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  Others weren’t so put off by seeing me in the news. My tenure as NAACP president still hadn’t officially begun when I got a call from Lisa Johnson, a Black graduate student at Spokane’s Gonzaga University. She told me she’d already talked to the current local NAACP president, who hadn’t been much help, but she saw the good work I was doing and was hoping I might be more supportive. She told me her five-year-old son Jason had recently come home from school with dirt on his clothes and a bandage on his forehead. When she’d asked him what had happened, he told her that some kids at school had thrown him in the garbage and he’d hit his head. She drove straight to St. Aloysius Gonzaga Catholic School, and Jason showed her the dumpster into which two twelve-year-old white kids had tossed him. Unable to lift the heavy lid, Jason remained trapped inside until one of his classmates heard him yelling and went for help. He was taken to the school nurse, who told him not to tell anyone about what had happened. Lisa discussed what the two boys did to Jason with the school’s administrators, but they denied any such thing had taken place.

  I found Lisa’s story completely heartbreaking and unacceptable. As the mother of two Black sons, I also found it completely believable. I couldn’t think of a more salient example of devaluing a Black child’s life. The two white boys literally treated little Jason like garbage! I asked her how I could help. She needed school supplies to homeschool Jason until he felt safe going back to school, and she wanted to raise public awareness about the incident so it didn’t get swept under the rug. I was happy to do both. I rallied EWU’s BSU, and we reached out to the BSUs at Gonzaga and Whitworth. Together we collected homeschool supplies, and on a cold day in December we marched around the school, stood on the corner where parents picked up their kids, and brandished signs that read, “Treat Our Black Kids with Respect,” “School Should Be a Safe Place for Everyone,” and “Justice for Jason.” Even Jason was there, all bundled up in snow pants, a winter coat, and gloves, holding an “Every Student Matters” sign above his head.

  I officially assumed the presidency of the NAACP’s Spokane chapter on January 1, 2015. The position was unpaid, but that didn’t stop me from working overtime. One of the first tasks I assigned myself was finding the chapter a new office. It was currently located in the back of the Emmanuel Family Life Center, an African Methodist Episcopal church several miles from downtown next to some shady-looking apartments. You had to park in a dimly lit parking lot, and it was always dark outside when the meetings ended. Around the same time that I assumed the presidency, an NAACP office in Colorado Springs was bombed, and it was also located in an obscure part of town. I knew from experience that the local white supremacy groups were fully capable of doing something similar, and I didn’t want anything like that to happen on my watch.

  When I heard that State Representative Marcus Ricelli was moving out of his office on West Main Avenue, I went to take a look. It was perfect. It had beautiful hardwood floors, access to conference rooms where we could hold our monthly meetings, and more-than-reasonable rent. It was also located in the middle of downtown, above a community theater, with a law office on one side and State Senator Andy Billig’s office on the other. Those who might be tempted to direct a hate crime at this new office would probably think twice when they saw that it shared a wall with a government official who was white and male. I secured a large donation from a local businessman and prepaid our rent and utilities for an entire year. We had a ribbon-cutting ceremony on MLK Day to commemorate the office’s opening.

  Meanwhile, I was already hard at work in my new role on Spokane’s Office of Police Ombudsman Commission, which oversaw the work of the local ombudsman and intervened as needed to recommend policy reform within the Spokane Police Department. Getting the OPOC job had been an arduous process. The application was very long and detailed, requiring me to write an essay, and unlike the ballot for the NAACP position it included an “ethnic origins” question. I checked BLACK, WHITE, and NATIVE AMERICAN. I was then interviewed by two city councilmen, a committee, and finally the mayor, David Condon. Getting interviewed three times for the job—which I believe was one or two interviews more than the other OPOC members had to endure—seemed excessive and unfair to me. But once the mayor appointed me I put that behind me and concentrated on the work that needed to be done. In December, the four other members of the commission elected me to be its chair and Kevin Berkompas the vice chair. Some people commented how funny it was to have a Black Lives Matter activist be the chair, while the vice chair looked like a white cop. Kevin had served in the Air Force and worked in the Department of Defense, but underneath the close-cropped hair and militaristic demeanor was a man with a conscience who was committed to ensuring police accountability and transparency.

  Like my position with the NAACP, this one was also unpaid, but I took it as seriously as I would have if I’d earned a million dollars a year, and attacked the three-inch binder, which detailed the history of the previous ombudsman’s work, with the same rigor I used for academic research. As chair of the OPOC, I went on ride-alongs with police officers to understand local policing methods and make sure they were acting aboveboard, and I presided over the commission’s monthly televised meetings. I met frequently with local leaders, including city council members, nonprofit directors, and the heads of community organizations such as the Spokane Police Accountability and Reform Coalition, the Center for Justice, and the Peace and Justice Action League. I occasionally joined some of the other commissioners on trips to places like Seattle and Oakland for training sessions in civilian oversight of law enforcement. And once a month I had a one-on-one meeting with the police chief, Frank Straub.

  With his moustache and gruff demeanor, Chief Straub was a cop through and through. Even in the safety of his office, he’d wear a bulletproof vest and sit with his hands on his belt inches away from his gun. He generally acted civilly toward me during, our meetings, but he always conveyed an air of condescension. He would offer me coffee, which with my tight schedule and limited sleep I never refused, but once we were seated, he’d usually start off by saying something snide like, “Rachel, it must really suck to be the head of the NAACP and the chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission. Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Which hat are you wearing today?”

  Since my divorce, I’d gotten better at standing up to bullies and men who tried to leverage their power to intimidate me, so I never backed down when Chief Straub baited me. “I’m doing fine, Frank,” was my usual response. “I’m here as chair of the commission today, and, no, I don’t see my roles as conflicting but complementary since both of them address justice issues.”

  He’d usually have his assistant there taking notes for him, and occasionally someone else from his department would show up. I never quite understood why. I responded by bringing Kevin Berkompas, who’d also take notes for me and chime in as needed. What made it into the notes was standard commission business, me asking for things like access to certain Internal Affairs files and Chief Straub telling me why he didn’t think that was appropriate. He was always very standoffish toward me, and the vibe I got from him kept me at a distance. I always felt like he was either checking out my cleavage or wishing I wasn’t there. Despite our differences, we did our best to act professionally and cordially toward each other, but I’d soon come to discover the truth. I was a thorn in the man’s side, and he had it in for me.

  Adding this job and the NAACP job to the two I already had required lots of planning and coordination. As I took on more tasks, I had to subordinate others on my agenda. I’d become a licensed intercultural competency trainer, but I put that on the back burner for the moment. I also reduced the number of hair clients I was willing to take on. Still, I was working more than sixty hours a week. One of the students in my African history class asked me, “What do you do for fun?”

  “My work is fun,” I assured her.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lorenzo Hayes

  BEING NAMED PRESIDENT of the Spokane chap
ter of the NAACP had one unfortunate consequence—after a lull following my departure from the Human Rights Education Institute, the hate crimes that had been directed at me and my sons starting in 2008 resumed in earnest. In March 2015, a package addressed to me but lacking a return address and postage was delivered to the NAACP’s post office box. When I opened it, I found an article about me from The Inlander, photos of Black men being lynched and used for target practice, photos of white men pointing guns at the camera, and handwritten notes issuing threats and signed “War Pig.” Two days after I received this package, Franklin and one of his friends were accosted a block from our house by a white male who called Franklin the N-word.

  A month later, I received another package from War Pig—same handwriting and signature and, once again, no return address—but this time it was delivered by the postal service directly to the NAACP office on West Main Avenue instead of our P.O. box. Still traumatized by the grisly photos from the previous package, I declined to open the second package and handed it over to the police. A week later, another package from War Pig showed up, this time in my faculty mailbox at EWU. Once again I opted not to open it and gave it to the police. These last two packages contained postmarks indicating they’d both been mailed from Oakland, California.

  That same month, as I was chairing the monthly OPOC meeting live on TV, Franklin started blowing up my phone with calls and texts. “Mom, I’m hearing noises outside,” one of his texts read. “Footsteps. October’s fur is standing up on her neck. I’m in your bedroom with the sharpest knife I could find. Hurry, Mom. Please. I’m scared.” I handed the meeting over to the vice chair, asked the police officer in attendance to send someone to my house, and raced home, where I found large boot prints in the snow right outside my bedroom window. I filed another police report and installed some surveillance cameras, which a friend had given me.

  Another strange incident occurred while I was chairing the May OPOC meeting. Franklin was home and had forgotten to lock the side door. A white male and female burst in through the door. Seeming surprised to see him, they told him they were supposed to be watching someone’s dog and must have come to the wrong house. The detective who came to investigate told us that the couple were probably burglars, based on their excuse, which burglars commonly used when encountering someone unexpectedly. The surveillance cameras I’d installed captured their faces, and I handed the footage over to the police. Were these incidents related? Were we safe? I tried to keep an open mind, but when the police investigations came up empty, I started to grow more concerned about our welfare.

  The sense that I was being targeted returned on April 16, when an unnamed individual filed a “whistleblower complaint” against me and my fellow OPOC commissioners Kevin Berkompas and Adrian Dominguez, accusing us of workplace harassment and abusing our authority. I was surprised by the allegations. Like Kevin and Adrian, I had never had my integrity or ethics questioned in my entire career. Among other things, Rebekah Hollwedel, whose name was later revealed by a local television station to be the whistleblower, alleged that I had manipulated the minutes of meetings, when in fact Kevin had taken over the task of transcribing our minutes. Any editing was only done to ensure that the minutes were accurately transcribed and properly formatted, at which point they were passed along to Rebekah. OPOC’s independent legal counsel advised us that in all likelihood nothing would come of the charges, chalking them up to personality issues. But I wasn’t so sure. I couldn’t help but notice the similarities of those being targeted. Of the five members on the commission, Kevin and Adrian were the only ones who were as adamant and outspoken about enforcing transparency in local policing as I was, and we often voted the same way.

  Whether it was coming from white supremacists or city officials, I felt bullied, and the local media were hardly sympathetic to my plight. That nearly all of them were white and catered to a predominately white audience was certainly a factor. I’d noticed the same bias when it came to reporting the deaths of Black men at the hands of the police. To Black people, all these deaths were news, but the media typically focused on some more than others, and I wanted to know why.

  The reason for the media’s bias remains a bit of a mystery to me, but I believe there could be several factors involved and one of them was the victim’s age. On November 22, 2014, Timothy Loehmann, a white police officer in Cleveland, shot Tamir Rice twice after responding to a dispatch call about “a male Black sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people” in a park next to the Cudell Recreation Center. Rice died the next day. The “weapon” he’d been holding was an Airsoft toy gun. He was twelve.

  Another factor that could turn what has been almost a daily occurrence in our country’s history—Black men getting killed by the police—into a media event was video footage of the incident. On April 4, 2015, Michael Slager, a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, stopped Walter Scott, a fifty-year-old Black man, for a non-functioning brake light. When Scott got out of his car and started running, Slager chased after him and shot him five times, killing him. The incident might have gone ignored if Feidin Santana, a bystander unseen by Slager, hadn’t recorded it on his phone and shared the gruesome footage of Scott’s death—his hands were in the air as bullets ripped through his back—with the media after the initial police report differed from the events he’d witnessed.

  The proximity of one incident to another also seemed to play a role in turning certain cop killings into major headlines. Just eight days after Walter Scott was killed, police officers in Baltimore picked up Freddie Carlos Gray Jr., a twenty-five-year-old Black man, for reasons that were never made entirely clear. Gray fell into a coma while he was in police custody and died a week later. Livid that yet another name had been added to the long list of Black men killed in police custody, BLM protestors once again took to the streets in major cities across the country I might have joined them if I hadn’t been so consumed with a racially charged cop killing that had occurred much closer to home.

  On February 10, police officers in Pasco, Washington, had shot and killed Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a thirty-five-year-old Mexican man, after he’d allegedly thrown rocks at them. When the three officers fatally shot him in the back, Zambrano-Montes had his hands up in a position of surrender. Over the course of the next several months, I went back and forth to Pasco, a six-hour round-trip drive from Spokane, multiple times to march with protestors who were calling for justice after the officers involved were put on paid administrative leave and never charged with a crime. During the first trip, I spoke at a rally and marched with Gerald Hankerson, the NAACP president of the Alaska–Oregon–Washington State Area. The police refused to issue us the proper permits for a protest, so each time we marched we risked getting arrested. The cops drove close behind us, blocked streets in front of us, and yelled at us through bullhorns, demanding that we disperse. When we didn’t, they started arresting people at random. I went to at least three protests in Pasco that spring, all of them contentious.

  Some incidents of police brutality had occurred in Spokane in the past, and most of them received very little attention. The same was initially true after the local police arrested Lorenzo Hayes on May 13, 2015. A thirty-seven-year-old Black man and father of seven children, Hayes was charged with illegally possessing a firearm and, curiously, violating a no-contact order, even though Hayes was at his own house at the time. According to witnesses, Hayes cooperated with the police as they handcuffed him, put him in the back of a police car, and took him in for booking. When they arrived at the jail, thirteen white male officers surrounded the car and, later claiming Hayes was uncooperative, yanked him out of the car and dragged him into the building. Inside, the officers threw him on the floor and held him down as he suffocated on his own vomit, went into cardiac arrest, and died from asphyxiation, just as Eric Garner had.

  Moments after Hayes died, Chief Straub called my cell phone and told me he was assembling Black community leaders for an emergency meeting. He did
n’t provide any details. All he would say was that a critical incident had occurred, and we’d learn more at the meeting. I left work early to be there, as did a handful of Black pastors and organizers of local youth groups and community programs. We sat around a large oval table as Straub, whose officers had taken Hayes into custody, and the local sheriff, who had jurisdiction over the jail where Hayes died, told us that Hayes’ death needed to stay quiet and asked us to, in effect, keep the local Black community in line. With racial tensions still high after the deaths of Walter Scott and Freddie Gray, he didn’t want there to be any protests or bad publicity. He told us that our constituents needed to understand that this was not “a media moment,” that the highway patrol would be handling the investigation because the police department and the sheriff’s department were both being investigated, and that we should reserve judgment until the investigation had been completed.

  Straub went on to say that Hayes was high on drugs at the time of his arrest and that his death was likely the result of an overdose. He said he hadn’t read any reports about the incident and was relying on his memory of a single conversation he’d had with the officers who’d been present, so he didn’t want us to feel like he was being misleading if the autopsy contradicted what he was telling us.

  Since I regularly rode around with police officers as the OPOC chair, I knew that they were required to keep notes about every call they were assigned by the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, so I asked him if he’d read the CAD notes. He said he had, but in a tone that let me know he wasn’t pleased with the question.

  I pushed harder. “Did any of the officers have a body camera on?”

  He said they didn’t, although I later found out that one officer who came to the jail with the ambulance after Hayes died did have a camera, and the footage it captured revealed a clear racial bias. When the officer was told the victim’s name was Lorenzo, she assumed he was Hispanic. When she was corrected and told that he was Black, she said, “So how many priors does this guy have?” After hearing that Lorenzo had gone into cardiac arrest, she said, “That’s what happens when they come in here all doped up.”