Report slams response of law officers to racist rally
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Law enforcement’s response to a violent white nationalist rally in Virginia last summer failed on multiple fronts, leading to “deep distrust of government” in the Charlottesville community, an independent review released Friday found.
Former U.S. Attorney Tim Heaphy’s investigation of the Charlottesville rally found that the city failed by not adequately communicating or coordinating in advance and by removing an officer from an area where a car plowed into counterprotesters and killed a woman.
Heaphy’s team interviewed 150 people and pored over half a million documents for the report, which found a lack of preparation and coordination between state and city police and a passive response by officers to the chaos.
“This represents a failure of one of government’s core functions—the protection of fundamental rights,” the report said. “Law enforcement also failed to maintain order and protect citizens from harm, injury, and death. Charlottesville preserved neither of those principles on Aug. 12, which has led to deep distrust of government within this community.”
White nationalists who descended on Charlottesville in part to protest plans to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee began fighting in the streets with counterdemonstrators before the event even officially began. The brawling went on for nearly an hour in front of officers until the event eventually disbanded. Later, as counterdemonstrators were peacefully marching through a downtown street, a car drove into the crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many more.
The report says “planning and coordination breakdowns” before Aug. 12 led to “disastrous results.”
State police directed their officers “to remain behind barricades rather than risk injury responding to conflicts between protesters and counterprotesters,” the report said. And Charlottesville commanders “similarly instructed their officers not to intervene in all but the most serious physical confrontations.”
Charlottesville Police Lt. Stephen Upman said officials were reviewing the report and plan to confer with the city manager and City Council “to determine our next steps.”
State police and Charlottesville police were unable to communicate by radio the day of the rally because they were on different channels, the report said.
The review also found that an officer was initially supposed to be stationed near the intersection where the car plowed into counterprotesters. But the officer asked for relief out of safety concerns and was not replaced.
Only a sawhorse was in place when the car drove into the crowd, killing Heyer and injuring at least 19 others. The day’s death toll rose to three when two state troopers sent to monitor the scene and support the governor’s motorcade died in a helicopter crash.
Rally organizers and counterprotesters, as well as some law enforcement experts, have questioned why authorities didn’t do more to separate opposing forces or step in once the violence began breaking out.