Columbia police thought he was a gallery intruder. He was the resident artist
John Sims thought neo-Nazis were about to kill him early Monday morning.
In the gallery adjacent to his loft apartment at 701 Center for Contemporary Arts on Whaley Street, he’d created art that put Confederate flags in nooses and reimagined the flag with lace and silky cloth and pink hearts in place of the stars. He thought his art might have caused a visceral reaction that was about to get him murdered, he said.
A gun was pointed at him and a person was yelling at him. When he saw the badges, he still wasn’t sure they weren’t white supremacists. He thought the people saying they were Columbia police officers might have been impostors.
“If it’s the Klan, I’m not about to have some wine and cheese and a discussion,” Sims said at a Tuesday talk about his art and the experience with Columbia Police Department moderated by Dr. Bobby Donaldson, a civil rights historian at USC.
It’s an experience that Sims said the nation has seen end with innocent Black men dead.
The Columbia Police Department says its officers were investigating a potential break-in at the center. The officers acted almost perfectly with one exception, the department said. On Thursday, the department released the body camera footage of the incident.
At about 2 a.m. on May 17, a Columbia officer noticed a door was open at the 701 center, which is also a popular event space, according to a police report.
The officer called dispatch and said he was going to search the place for a possible intruder or to see if anyone was in trouble, a police report said. Two backup officers arrived and the officers entered the building with guns drawn, following their training. It’s proper protocol for officers to have their guns out when they search a building for a possible crime, a department spokesperson said in a statement.
The officers heard footsteps on an upper story floor, according to the report. The officers identified themselves and yelled for the person to come out.
Sims had seen what looked like flashlights shining into his loft apartment. That’s when he started to believe white supremacists might be after him for his art, he said. Sims had been staying at the 701 center as the artist in residence since early May. He went into the loft’s bathroom to try to call police, but had no cell phone signal.
The officers entered the apartment, and Sims eventually came out of the loft bathroom. With his first glimpse of the officers, he saw the gun drawn on him. The officers yelled for him to put his hands up but he didn’t do it at first, still thinking the men with badges and guns might be white supremacists in disguise.
The officers shouted more commands at Sims. Sims wanted the officers to give more identification than simply saying they were police. Sims put his hands up as officers commanded. An officer went up the loft stairs to detain Sims. That’s when the armed officer holstered his gun, according to reports. The officer pulled Sims arms behind him to cuff him, the police report said.
Sims explained he was the artist in residence, he said. They kept him in what police called “investigative detention” for about eight minutes while they checked his identification and ran it through a wanted criminal database. Officers saw clothes and bedding in the loft, a report said.
Those items, along with the database clearing Sims, prompted police to uncuff Sims, who was shaken but not physically hurt.
Even though he escaped relatively unharmed, Sims questioned whether the police would have put a white woman in handcuffs. Would she have been treated the same, he wondered. He had other concerns about the incident. He was immediately treated like an intruder without any other considerations, and detaining him wasn’t necessary, he said.
He questioned the legality of police coming into the loft without a warrant. The department’s statement about the incident is too general and leaves out details, such as the officers entering the living space without the warrant, Sims said.
“I could have gotten shot,” he said. “They would have thought they saved the day but here I am the artist in residence.”
The Columbia Police Department sent out a statement on the incident Thursday afternoon. The statement indicates that the officers would have acted exactly the same if circumstances, such as race, were different.
In a review of the incident, Chief Skip Holbrook concluded that officers “conducted themselves professionally and within policy,” the statement said.
“Our communities are faced with significant challenges today,” Holbrook said. “Recent events around the country have brought policing issues, such as transparency and accountability, community trust, officer and public safety, and use of force, and implicit bias to the forefront in our public dialogue. (Columbia Police Department) has taken advantage of every opportunity to be a part of the national conversation about community-police engagement and criminal justice reforms through training, policy and culture.”
City Manager Teresa Wilson said in the statement that temporary rentals in the city need to be better identified and those living spaces need to be communicated to the police and fire department.
Holbrook said a supervising officer at the incident erred in denying Sims’ request to take photos of the officers. Sims had asked the officers if he could take photos. The supervising officer said he couldn’t. Sims said one of the officers asked if he was going to put the photos online.
Not allowing Sims to take photos was “the only misstep,” Holbrook said.
SIms, a Detroit native who has lived in Florida for 20 years, “is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist who creates multimedia projects spanning the areas of mathematics, art, text, performance and political-media activism,” his website says. “His main projects are informed by the vocabulary of mathematical structure, the politics of sacred symbols and poetic reflection.”
He began his residency at 701 Center for the Arts on May 4. He’ll end it in June. In that time he’ll finish writing a play titled “The Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag,” which is “an exploration of the twenty years of artistic practice and experience around this body of work,” wrote Michaela Pilar Brown, an artist and director of the 701 center.
Sims’ work “boldly addresses the connection between Blackness and the complex history of the American South,” Pilar Brown wrote. “In particular, it is a response to the controversy around the Confederate flag and an active movement to infiltrate the discussion by questioning the very nature of sacred symbols, visual terrorism and identity politics shaped by symbols.”
Speaking about the incident on Tuesday, he said he did not trust police. In June 2020, motivated by the killing of George Floyd, he penned a piece for the Orlando Sentinel explaining why he doesn’t trust police or their ability to change the culture that led to Floyd being smothered under an officer’s knee for nearly nine minutes.
“When a police culture suffocates the voice of justice, why should I trust the police with my body?” Sims wrote. “If resisting and cooperating bring the same outcome — death — what am I to do, especially if good cops cannot stand up to bad cops?”
The irony isn’t lost on Sims that he tried to call the police when he thought others with more malicious intent were attempting to hurt him because of his art. Even if Sims distrusts police, he has a deeper level of distrust for another group.
“I’d rather them be cops than neo-Nazis,” he said.
SIms’ exhibit runs until June 25 at 701 Center for Contemporary Art. On June 10, there’s a table reading of the play he’s working on while in residence.
This story was originally published May 21, 2021 at 10:30 AM.