Fixing police practices isn’t enough to heal racial divide in Greenville, report says

In a city where Black residents feel much less safe than their white counterparts, bridging Greenville’s racial divide will take more work than revamping the police department, a citizens review committee on police practices said in its final report to Greenville City Council.

Their report, published this week, calls not only for modifying police officers’ use of force standards, but also for Greenville to seek reconciliation with the Black community for the past, including a lynching in the 1940s and closing the public swimming pool in the 1960s.

The committee said officers and community leaders should seek education on the history of racism from the Race Equity Institute, a North Carolina non-profit that has worked with other Greenville organizations.

“This is work that should be a beginning of even harder work to be completed,” the Rev. Stacey Mills, the committee chairman, said.

The panel also recommended changes to the police department’s general orders on use of force, K9 handling and training. Essential to moving ahead is installing a permanent police chief.

Howie Thompson has been interim chief since Ken Miller resigned last December in the wake of a State Law Enforcement Division investigation into the dismissal of a drunk driving charge against a prominent Greenville businessman. SLED said Miller had the authority to dismiss the charge but he had lied to investigators about the incident.

As the city considers revamping its police department’s policies to help bridge the racial divide on trust and safety, Greenville Mayor Knox White said the city also is working to retell the Greenville story to include the good and the bad.

Leaders want to resolve issues that brought about recent racial justice protests, and they’re considering what to do about a Confederate statue at the edge of a historic downtown cemetery. One idea is to seek the state’s OK to move it closer to a mass grave of Confederate soldiers. That would put it more in context, White said.

The past, a lynching and a segregated pool

In what is now considered South Carolina’s last lynching, 24-year-old Willie Earle’s body was found in a slaughter pen beside the road from Greenville to Pickens in February 1947. He had been beaten, stabbed and shot in the body and the head after a mob dragged him from a city jail cell.

Earle had been arrested on suspicion of killing a taxi driver, who had picked up Earle in Greenville and given him a ride to his mother’s in Pickens County. The driver was found dead in his cab about a mile from the mother’s house, and Earle arrived on foot.

Thirty-one men were tried for Earle’s his murder, and 31 were acquitted despite confessions from most of them. All but three were taxi drivers and were said to be seeking revenge.

British writer Rebecca West sat through the trial and wrote a story for The New Yorker in 1947 that is considered a seminal history of the lynching.

“As soon as the clerk had read the verdicts aloud and the Judge had left the bench and the courtroom, which he did without thanking the jury, the courtroom became, in a flash, something else. It might have been a honky-tonk, a tourist camp where they sold beer,” she wrote.

Three years later, Greenville County paid Earle’s family $3,000 after lawyers for the NAACP sued.

In 2010, a marker was installed to commemorate Earle’s death, but two years later it was vandalized and then stolen.

“Part of our community was not ready. Oh, how tragic, we are still having acts of violence,” said S.C. state Rep. Chandra Dillard, D-Greenville.

Dillard is involved in a project to identify and mark places in the city that have significance to the Black community, such as the area known as Black Wall Street on the south end of downtown.

She thinks it is an important effort, but it is not reconciliation. That would involve leaders acknowledging and apologizing for wrongs.

Dillard remembers the segregated main public swimming pool in Cleveland Park. In 1961, police arrested eight Black teenagers for swimming there. The NAACP sued in federal court, which ordered the city to open the pool open to everyone.

Instead, the city put sea lions in it.

Drew Lanham, a Clemson University professor of wildlife ecology, wrote an article earlier this year for the Bitter Southerner based on a conversation with some friends who said they swam anyway.

“The pool remained closed until the ‘Marineland’ idea seeped into the city council’s racist heads in 1963 and a trio of sea lions was deemed better than a single black toe being dipped into a pure white pool,” Lanham wrote.

The site later became a rose garden and, now, tennis courts.

“Rather than allow African Americans in that pool, they chose black seals as if to say we are less than human,” Dillard said.

The report’s findings

The citizens ad hoc panel was established in the wake of protests around the country after the death of George Floyd. The Minneapolis man died after a policeman held him down with a knee on his throat.

The committee spent two months reviewing the police department’s General Orders, which regulate use of force and other operational matters.

Mills, the head of the committee, said the idea of reconciliation is at the heart of all the recommendations, including developing a comprehensive community policing plan to ensure officers know the residents. Officers should not only spend more time getting to know community leaders and residents, but also should live in the area. They should go door-to-door handing out business cards and learn about the area’s history, the committee said.

Further, the committee said the police should develop partnerships with agencies dealing with mental health, domestic violence and child welfare to backstop them on situations outside their expertise.

“The Greenville Police Department cannot continue being the default for service calls that require expertise and resources held by others, beginning with mental health,” Mills wrote in his opening message in the report.

The panel also recommended the police department buy holsters that would automatically turn on body cameras when an officer’s gun is drawn. They estimated this would cost $60,000. Police already have automatic video when a Taser is drawn.

The committee recommended more simulation training for officers on use of force and to bulk up the work of the Citizen Review Board, which investigates shootings by officers as well as complaints to internal affairs. The work of that board should be more transparent, including open meetings and decisions reported to the City Council regularly, the committee said.

A line-by-line rewrite of the General Orders was submitted for consideration. It suggested the new orders include:

• An express ban on the use of choke holds. The existing language says choke holds must be a decision by the chief, although they are not allowed.

• Officers should not hit a suspect in the head, and once a suspect is handcuffed no further force should be used.

• Verbal abuse by someone not suspected of a crime does not warrant use of force.

• Officers have a duty to report others suspected of violating the use of force policy.

• K9s should not be used in crowds.

White, the city’s mayor, said the lynching and pool decision were egregious and should be remembered. People should also know that in the 1930s the city took a park historically used by Black residents in an area known as Southernside to build a baseball stadium, he said.

Residents protested and were joined by business leaders in saying the city had made a bad decision. City leaders promised another park.

Now, 75 years later, the city is building it and calling it Unity Park.

This story was originally published October 28, 2020 at 5:00 AM.