Police chief defends accommodations for group at gun rally
When about 20 armed men showed up for a protest outside the Newport News Police Department headquarters a few weeks back, police worked to accommodate the gun rights advocates.
Police tactical officers roamed the top of the Jefferson Avenue building — just in case anything got out of hand. But police also set up a public address system for the group outside the building’s entrance.
Police Chief Steve Drew and the event’s organizer, 20-yearold Kenneth “Mike” Dunn, and exchanged beverages — a chocolate milk for Dunn and a Diet Mountain Dew for Drew — as the event kicked off.
“Know this, I support your right to free speech,” Drew told Dunn as the men clicked their plastic bottles after shaking hands.
“I want you to uphold the
Constitution,” Dunn replied. “That’s what I want you to do.”
“We have to keep people safe,” Drew responded.
The activists were demonstrating against a new city ordinance banning the “open carrying” of guns at city parks and city buildings.
Dunn, of Halifax County, said he requested the chocolate milk when he was arrested after carrying a handgun openly a week earlier at Huntington Park.
Drew said the beverage sharing was a “de-escalation” tactic designed to defuse tensions. “I was teasing Mr. Dunn about chocolate milk and he was teasing me a little bit,” he said after the rally. “I think that’s just a gesture that we’re willing to work and talk.”
‘Good Conversation’
Several of the men in attendance, including Dunn, carried
multiple weapons, some of them semi-automatic rifles.
Dunn told the activists he was going to let Drew speak — though he said he warned the chief “that I could not promise how the crowd would react.”
“Some of you might get upset if I let the chief of police come and speak, but I’m going to let him say his piece,” Dunn told the crowd. “He’s got his right to his First Amendment just as much as we do, so I’m going to let him say what he’s got to say and receive him how you do.”
Drew then took the microphone, telling the crowd that he and Dunn had a good conversation earlier in the day.
“We certainly support your right to free speech, and I appreciate the conversation,” Drew told the men. “We offer the grounds here of the police department for free speech, and I appreciate the non-violence. We’ll treat you with the utmost respect and just ask the same.”
The chief added lightheartedly that he wanted to give them a podium, too, but there was an issue with a lock that precluded it.
“There are different sides of issues, and I just ask that we address them with our votes, our courtrooms and our legislators,” Drew told the group. “What I don’t want is to put people in danger.”
The three-hour event went off without a hitch. There was no violence, and no one was arrested. The armed demonstrators took photos in front of a sign on the front doors to headquarters that prohibit firearms, but they did not try to enter the lobby.
“We allowed them this space here on the good faith that I would come out and meet with them, and they would see no show of force from the police department,” Drew said.
The chief said he and Dunn “were able to sit down and talk and reason together” the morning of the protest, and they were able to respectfully come to terms on how the event would go. The police building, he said, is the best place in the city for such an event.
“They told us they would be here from about 6 to 9 and they were true to their word,” Drew said. “They said there would be no violence, no disruptions and that’s what occurred ... They didn’t have to talk to me. I appreciated that they did, I think that shows good faith and I just wanted to reciprocate that.”
But Drew has faced criticism on social media and elsewhere ever since — with some accusing him of being overly friendly with the armed men.
At the event itself, Aubrey “JaPharii” Jones Jr. — who leads the Black Lives Matter 757 group and has befriended some in the gun rights group — said he’s a believer in the Second Amendment.
But Jones said the treatment of the gun activists was much better than the way he says police treated his group during a protest after President Trump’s rally at the Newport News airport in September.
“If we’re going to be fighting for the rights for all, let’s fight for the rights for all,” Jones said, asserting that racial differences — most of the gun activists were white men — accounted for the variance in treatment.
“This is a social experiment, and our hypothesis was correct,” Jones said. “In my four years of activism, I have never had a police chief offer me a (expletive) PA system to come tell them what I am and ain’t gonna do. It just hasn’t happened.”
He added sarcastically: “I appreciate you exposing the world to this beautifulness.”
A progressive social media-focused news outlet called NowThis, with 2.7 million Twitter followers, posted footage of the beverage exchange, with the video watched some 427,000 times as of Friday.
“This police officer offered help to an alt-right ‘Boogaloo’ member even though he was openly defying Virginia’s open carry law,” the post says, referring to the Boogaloo Bois.
Dunn, for his part, acknowledges that he’s a Boogaloo Boi. But he’s repeatedly tried to distance himself from the alt-right label, saying he’s a Libertarian.
A story on the World Socialist Web Site said it was “remarkable” that a police chief would share a beverage with Dunn in such a fashion.
A few days after that, an organization called The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED, cited the protest in a report on “Right-Wing Militias and the U.S. Election.”
“Some police departments, such as that of Newport News, Virginia, have sought to get along with and make concessions to local Boogaloo cells,” the report said, asserting that the chocolate milk and PA system “underscores friendly ties between law enforcement and militias.”
Chief defends outreach
But Drew defends his department’s actions that night — saying his priority is always protecting the safety of the residents, and he always tries reach out to community groups to make sure that happens.
“This is not anything to do with race,” he added. “And it bothers me that some in social media have tried to turn it into that ... We don’t close our doors to anybody. This department serves the city of Newport News. It doesn’t matter to me your age, your zip code, your race or where you live.”
He referenced the local protests that arose over the summer in response to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Drew said his department has handled more than 40 protests involving Black Lives Matter and other groups, and “we have not had to make any arrests.”
“If you go back and look at the footage ... we’ve marched with children down the sidewalk and with churches that have come and marched up and down Jefferson Avenue,” he said. He and an assistant chief even “took a knee” at one protest.
He said police have accommodated marchers, including by blocking traffic in one lane and keeping traffic moving in others. But, the chief said, “actions must be taken if lives are endangered.”
Drew said that was the case after the Trump rally, where he said protesters were “walking into oncoming traffic,” requiring police to step in. Some protesters were detained, he said, but later released without charges.
“We just can’t have that,” he said. “Somebody would have got hurt and the narrative would be that the police department allowed somebody to get hurt and why didn’t they stop this.”
New ordinance
Separately, Drew said it’s not the case that he rolled over and allowed the gun activists to defy the city’s new gun ordinance, despite the claims of Dunn and some on social media to the contrary.
At the Oct. 15 rally, Dunn claimed that the gun activists were “completely disregarding” the new ordinance. “We’re here standing together openly and blatantly defying an unconstitutional city ordinance, and we will keep doing that,” he said.
The ordinance, recently passed by City Council, bans the “open carrying” of weapons — such as wearing it on a holster or over one’s shoulder — at city buildings, parks, community centers, and city-sponsored events. (Concealed handguns can still generally be carried in such places with a permit).
But Drew said the ordinance doesn’t apply to the grounds or parking lots of city buildings — only to the buildings themselves. The chief said Dunn mistakenly thought the new ordinance applied to all city property, and “they believed believed they were going to be arrested when they walked onto the property.”
When he told him that morning that that wasn’t the case, Drew said, “I think that defused some things.”
Chocolate milk exchange
As for the chocolate milk and Mountain Dew exchange, Dunn said it was the chief ’s apology without words for the trespassing arrest the week before. “I think that’s his way of apologizing without — you know — actually apologizing,” he said at the rally.
But Drew has not apologized for the arrest, and the case is still pending in court. He says there was no symbolic meaning for him in the gesture, calling it a way to de-escalate any tensions.
Before the two met, Drew said he noticed some of Dunn’s social media posts in which he mentioned chocolate milk and chicken tenders, so the chief used that as a conversation starter.
“And when I asked that question, the demeanor — of this is what we’re going to do and this is why we’re here — changed,” Drew said in a police department video released a few days after the protest. “And he started to joke.”
Police also didn’t arrest anyone under a separate state statute that could have applied.
Under Virginia law, it’s also against the law in a small number of cities — including Newport News — to carry a loaded semi-automatic weapon that has more than 20 rounds of ammunition, a folding stock or a silencer, unless the gun-holder has a concealed carry permit.
Dunn — who was carrying a semiautomatic rifle with an extended magazine — recently turned 20, so is still a year shy of the minimum age to get a concealed handgun permit.
But it wasn’t clear at the rally whether Dunn’s weapons, or any of the other firearms, were loaded. Drew said he’s learned over the years that the guns at such rallies are often unloaded, and he didn’t press them to to tell him more.
“I don’t have the right to go up and stop them, detain them, take their firearm, and look at how many rounds they have,” he said. “I have to have a reason that would prompt me to do that ... You can ask, but they don’t have to let you see it.”
Earlier incident
The protest stemmed from Dunn’s Oct. 8 arrest at Huntington Park — a city-owned park between Warwick Boulevard and the James River, north of the shipyard.
It happened shortly before a scheduled campaign rally for Libertarian vice presidential candidate Spike Cohen, according to video footage posted on Twitter by Fred Fischer, the editor-in-chief of an online media outlet “News 2 Share.”
The footage shows a park ranger asking Dunn to either conceal his gun if he has a permit or put the firearm in his car.
Dunn argues with the ranger and a Newport News officer, telling them they “swore an oath to defend the Constitution” and the city ordinance is an infringement on his Second Amendment rights.
The officer then gives Dunn a choice — leave or be handcuffed. The officer begins counting down from 10, stopping at three to tell Dunn to remove his hand from the handgun in a holster at his waist.
When the officer reaches one, he tells Dunn to turn around and cuffs him.
“This is what tyranny looks like!” Dunn yells out.
He was charged with trespassing — a Class 1 misdemeanor — when he failed to comply with the officer’s orders, police spokesman Brandon Maynard wrote in an email.
Police confiscated Dunn’s gun, though Drew said it was returned to him a week later — as the chief said is standard practice for that kind of charge — after the police took a picture of it for the case.
Dunn is next due in court Dec. 16.
Dunn contends that he was charged with trespassing rather than the ordinance violation “because they know if they charge me with the city ordinance they cited we would blow it out of the water in court.”
No one has so far been charged under the new ordinance, a civil infraction that carries a $500 fine. But police say they will charge violators with trespassing if they don’t leave or put the gun away.
‘We’re all heavily armed’
Dunn, for his part, said after the Oct. 15 protest that all went peacefully, with no arrests or confrontations with police “because we’re all here and we’re all heavily armed.”
“We’re unified, and they know if they mess with one of us, they’re going to mess with all of us this time,” Dunn said.
Drew had a different take. “Our number one priority is to keep people safe and informed, be transparent, to be neutral. And I think that’s what we did.”