2 Durham officers charged with assault (Another DukeLax Coverup)

DURHAM -- Raleigh police have charged two Durham Police Department officers in connection with an incident that occurred July 20 outside a Glenwood Avenue sports bar.

The officers, Gary Powell Lee, 38, of 3588 Copper Creek Lane, Franklinton, and Scott Christian Tanner, 33, of 2516 Hiking Trail, Raleigh, both face counts of simple assault. Conviction on the misdemeanor carries with it, for someone with no prior offenses on their record, the possibility of a maximum 30-day jail sentence and a $1,000 fine.

Lee and Tanner are accused of assaulting Rene Dennis Thomas, a cook who works at Blinco's Sports Restaurant and Bar, 6711 Glenwood Ave., Raleigh. The charges stem from a parking-lot altercation that occurred late on July 20 as five current and two former Durham Police Department officers were leaving a going-away party for a departing officer.

A criminal summons issued Thursday alleged that Lee, a member of the department's Special Operations Division, tried to strike Thomas and tackled him, causing the cook to fall to the ground. A second summons alleged that Tanner, a motorcycle officer who works in the department's Traffic Services Unit, kicked Thomas in the head.

Thomas has told television reporters that as many as six men participated in the assault, which began with an exchange of racial slurs. But Raleigh Police Department spokesman Jim Sughrue said detectives in that city don't intend to charge anyone else in connection with the incident, or add later to the charges they've already filed.

"It's been extensively investigated, and we're confident that the responsible individuals have been charged," Sughrue said.

But Lee and Tanner -- and three of their colleagues -- could still face sanctions from the Durham Police Department. An internal investigation is continuing and should conclude in two to three weeks, Police Chief Steve Chalmers said at a news conference Thursday.

The Durham probe is focusing on a wider range of issues that include the alleged use of racial slurs. "The alleged conduct is something that is certainly deplorable to us, and something we don't want to be consistent in the way we operate and conduct ourselves," Chalmers said. "The entire allegation is disturbing."

Lee and Tanner had previously been restricted to administrative duties, and remain so. The other three officers in the case -- Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, Officer Richard Clayton and Officer James Griffin -- had also been restricted but on Thursday were allowed to resume their normal duties.

The decision doesn't mean the three have been cleared, but does indicate that based on "the facts we've already uncovered ... there's no reason we can't put these officers back on full duty," Chalmers said.

Asked later if that meant the three had played only a minor role in the incident, Chalmers said, "At least we can say it wasn't a major role."

All of the officers have the right to a lawyer's help, and two, Gottlieb and Lee, have retained the Durham firm of Clayton Myrick McClanahan & Coulter to represent them as the internal investigation and criminal case unfold.

A lawyer there, Allen Mason, confirmed Thursday that senior partner Jerry Clayton had spoken to Gottlieb and that another of his colleagues, former Assistant District Attorney Freda Black, had spoken to Lee.

One of the two former Durham officers involved in the case, James Kennedy, has also retained Clayton's firm and has talked with Mason. Kennedy is a former motorcycle officer who left the department late last year. The other former Durham officer who was present remains unidentified.

Asked if the lawyers and their clients would speak up to offer their version of what happened, Mason said there's "not a chance in the world" of that happening outside formal channels.

"We're not Duke lacrosse lawyers," Mason said alluding to the year's most highly publicized Durham Police Department case, one that Gottlieb and Richard Clayton, who's no relation to lawyer Jerry Clayton, have both worked on. "We don't practice that way. We don't comment about pending cases, we don't do interviews, we don't make statements."

The Raleigh charges were notable for the fact that they didn't address what Thomas has said was the first act of the confrontation, a move by one of the men involved to poke him in the shoulder with a finger. The charge against Lee addressed an act Thomas alleged was committed immediately afterward by a second man, and the charge against Tanner addressed something that happened after Thomas fell to the ground.

The shoulder poke was likely a criminal act under North Carolina law, given court decisions that have held "the merest unauthorized touching of another [person] is an assault," said Barry Winston, a criminal-defense lawyer in Chapel Hill.

A judge "who strictly interprets the law would, I suspect, hold that North Carolina law requires him to convict someone who walks up to someone and in an antagonistic fashion pokes that person with his finger," although that's "not what the average person thinks of as assault," Winston said.

Raleigh detectives filed Thursday's charges after consulting prosecutors in Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby's office, a move Sughrue said is standard in officer-involved cases. The spokesman declined to say why there wasn't a charge addressing the alleged shoulder-poke.

"Based on the investigation of the case, and facts present, it was determined that these two charges were the appropriate charges to bring," Sughrue said.

Thomas was surprised Thursday to hear that the charges involved the officers they did. "Lee and Tanner? Huh. OK. Check that again and call me back," he said before cutting off a brief interview. "I don't think you have the right guys."

The cook did not elaborate, and did not return a call placed to his cell phone late Thursday afternoon.

The Raleigh department's decision to issue a criminal summons for each of the officers, rather than an arrest warrant, saved Lee and Tanner an appearance before a magistrate and possibly the need to post bail to avoid detention. Sughrue said the officers didn't receive any special treatment.

"That is very typically the way a simple assault case is handled," he said. "That's very consistent with the way we'd handle the same case if the suspects had not been law enforcement officers."

Also routine was the Raleigh department's decision to assign detectives from its own internal-affairs unit to work the case. No matter what agency they work for, when police are "suspect in a case in Raleigh, the case is investigated by internal affairs," Sughrue said.

Mayor Bill Bell said the allegations, if true, are unfortunate. "If in fact it did happen, I'd hope they'd be prosecuted to the fullest extent," he said.

City Councilman Eugene Brown agreed. "It's always problematic when you have those hired and paid for enforcing the law breaking the law," he said. "I want to withhold judgment, but so far, this is just embarrassing."

Lee has worked for the department since 1999. Tanner joined the force in 1997, and was recently the beneficiary of a department-organized fundraiser intended to help him and another officer pay for cancer treatments. He suffers from Hodgkin's

"The committee' still powerful force in Durham.
Group stirs reverence, fear in political circles."

Author: SHIFFER; November 17, 1996, The News & Observer

DURHAM - Held together by faith after 239,640 miles, the Greater Joy Baptist Church van rattled over the railroad tracks in East Durham and kept going. It was Tuesday, not Sunday, and Gwen Helms was on a different kind of mission: Getting out the vote for the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People

Helms was fetching her seventh voter this Election Day - Valeria Shepard, who had called for a ride because she was running late. A toot of the horn brought Shepard, a West Virginia transplant who found out about "The Committee" when a volunteer nabbed her one day outside the supermarket.

After a bumpy trip to Precinct 18, Holloway Street School, Shepard was handed a pink sample ballot marked with the committee's favored candidates. Shepard voted, climbed back into the van and smiled with satisfaction at choosing her leaders: "It feels good and I'm praying at the same time."

Chalk up six miles on the odometer and one more full ballot for the committee.

For 61 years, the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People has built its power one vote at a time. The most effective political action group in the Triangle - and arguably the state - demonstrated its strength this past Election Day, mobilizing thousands of black voters to back its favored candidates.

The result was an affirmation of the group's formidable role in Durham politics, a role that had suffered a blow in the 1994 elections. This year, voters removed white conservatives from local government. Starting next month, committee-endorsed candidates will dominate both the City Council and the county Board of Commissioners.

Such influence has earned it both reverence and animosity.

Supporters say the group is only as strong as its members, who take heed of the committee's endorsements but vote as individuals. The committee succeeds, they say, because it makes the most of a long history of activism in a black community that members and political observers call one of the most organized in America.

Opponents accuse the committee of backing only black candidates and manipulating blacks to vote against their interests. "It's like a dictatorship," contends Republican County Commissioner Ed DeVito, who was voted out this fall. "Now they can pretty much do what they want to do."

But the reality of the committee's power is more subtle. Its endorsed candidates generally win only if they happen to be Democrats and their election depends on a coalition of voters, black and white.

What separates the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People from other such groups, according to political scientists, is its ability to channel political sentiment into a get-out-the-vote machine unlike most others.

In politics, however, "the perception of power is power," Robin Dorff, an N.C. State University political scientist, says. And the perception of the committee's influence is spread by supporters and detractors alike.

"We've got a good machine going," said committee chairman Ken Spaulding. "And good folks doing it."

### Historic role: When business executive C.C. Spaulding - an elder cousin of the current chairman - convened a group of black leaders at Durham's Algonquin Tennis Club in 1935, the world outside was divided into black and white. Blacks sent their children to segregated schools and faced arrest if they tried to eat in the wrong restaurant. On the City Council and county Board of Commissioners, white Democrats ruled.

But Durham was also home to a unusually large population of affluent black bankers, insurance executives, educators and other professionals, whose 1935 meeting at the tennis club created what would become the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs.

For the next six decades, the group would serve as an unflinching advocate for Durham's black community in employment, education, court and politics. It took nearly two decades before it got its first candidate elected to a major office. In 1953, a committee-backed candidate, Rencher Harris, became the first black City Council member. By the 1980s, five decades into its work, black majorities were elected to both the county Board of Commissioners and City Council.

Chester Jenkins became the city's first black mayor in 1989. Bill Bell, perhaps Durham's best-known black politician, used his position as chairman of the county commissioners to integrate Durham's two school systems in 1992.

In 1994, the committee helped make Jeanne Lucas the first black woman elected to the state Senate.

But the committee, argues Dorff, the NCSU political scientist, would not succeed without an already organized and active black community. It's the catalyst, not a controller, of political consciousness. "It's probably like yeast in a dough," he said.

Today, the group and its nine subcommittees - civic, political, religious and human affairs, youth, economic, education, housing, health and legal redress - meet regularly to keep themselves abreast of local and national events and trends. The committee raises its collective voice when leaders perceive a threat to the community's interest.

The committee successfully lobbied for the merger of the predominantly black city schools and largely white county schools. It fought back an attempt in federal court earlier this year to dilute black representation on the school board.

"Without the committee, I would hate to even speculate what Durham would be like," said Delores Rogers, a committee activist and retired lab technician. "It could be different if we didn't voice our opinions and stayed quiet. It could be bad for people overall."

### How much influence?:

State Rep. Paul Luebke looked flushed and agitated when he showed up at the committee headquarters on Election Day. On a visit to one of the precincts, Luebke discovered that some of the committee's 38,000 sample ballots were incorrectly printed, falsely suggesting that the committee favored the state's $950 million highway bond.

Luebke, an outspoken highway bond opponent, thought the mistake could swing the referendum in Durham County. "It's terrible," he said. "We're talking about shifting 30,000 votes."

The mistake was corrected and the bond failed in Durham County, but Luebke's concern shows politicians' recognition of the influence of the committee's endorsements.

A steady stream of Durham politicos - including Bell, Jenkins, County Commissioner MaryAnn Black, City Council member Cynthia Brown and others - visited the committee's Grant Street office that day to help out or just greet the campaign workers.

For each election, the committee spends months plotting strategy. It analyzes the races and conducts extensive candidate interviews. To build suspense, it waits until a few days before an election before announcing its recommendations.

Then, having made its decision, the group musters an army of volunteers to coordinate rides, distribute sample ballots and work the polls. It doesn't rely on good will alone: The committee pays as many as 40 poll workers $40 each to hand out literature and perform other duties at certain precincts.

The result, election after election, is a black voting blitz that has put the committee's endorsed candidates into office, despite a black community that represents only 37 percent of the county's population, according to the 1990 U.S. Census.

When Durham County conservatives looked at the ruins of their campaigns after the 1995 and 1996 elections, they blamed the committee in a flurry of editorial cartoons, letters to the editor and public statements.

DeVito, the toppled Republican commissioner, blamed his loss on blacks voting only for other blacks and suggested the committee has too much power.

"It's very difficult to overcome an organization like that," he said.

Russell Barringer Jr., who has supported a string of unsuccessful conservative candidates, said the committee aims to control local politics. The group's power, Barringer suggests, depends on blacks thoughtlessly following its recommendations.

"They can say that they vote their individual minds; however, the facts certainly don't indicate that," he said. "The fact of the matter is that they vote along racial lines. For them to say otherwise is absolutely ridiculous."

Brown, the City Council member and the director of the anti-poverty nonprofit Southerners for Economic Justice, bristles at such comments. She says the committee has never tried to tell her how to vote on any issue.

The rhetoric that followed this year's election, she says, bears a tone of white supremacy. The system has traditionally held blacks powerless, so when they start to identify leaders and organize, "we become the focus and are told that we have too much control over politics."

An analysis of the Nov. 5 election shows that the results are not simply the product of some political machine.

All but one of the committee's endorsed candidates in Durham County won their races. But voters in the black districts cooperated with the committee's sample slate only when the recommended candidates happened to be Democrats.

The committee failed when it tried to steer a majority of the same voters toward GOP candidates. Its endorsed candidate for state treasurer, Republican Ann Duncan, lost this year to Democrat Harlan Boyles, even in some of the committee's key precincts.

Such results confirm one political scientist's suspicion that the committee lacks the power attributed to it by its supporters, detractors and the media.

"The power is really in the hands of the individual citizen who makes up his mind," said Gordon Diem, a political scientist at N.C. Central University.

### Always there: Politics and the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People have been inseparable for Lillian Cutler. Legally blind, she and her late husband, Cagy, ran a snack bar at NCCU for years. She also has been the first voter to show up at her Pearson School polling place on election days for decades.

To do so, she relies on volunteers from the committee to take her to the school, read the endorsements, mark her choices on the ballot and take her home.

Cutler, 82, said she always knew whom she wanted to vote for in certain races, but she would depend on the endorsements to help her with unfamiliar names. The committee has always been there for 61 years because it serves people like her, she said.

"They've been doing something, something that benefited their own race. They realized that we needed them, and we still do."

Therein lies the true strength of the committee, supporters say: longevity and diversity.

While the organization and Durham's black community have changed since 1935, the committee has consistently brought together blacks across the political spectrum. It charges no membership fees and is open to anyone who wishes to participate.

"It's been the leadership over the last 60 years," Spaulding said. "There is great respect for the organization by members of the black community."

It has endured setbacks. In 1991, white conservatives swept the black liberal majority off the City Council. Three years later, two white Republicans replaced the two committee-backed black Democrats on the Board of Commissioners when a conservative tide swept the state. But the committee bounced back each time. Similar organizations, such as the Raleigh-Wake Citizens' Association, have struggled to maintain their influence in changing political times.

If the committee achieves anything, advocates say, it keeps politics in the forefront of the black community's consciousness.

"It makes people aware of what's happening," said Don Williams Jr., an IBM computer salesman whose bid for a school board seat in May failed despite the committee's backing. "Without the Durham committee, there's lots of things I myself would not know."

### Getting out the vote: But it is at election time when the committee's diverse constituency comes together as a machine, fine-tuned by decades of experience.

On this past Election Day, stalwarts gathered before dawn in a small office building next to a boarded-up, battered duplex on Grant Street. For the next 12 hours, one tiny, cramped office would serve as the committee's election headquarters.

By 9 a.m. committee headquarters already had received 400 requests for rides and information. Four constantly ringing telephones and a stream of visitors seeking orders or answers made the office, in the words of one campaign staffer, "frantic and frenetic." Staffers shoved papers bearing the names of voters into the hands of drivers, who fetched them in station wagons, rental cars, church vans and other transportation.

"This man was supposed to be picked up at 8 o'clock," shouted committee activist Hazel Rich, the phone in her hand at 10:20 a.m. Sandra Battle, the committee's political director, yelled her response.

"We're backed up, we're backed up. Tell him the polls are full!"

Throughout the day, Spaulding stopped by to talk strategy with Battle. At midmorning, poll workers started calling in turnout at targeted precincts. Volunteer Hollis Shaw checked the numbers against the total of registered voters. Workers would later "flush" or recruit registered voters who had not yet shown up to vote.

Finally, 15 hours later, the rides, number-crunching and fingernail-biting paid off: Turnout in some core black precincts topped 68 percent, and most were higher than the county average of 59.3 percent.

Battle summed up the day, her mission, with two words: "We delivered." Again.

Copyright 1996 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.
Record Number: 1996321120

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