Police chief steps down over report on rally

Force’s response to street clashes criticized

Charlottesville Police Chief Alfred Thomas resigned abruptly Monday, just 17 days after the release of a report that was highly critical of the police department’s handling of an August white supremacist rally that turned deadly in the Virginia city.

The 207-page report prepared by Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, concluded that the police department was ill-prepared, lacked proper training and had a flawed plan for managing the Unite the Right rally that drew hundreds of neo-Nazis and white nationalists to Charlottesville on Aug. 12 and resulted in violent clashes with counterprotesters. The lack of adequate preparation led to “disastrous results,” Heaphy wrote.

Thomas, an air force veteran who previously was chief of the Lexington, Va., Police Department, had led the Charlottesville agency only since May 2016 when he became the city’s first black police chief.

“Nothing in my career has brought me more pride than serving as the police chief for the city of Charlottesville,” Thomas said in a press release. “I will be forever grateful for having had the opportunity to protect and serve a community I love so dearly.”

City manager Maurice Jones said Thomas served with distinction and honour.

“He is a man of integrity who has provided critical leadership for our department since his arrival,” Jones said in a statement.

The review of the rally confirmed widespread observations that police did not intervene to break up street brawls. The passive police stance, the report said, “represents a tremendous tactical failure that has real and lasting consequences.”

Heaphy said he heard from a couple of officers in the police command centre that day who said Thomas told officers, “Let them fight for a little. It will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.” Through his attorney, Thomas denied he ever said, “Let them fight.”

Several hours after the rally had been declared an unlawful assembly, Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr. allegedly drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old legal assistant, and injuring 35 others. Fields was charged with first-degree murder.

In the report, Heaphy called Heyer’s death “the most tragic manifestation of the failure to protect public safety after the event” and pointed to police decisions that left the section where Heyer was struck abandoned by law enforcement.