WASHINGTON — The fatal shooting of a Black man by law-enforcement officers in northeastern North Carolina has elevated race, racial justice and policing as key issues in the state’s 2022 Democratic U.S. Senate primary.
Pasquotank County sheriff’s deputies shot and killed Andrew Brown Jr., 42, in his car outside of his home in Elizabeth City while they were serving search and arrest warrants related to felony drug charges, The News & Observer reported previously.
The death of another Black man at the hands of law enforcement sparked daily protests in the small town and garnered national attention as it came just hours after a police officer was found guilty of murder for killing an unarmed Black man last summer.
“It’ll be a weight that will be disproportionately placed on the shoulder of the Black candidates,” said Richard Watkins, a Chapel Hill virologist and one of three Black candidates in the race. “The two white candidates should be shouldered with the same burden we are burdened with. It should be expected to be a central component of their campaigns, too,”
“Everyone should make equity and the right to a just society central to their campaign. It should be demanded of the white candidates as well.”
The five Democrats who have announced they are running include three who are Black: Watkins, former state Sen. Erica Smith and former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley. Each, if elected, would be the first Black senator from North Carolina. The U.S. Senate does not currently have a Black woman among its 100 members.
State Sen. Jeff Jackson and Beaufort Mayor Rett Newton are also candidates in the Democratic primary, which is scheduled for March. Republican Sen. Richard Burr is not running for a fourth term in 2022.
“Yes, and it absolutely should,” Jackson said when asked by The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer in an interview Tuesday whether police reform would be a key part of the campaign. “It’s a deep concern to millions of people all across the state.”
Smith has spent part of the week in Elizabeth City, releasing videos on social media of her in the crowd with Brown’s family, attorneys and protesters. She has called for Attorney General Josh Stein’s office to get involved in the case.
“We have to address this crisis head-on,” Smith said of Black men, in particular, being killed by law enforcement, in an interview Tuesday. “This is a crisis and it needs to be addressed, whether or not I’m in a U.S. Senate race. How long are we going to continue to accept unarmed Black men and women being shot down and murdered by the people that are supposed to protect them?”
The American Public Health Association declared in 2018 that law-enforcement violence is a critical public-health issue and one that disproportionately affects marginalized populations.
About 1,000 people are killed annually in police shootings, according to statistics kept by The Washington Post, with young Black and Latino men the most likely to be killed. The database does not distinguish between shootings deemed justified or unjustified.
“Do we have the collective will to demand better policing that will keep us all safer?” Watkins said in an interview.
Jackson and Smith said they support passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The Democratic-controlled U.S. House passed the bill last year and again this year, but it did not get a vote in the Senate, which considered but did not pass a separate, Republican-led package of policing policies last year.
The legislation was named after a Black man killed by Minneapolis police officers, who knelt on his back for more than eight minutes. Bystanders recorded the scene. A jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin on murder charges — a verdict that was read just hours before Brown was shot in Elizabeth City.
Among the provisions in the legislation are bans on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, an end to qualified immunity that protects officers from civil lawsuits, lowering the standard for prosecution to recklessness from willfulness and creating a national police misconduct registry which, in theory, would make it difficult for officers removed from one agency to be hired by another.
Many of the changes would only be at the federal level, but with incentives for states and localities to adopt them as well.
Beasley, too, said in an interview Tuesday she would “work for police reform.”
“It’s important to be thoughtful. First and foremost, there must be accountability and transparency. It’s important to the communities and to the families involved,” said Beasley, who has two adult sons. “When the family of Andrew Brown is suffering, there’s a collective suffering of people all over the state.”
A judge in Pasquotank County ruled Wednesday morning that footage from law enforcement would not be released publicly.
“The decision to block the public from a full accounting of this incident is egregious,” Newton said in a statement to The News & Observer on Wednesday.
And Beasley tweeted: “This decision is an injustice to Andrew Brown’s family and the people of Elizabeth City. The full footage should be publicly released without delay.”
Under a North Carolina law passed in 2016 and signed by then-Gov. Pat McCrory — now a Republican candidate in the Senate race — judges determine whether or not video can be released.
Jackson was one of two state senators to vote against the law. It passed the House 88-20.
“I thought it overly restricted the public’s access to body camera footage. It stacks the deck overwhelmingly against public access. It stacks the deck against people themselves in the video,” said Jackson, who said there was talk at the time of returning to the tweak the legislation as time went on.
“They just never came back to it. Now they seem very resistant.”
Smith voted for the legislation as a member of the Senate.
“Prior to that bill there was no process for either recording or releasing of dash cam footage. It was a first step. It is so very needed in cases like this,” said Smith, who said the bill “increased police accountability.”
But Smith said the law “is not working as intended.”
Democratic lawmakers introduced proposed legislation this year to repeal the law and replace it with a measure that would require law enforcement agencies to release footage within 48 hours unless a court orders it sealed, The News & Observer reported earlier.
All five Democratic candidates called for the quick and complete release of unredacted footage in the Brown case. There are recordings from four body cameras and one dashboard camera.
“It’s important that the entire video be released to the family and to the community,” Beasley said
