“Both/And Solutions for Public Safety Are Growing,” Open Letter from Five Members of the Asheville City Council

This letter was publicly shared on Thursday, August 10th, and was signed by Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, Vice Mayor Sandra Kilgore, and City Council Members Maggie Ullman, Sage Turner, and Sheneika E. Smith. It describes the various strategies that City Council is employing to address public safety concerns. These include hiring more police officers, facilitating more affordable housing, expanding healthcare access, and several “new approaches,” such as the Downtown Safety Initiative and Community Responder Program. The letter claims that the City is engaging in “a comprehensive and multifaceted approach” to public safety that will address the “root causes of human actions that put safety at risk and beget criminal activity.” You can read the full text of the letter here, as well as news reports on it from Yahoo news and WLOS.

We’re disturbed that the authors of this letter, while claiming to be “comprehensive” and to address “root causes,” chose to completely ignore the intersection of public safety with issues of race and racism. There are well-documented and deep racial inequities in how this City is policed, who is able to afford housing, and who has access to health care, but there is no reference to these issues in the letter, and therefore no mention of any strategy for addressing them. We would suggest that the effects of these strategies won’t be felt universally without recognizing and addressing how each is tied to systemic racism. We wonder (a) why these members of City Council chose to leave this important element of public safety out of their letter and (b) what thoughts they might share now about how a racial equity lens will be used in the strategies they describe.