Bring the facts to light
Friday's lead editorial.
Mike Barber's snappy quip the other night that everyone but the "intergalactic legal network" has investigated the Greensboro Police Department may have brought a few chuckles.
But when he moved that the council officially embrace yet another outside probe, the city councilman was dead serious. "We need to open our doors, open our windows and open our arms for anybody who wants to investigate us," Barber said.
Barber's motion, approved 5-3 by the council, welcomes a federal investigation of allegations that police destroyed records related to the bloody Nov. 3, 1979, confrontation between Klansmen and Nazis and a group of anti-Klan demonstrators that left five people dead and another 10 injured.
Three local ministers say they were told by an officer, Julius Fulmore, that someone in the police department ordered that 50 boxes of information pertaining to the shootings be destroyed in either 2004 or 2005.
The state NAACP followed with a request for a federal investigation in letters sent to the offices of U.S. Sens. Richard Burr and Elizabeth Dole and U.S. Reps. Howard Coble and Mel Watt, as well as Gov. Mike Easley and state Attorney General Roy Cooper.
Truth be told (and that is one of the goals here, isn't it?), the council should have approved Barber's motion unanimously. If the city wants to convey anything, amid lingering shadows over the police department, it should be that it has nothing to hide. Look where you will. Ask tough questions. Bring it on.
The motion does not endorse the ministers' allegations. It simply supports a clear and open accounting for what actually did or did not happen. And why.
So far, there is no evidence that any law was broken. District Attorney Doug Henderson has said as much. But questions remain about why the documents were discarded and who gave the order. If the files were destroyed as alleged, why do so as a local panel, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was researching the shootings? Don't the documents hold historic value if nothing else? What does the department typically do with old case files?
As for City Manager Mitchell Johnson's decision to meet with the ministers, then offer no response to their concerns, that's no way to treat citizens, whatever their point of view. "You can say what you will about them," Barber said of the Revs. Nelson Johnson, Cardes Brown and Gregory Headen. "They did it right. They came to us first."
As for the bigger picture, local government is struggling to rebuild the trust and confidence of citizens. The absolute worst way to do that is to be distant, close-mouthed and unresponsive. "I don't think we can ever appear to be defensive again," Barber said. "We can never appear to be covert again. We cannot absorb another body blow."
If the city has nothing to hide, it has no reason to worry. And it has much more to gain than to lose by shining light wherever it needs to shine.