders, and remaining passive as bloody clashes between protesters and counterprotesters raged around them, a former federal prosecutor reported on Friday.

The Charlottesville police knew in advance “that there were people here bent on engaging in violence,” but they believed they were ready, naïvely citing their experience of handling block parties and visits by dignitaries, said Timothy J. Heaphy, the former United States attorney who was hired by the city to investigate the episode.

Mr. Heaphy’s law firm, Hunton & Williams, drafted a report more than 200 pages long that was released on Friday, detailing many basic tactical mistakes, including a failure to keep the factions apart, coordinate among law enforcement agencies, react to violence, or call in available reinforcements. 

The investigators found fault with elected city leaders and University of Virginia officials, but pointed their sharpest criticism at the Charlottesville Police Department, or C.P.D., and the Virginia State Police, or V.S.P.

“V.S.P. directed its officers to remain behind barricades rather than risk injury responding to conflicts,” the report states. 

“C.P.D. commanders similarly instructed their officers not to intervene in all but the most serious physical confrontations.”

What the report calls “the most tragic manifestation of the failure to protect public safety” was the death of Heather D. Heyer, a counterprotester who the police say was killed by a white supremacist who drove into a street that was closed to traffic, and thick with pedestrians. 

An officer assigned to keep cars off the street had felt threatened, so the police had withdrawn her.

. . . .

Mr. Heaphy’s firm interviewed witnesses, examined video and still photographs, and reviewed half a million pages of documents. 

What emerged, he said, was a failure to prepare, a failure to inform the public about what to expect, and a failure to protect people.

. . . .

Unknown to the city police, Mr. Heaphy said, “the state police were told, ‘You are here to protect the park,’” and not to respond to violence.

. . . .

“When violence was most prevalent, C.P.D. commanders pulled officers back to a protected area of the park, where they remained for over an hour as people in the large crowd fought on Market Street,” the report said.

The city’s plan to control the streets “essentially was much like it is on Saturday afternoon for a football game,” without the resources needed for mass unrest, Mr. Heaphy said. 

It relied on officers and unarmed personnel directing traffic, he said, and “they were told, if it gets dangerous, if it gets violent, go inside your car and lock the doors.”

A single Charlottesville officer, normally assigned to schools, was posted with a patrol car at an intersection on 4th Street to keep it closed to vehicles. 

She grew afraid for her safety and called for help, but her superiors told her to leave her post and no one was sent to take her place.

Without the officer and her car, all that blocked the street was a wooden sawhorse, and vehicles easily drove around it and into the crowd — including the one that killed Ms. Heyer.