Surveillance of black leaders

I rarely make common cause with the Rhino and the Troublemaker. But in at least this instance, they're right to demand an accounting from Greensboro City Manager Mitchell Johnson and police Chief Tim Bellamy.

Ben Holder has been showing up at council meetings and making a scene about this lately. And Rhino Editor John Hammer picks up the story this week, writing:

"On Tuesday, Holder brought up the "police surveillance" matter the council should have dealt with a long, long time ago, but instead the council handled the issue as it has so many and just hoped it would go away. The council does have a problem because in dealing with this issue, councilmembers will have to confront the fact that City Manager Mitchell Johnson and police Chief Tim Bellamy mislead the council. The question the council will have to answer is, was the misrepresentation deliberate or not."

What's surreal is that the facts of this case have been in the public realm for sometime. Mitchell Johnson admitted in a press conference in November 2006 that the reason black community leaders were recorded by a nonsworn police employee was because a fellow task force member was, as he put it, "doing something inappropriate."

The background of the story has been amply reported in YES! Weekly, the Troublemaker blog and the Rhino. The trouble is, not everyone in the community faithfully reads, YES! Weekly, the Troublemaker or the Rhino. Several prominent citizens remain persuaded that the Greensboro Police Department under former Chief David Wray deliberately targeted black leaders for surveillance, based on a press release put out by the department in April 2006. I know because I had to explain what really happened to the Rev. Nelson Johnson, one of the black leaders who was recorded, last spring. If all you know is that black leaders were recorded, but you don't know that the reason for the recording was to gather information about a task force member who led a wired nonsworn police employee around to the offices of various black leaders, it looks sinister.

When I interviewed Chief Bellamy in December 2006, he said the recordings could not be released to those who were recorded because they were part of an administrative investigation. It sounded ridiculous to me then — eight months after the disclosure that the recordings had been made. So it's aggravating to read today in the Rhino that Bellamy wrote in a Jan. 29 memo to City Attorney Terry Wood that "this matter is included in an administrative investigation which is being completed at this time," and that "this information is protected."

It's time for all involved — Mitchell Johnson, Tim Bellamy — to come clean, and Mayor Yvonne Johnson should insist on a full airing of the facts.