The Fuquay-Varina Board of Commissioners voted in its April 6 meeting to suspend the activity of its Public Safety Committee, a group of three commissioners tasked with hearing and recommending on public safety issues. The committee was resurrected a month earlier following a racist policing incident in January involving a Black 14-year-old child wrongly accused of stealing a bike.

At the meeting, the committee chair recommended that the town’s citizens form their own group for ongoing discussion of relevant issues. The mayor pro tem cited the town’s MoneyGeek ranking as the No. 1 safest small town in North Carolina as reason both to dismiss any issues raised regarding local policing and to disband the committee outright. Following suit, the mayor offered comments on the body camera footage from the January 2021 event, stating he felt “proud” of the young man who “listened,” and “did what he was supposed to do,” and of the officer whose demeanor “was respectful.”

The mayor’s descriptions of the January incident footage are not entirely incorrect. It would be fair, for example, to say that the arresting officer proffered certain kindnesses—he appeared willing to adjust the boy’s handcuffs so that they hurt less, and he took some care to avoid injury to the child’s head as he helped him into the back seat of the police car.

What is perhaps less noticeable in the video is that the arresting officer’s superior eventually arrives on the scene to question the very decision to handcuff the boy and to recommend that he be released from cuffs and car.

Less noticeable still is that the arresting officer describes the boy as “mouthing off” when he attempts to establish that he has a legitimate bill of sale for the bike in question. Even less noticeable is that the boy has been handcuffed and put into the back of a police car in front of his own home, just feet away from where his father, inside, is not notified of his son’s arrest until a good deal of time has passed.

“We’ll get to that,” the officer repeats when queried.

As the mayor’s comments focused on superficial markers of the interaction make clear, there is a version of racist policing that looks different from what we have become accustomed to seeing in the news in recent years. Regarding those familiar sights, we risk becoming inured to reports of the killing or abuse of Black and Brown people by police, so that when racist policing occurs that’s not easily recognizable as extreme violence or murder—when there is no shouting, no weapon brandished, no blood shed—many have a difficult time seeing it.

A couple of months before the boy was arrested for a crime he did not commit, Fuquay-Varina police pulled over a young Black couple in front of my home. At least two police vehicles were present while the couple stood in the cold, the young man submitted to being searched, and both of them witnessed a tedious and thorough search of their entire vehicle—from under the front hood to the floor coverings to the trunk linings.

One of the officers detaining them occasionally attempted polite chitchat: “Were they from Greensboro? Did they know of a restaurant there that he liked?” After 90 minutes, they were released without a citation.

The young woman later told me that the event I witnessed was the fourth time she and her partner had been pulled over within a single week of their holiday travels.

No amount of “pride” in polite-seeming conduct should keep us from noticing the racist assumptions and power dynamics played out beneath the surface of civility in both these instances.

Routine events like these hint at why it’s been so devastating for some Fuquay-Varina residents to learn that just after the Public Safety Committee’s third meeting— and the first at which the public was invited to comment on the work remaining for everyone to feel safe—the town’s leaders boasted about its safety rating and suspended the committee tasked with listening to its residents’ safety concerns.

At the final committee meeting, several callers made a plea for more and ongoing dialogue to repair and build trust between the town’s leadership and its citizens. Oth- ers requested greater overall transparency; a cultural assessment of the police department as well as bias training for police personnel; funding for community safety initiatives addressing those directly influenced by systemic racism; and targeted attention to the ways in which issues like housing, education, and healthcare are further determinants of a public’s safety.

Reinstating and reconstituting the Public Safety Committee seems like the very least the mayor and the town’s Board of Commissioners could do toward entertaining the input they claim to value. Whether they will prove capable of creating and sustain- ing an actual conversation regarding public safety or of taking direct action on behalf of citizens who do not yet feel safe are matters that we should see addressed within a formally established municipal committee— rather than hear that these issues are best addressed by concerned citizens.

Jennifer Holt is a freelance writer and resident of Fuquay-Varina.

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