CHAPEL HILL – Following Monday’s Chapel Hill Town Council meeting, Town Manager Roger Stancil lifted the temporary gag order preventing town staff—including himself—from speaking publicly on the Yates building incident of November 13.

In an interview with WCHL on Friday, Stancil, for the first time, gave us a detailed account of how he experienced the events that transpired that Sunday afternoon.

Listen to Part 1 of Roger Stancil’s conversation with WCHL’s Aaron Keck.


SATURDAY UPDATE: Listen to Part 2 of Roger Stancil's conversation with WCHL's Aaron Keck.


“Sometime during the day on Sunday, Chief (Chris) Blue contacted me,” Stancil says. “I had known that there was a march…and I’d known that we were providing our usual protection for marchers…but I didn’t really understand or know about the incident until Chief Blue called.”

What had happened was this: on Saturday, November 12, attendees of the Carrboro Anarchist Bookfair had planned a march down Franklin Street to the Occupy Chapel Hill encampment at Peace and Justice Plaza. Chapel Hill police officers, led by Assistant Chief Leo Vereen, were on hand to provide support and control traffic.

***Click here to read Police Chief Chris Blue's "My Reaction Was Surprise" account of the Yates Building incident...

But instead of proceeding to the Occupy camp, marchers veered into the long-vacant Yates Motor Company building at 419 W. Franklin Street. The protestors unveiled signs on the upper windows reading “OCCUPY EVERYTHING,” shouted down Vereen when he tried to speak to them, and made it clear by the end of the night that they intended to hold the building indefinitely if possible.

Occupiers said they hoped to turn the dormant building into a community center. But property owner Joe Riddle told police the protestors had no permission to be there, and Chapel Hill Fire officials said the building wasn’t fit for human habitation—necessitating some action on the part of police.

“It was unfortunate,” Stancil says, “because…it had taken this turn that appeared to be a lot different than anything we’d experienced in the past.”

“COMMUNICATIONS BREAKDOWN”

Stancil says Chapel Hill Police will typically contact him, in high-level situations, to keep him informed on all developments—but in virtually all cases, neither he nor elected officials question their judgment on how to proceed.

“My job is to hire the very best police chief,” he says, “not try to be the police chief. I rely on the department to determine tactics and specifics (and) to keep me informed...

“I could (intervene) if I want to—they work for me—but my job is to hire the best professionals there are, and then rely on them to do their job.”

And that, Stancil says, is how he proceeded when Chief Blue called him on November 13.

“It was just, ‘we got a situation, we got people in the building, the building’s unsafe, we’ve got to get them out of the building, we’re going to do that and we’re going to do it before nightfall, (and) we’re waiting to make sure we can do it as safely as possible,’” he says. “That was the kind of level of information he provided me, which I think is the appropriate level…and then I provided (that) to the mayor.”

Stancil says he spoke to Chief Blue between 2 and 4 times on November 13, and relayed information to Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt throughout the day; Kleinschmidt in turn kept Town Council members in the loop. Somewhere along the way, however, a good deal of information got lost.

“Communications is hard,” Stancil says. “There’s the person sending communication and the person receiving information…we deal with information based on all kinds of assumptions about the past, (and in this case) we had an extremely unique situation for the town of Chapel Hill.”

With Chief Blue out of town, Assistant Chief Vereen was the commanding officer at the Yates building—and with events developing rapidly, conversations between the two officers focused less on detail and more on strategy. But it was Blue who was responsible for conveying information to Stancil, and Stancil in turn informed Kleinschmidt.

By that point, information was being received third- and fourth-hand, and wasn’t very reliable. Kleinschmidt, for instance, told Council Member Laurin Easthom that “Police are asking one more time” for protestors to leave voluntarily—but Chief Blue says he and Vereen never even discussed that option.

“There was a communications breakdown, and I was part of that chain,” says Stancil. “We really need to (develop) communication systems where we’re more clear about some of those situations, so I can provide accurate information to elected officials.”

DEPLOYING SERT: “I REMAIN CONVINCED”

In the middle of the afternoon on November 13, Chapel Hill police deployed a Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) to remove the protestors from the Yates building after an occupation of approximately 18 hours. The decision to deploy SERT was largely Assistant Chief Vereen’s, with approval from Chief Blue.

The dramatic scene that ensued on Franklin Street—cops in riot gear with drawn rifles, sometimes pointed at unarmed bystanders—enraged some residents, particularly after officers learned the occupiers weren’t armed. (The decision to deploy SERT was based in part on a perceived threat of possible resistance.) The SERT team did, however, evacuate the building successfully with no injuries—though the Town did later apologize to the media, on behalf of two journalists who were detained for nearly an hour.

In the rush to act, Stancil says he can’t remember if he knew exactly what police were planning. “I’m not sure whether our conversation included (SERT) or not,” he says. “I know it was really important to get the people out of the building before the situation got even more complex…

“We couldn’t let people just continue to be invited into this unsafe situation, because if something had happened, there’d be concerns about that too. So the on-scene commanders were caught in a difficult situation and a situation they’d not faced before.”

And while Town officials may have been largely in the dark about what was transpiring, Stancil reiterates that the final decision rested with police regardless—and after more than two months, he says he’s satisfied with the decisions that were made.

“After review, I remain convinced that the on-scene commanders made the best decision they could make with the information they had at the time,” he says. “Could we have done a better job of describing what they saw and what decisions they were making? Could they have done a better job of describing that to me? Yes. And we’re working on systems where that might occur…

“But they were in the moment, and hindsight is always a lot sharper…and I know these two assistant chiefs who were on the scene (Vereen and Bob Overton) are good solid long-term Chapel Hill police officers who made the best decision they could.”

The town of Chapel Hill got a significant amount of negative national press as a result of the incident, but Stancil says—relatively speaking, at least—Chapel Hill did it right.

“Hindsight, we have different info and we might have made a different decision, but we might have made the same decision,” he says. “And one of the things that confirms our decision is, you look at any pictures or any newspaper or hear on the radio about any other incident such as these in other parts of the country, there’s no question that we did it far better than others.”

LOOKING AHEAD

One way or another, the Yates building incident is now inescapably in the past—so while the debate will continue over what should or should not have been done, Stancil says the important thing now is to make sure similar events in the future are handled even better.

“I think our challenge is to look forward,” he says, “so that we have multiple options available to our commanders in these new situations...
 
“I think the decision that was made produced an effective result with nobody getting physically hurt. But especially in a town that values civil disobedience…we need to have other specialized teams in place (besides SERT) for different kinds of situations, so commanders on the scene have a multiple array of options, not just the team that’s mainly used for protection and drug raids.”

Stancil says the town and the police department are currently exploring new teams now.

Visit Chapelboro.com later this weekend for Stancil’s comments on the process of investigating the Yates incident—from the Community Policing Advisory Committee to the ongoing call for an independent investigation to the Town’s new approach, soliciting first-hand accounts via an online forum.