Portsmouth’s police chief is still in limbo. Will election results change that?
PORTSMOUTH — Two months have passed since Portsmouth Police Chief Angela Greene was put on leave without warning or explanation, and city leaders still won’t say whether she’ll get her job back.
After voters this week elected a new mayor and two new council members, all of whom are Black, Greene’s fate seems even more tenuous. Reaction to the chief ’s ouster had been largely split down racial lines, with mayoral candidate Danny Meeks, who is white, calling her reinstatement one of his top priorities. But Meeks lost to Shannon Glover.
Glover, who’s been a council member for two years, declined to comment about Greene, saying he’s “not even in the loop” on conversations about the future of her job. One of the newly elected council members, De’Andre Barnes, also declined to comment, saying he doesn’t “know all the details.”
“It would be unprofessional to comment on personnel issues,” Barnes said. “I don’t know if they were right to put her on leave or not.”
And Interim City Manager LaVoris Pace, who has the sole authority for now to name a police chief, did not shed any light.
“This is a personnel matter of which I cannot speak,” Pace wrote in an email Friday morning.
He added, “Chief Green(e) remains on paid administrative leave while the matter is being investigated,” but did not say what “the matter” was.
Vice Mayor Lisa Lucas-Burke, who was just reelected to a seat on council, said she’s frustrated by what she described as “an extremely long time” to wait for a final decision.
“It’s more nerve-wracking than the election,” Lucas-Burke said. “If they found nothing wrong, then bring her back.”
Attempts to reach Greene and her temporary successor, Scott Burke (no relation to the councilwoman), were unsuccessful.
Greene had l ed the department for about 17 months. She was pushed out in early September, weeks after she announced felony charges against state Sen. Louise Lucas and more than a dozen others stemming from a protest and vandalism at the city’s Confederate monument in June.
She officially got the job in June 2019, but had been interim chief since Chief Tonya Chapman abruptly resigned that March. Chapman later said she was forced out for trying to weed systemic racism out of the force.
Greene was one of many high-ranking public officials in Portsmouth to lose their job in the wake of the June 10 protest.
Then-City Manager Lydia Pettis Patton temporarily removed Greene from her post amid controversy over the criminal charges her department filed in the vandalism of the Confederate monument. While Pettis Patton did not publicly explain her decision to replace the chief, she had previously said police should not have been investigating the vandalism because Greene had an unspecified “conflict of interest.”
Less than a week after Greene’s removal, Pettis Patton and City Attorney Solomon Ashby were ousted. Pettis Patton had planned to retire at the end of the year, having held the job since Sept. 1, 2015. She resigned suddenly instead, and Ashby was fired.
Central to the drama was the racially divided City Council. As with many of the group’s major decisions, their votes on the ousters came down to Black and white.
Ashby has since filed a defamation lawsuit against outgoing mayor John Rowe over critical comments Rowe made after Ashby’s firing.
Many Black officials and residents had criticized Greene for supporting charges they saw as a thinly veiled effort to bring down Lucas, a powerful Black lawmaker who has pushed for police reform. Mostly white protesters, including some who don’t live in Portsmouth, had rallied to support Greene, saying she’d been wrongly punished for enforcing the law.
This week, after four years of racially divided votes under a majority-white City Council, Portsmouth voters drastically changed course Tuesday by electing four Black candidates, including Glover, to lead this majority-Black city. They kicked out the only white incumbent running for office, Councilman Nathan Clark. Rowe and Councilwoman Elizabeth Psimas, who are both white, had decided not to seek another term.