Greensboro City Council, closed session, March 3:
At-large Councilman Robbie Perkins: "I do think there is one major, major issue that, Zack, I don't know it it's on your decision tree, but I think this council needs to explore with our attorney prior to making this final decision. And we may not have even been briefed by our attorney on this Department of Justice issue. The DOJ is coming in here, and is going to investigate our police department.
"In thinking through the various positions that various folks are taking -- Zack has talked about running a corporation and making decisions in the best interest of the corporation -- I think in this case we need to look at the liability portion of this deal: That we have a manager that basically made a decision to stand up and listen to some African-American police officers' complaints about the police situation. No matter what you believe about Wray and whatever else, over the last three or four years this thing has escalated and been kept around -- and Bledsoe and all his stuff.
"And we've got a situation today where we've got a new president. And we've got a very aggressive attorney general of the United States of America. And that person is very interested in what happened in Greensboro, North Carolina over the last four years. And what type of exposure -- and I want Terry Wood to answer this question -- what type of exposure do we have as a city, as a police department to a DOJ investigation? And is that exposure enhanced or increased by us removing the person that voluntarily opened that investigation up [inaudible]? And my concern is that we have quite a bit of exposure. That that exposure is measured from a credibility standpoint of our community in terms of how we'll be perceived statewide and nationally, as well as dollar-wise. And I'd just like somebody to do that. Because we haven't had our briefing on this DOJ thing. And I don't know a whole lot about it. I've heard...."
Mayor Yvonne Johnson: "To be legal, let's wait and do that in the second, because we talked about coming in here...."
City Attorney Terry Wood: "...For one purpose."
Perkins: "But this is a critical part...."
Yvonne Johnson: "I understand, but can you just save it, because I don't want us to be illegal. You tell me if that's illegal for you to answer that now?"
Wood: "I can answer this part of the question. I can't get into the Justice Department investigation."
Yvonne Johnson: "Okay."
Wood: "Your specific request was Mitch's part in that. And that was part of my original discussion when I mentioned keeping him on as a city employee, is that his part in that would be very crucial. And has been. We're trying now to fulfill the Justice Department request, and he's been helpful in saying, 'Well, you need this, you need that, you need to go here.' As well as our PD and some other things. So when you say he is a critical part of that and might somehow affect that, I can only answer that it well could. Now, I don't want to get over into the investigation itself. I can do that, but we didn't come in here for that purpose, and we didn't state that."
Perkins: "My specific concern is that our increased liability could put the city at jeopardy at some point in time in the future, based on its actions in this regard. I think that it sets us up pretty good for some fairly serious exposure by DOJ."
Some back story here.
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