When council attached a “civil liberties resolution” to the RTIC vote, it was following a script Asheville has run for decades: crisis, apology, promised oversight, and a stripped-down, powerless version delivered. This page documents the full cycle, and the state-law ceiling that guarantees the powerless version, because it’s the strongest answer to “we’ll make sure it’s used responsibly.” In Asheville, as of today, no civilian police oversight body is functioning at all.
The record, crisis by crisis
1991 → today: CPAC, the committee that stopped meeting. Asheville’s Citizens Police Advisory Committee was created in 1991 as a “liaison”: no investigative power, no records access, no discipline role, members removable by council “with or without cause.” In 2018 the city tried to dissolve even that. It survived, and then simply stopped: CPAC has not met since March 2020. Never abolished, never convened; the city’s own page says “not currently meeting.” Its own representative, Blake Marcus, told council in 2020: “I don’t think CPAC needs to exist anymore.” (City page · WLOS)
2017–2019: Johnnie Rush. An APD officer beat, choked, and tased a Black man walking home from a 13-hour shift. The public learned of it only because someone illegally leaked the bodycam video: NC’s bodycam law (G.S. 132-1.4A) had kept it sealed through six months of internal handling in which the officer was quietly allowed to resign. The reforms that followed: a Human Relations Commission given no investigative power; a written-consent-to-search policy that council ordered in May 2018 and APD implemented in October 2019, seventeen months later, after the chief refused, and the Police Benevolent Association threatened legal action against the five council members who voted for it. The officer’s felony guilty plea ended in probation, dismissal, and expungement. (ACLU · Mountain Xpress on the PBA threat · city announcement, Oct 2019)
2020: the year of maximum promises. After the tear gas and the medic station, Chief Zack was “truly sorry”; Mayor Manheimer called it “senseless… wrong.” City Attorney Brad Branham promised a new kind of board with “much deeper access to records… a much more formal role in the process of reviewing disciplinary situations”, pending state authorization. What was delivered: a ~3% budget reallocation (animal control and noise moved out of APD); an internal after-action review, ten months later, that found the tear gas “within agency policy”; no publicly confirmed discipline for any officer (not for the gas, not for the medic station), with 500+ tear-gas complaints filed and every outcome sealed by state personnel law. And the promised board? That was HB 399, sponsored by the entire Buncombe legislative delegation, pre-negotiated to be modest (no subpoena power, no public findings, use-of-force cases only). It died in Raleigh without a hearing. Meanwhile the city spent six figures on a California PR firm billed as “transparency engagement advisers.” (Mountain Xpress on the after-action · WLOS on the promised board · The Abuse Record)
2026: the Public Safety Committee looks away. There is technically a body where police-technology oversight should live: the Public Safety Committee, chaired by Bo Hess (full meeting-by-meeting review: The Committee). A review of all seven of its recorded meetings from May 2025 through July 2026 found it has never once exercised oversight of the RTIC: no audit ever requested, no post-approval briefing ever received, and the July 29, 2026 meeting (held as the RTIC moved toward operation) contains not a single word about its implementation, the Flock wind-down, or the quarterly audits APD promised. When residents did bring it to the committee (eight callers demanded Flock/Fusus cancellation over ICE concerns in November 2025), staff denials were accepted and no action followed. The committee that exists to watch this is chaired by its strongest advocate, and it does not watch.
2026: the RTIC. Council approved a citywide surveillance apparatus with a resolution stating it would be used “solely for lawful purposes.” The resolution designates no oversight body, creates no reporting duty, and contains no enforcement mechanism, and it was passed in a city where, at that moment, every civilian oversight channel was dark: CPAC dormant six years, the Human Relations Commission conducting no business since Helene, the Reparations Commission formally dissolved in October 2025 with its criminal-justice recommendations punted to a future budget. The four new recovery boards council created instead? None touches policing. Resident Jessica Myers said it at the podium: “We aren’t protected by civil liberties statements.” (BPR · BPR on the boards · Urban News on the commission’s dissolution)
The ceiling: real oversight is illegal here without Raleigh
This is the structural fact under all of it, and it’s not rhetoric; it’s statute:
- G.S. 160A-168 makes personnel files confidential. A city official who showed a review board an officer’s disciplinary file without a court order would be committing a misdemeanor. Boards cannot see the records they’d need to review anything.
- No NC city may grant its board subpoena power. Only the General Assembly can, and bills to allow it (2015, 2017, Asheville’s own 2021 local bill) have all died without hearings.
- The boards that exist under these constraints perform exactly as designed: Charlotte’s review board heard 102 appeals in ~25 years and sided with complainants twice, and both times the chief rejected the finding. Winston-Salem’s considered 11 cases in 9 years and sided with police every time. Durham’s has granted 2 hearings since 2011. Dawn Blagrove of Emancipate NC, on the record: “These boards are doing exactly what they are designed to do by system actors, which is create the facade of accountability without creating actual accountability.” (WFAE · Winston-Salem Journal · ABC11)
What this means for the RTIC: the argument, made carefully
Put the three records together:
- The Abuse Record shows these systems get abused everywhere, and the promised safeguards almost never catch it.
- This page shows Asheville cannot build real oversight even when it wants to: state law forbids the powers oversight requires, the legislature won’t grant them, and the city’s own history is a loop of hollow deliverables.
- The Promise Tracker shows the city has already refused to show the public its audit logs, while the promised transparency dashboards 404.
A surveillance system whose safety depends on oversight, deployed in a jurisdiction where effective oversight is legally impossible and historically refused, cannot be made safe. The honest policy choices are the ones oversight doesn’t have to save: don’t deploy, don’t renew, and strip out the capabilities (500-mile sharing, private-camera integration) that no local safeguard can contain. That’s the case to make at Speak at Council, to every candidate, and at every contract-renewal decision between now and 2033.
A note on labels: quotes and dates above are from public records and named reporting; where an assessment comes from advocacy or opinion journalism rather than documents, I’ve linked the source so you can weigh it yourself.
Related: The Abuse Record · Promise Tracker · The Check-In Meetings · Timeline