Police in Portsmouth, Virginia, have issued felony warrants for 14 people involved in the vandalism of the city’s Confederate memorial that left a protestor in a coma after one of the historic site’s four statues fell on his head.
Charged with felonies in the vandalism are state Senator Louise Lucas, a school-board member, three public defenders, and three representatives of the city’s NAACP.
Lucas, the school-board member, and the NAACP workers are charged with felony conspiracy and felony injuring a monument. The public defenders face a charge of felony injuring a monument.
Encouraging a Felony
As The Washington Post reported of Lucas’ role in the mayhem, “as a crowd gathered at the Confederate Monument … Lucas [told] police … officers that they could not arrest demonstrators, who she said were about to paint the monument.”
The senator ordered police to stand down:
[Lucas] suggested that Portsmouth City Manager Lydia Pettis Patton would back up her claim.
“They’re going to put some paint on this thing and y’all cannot arrest them,” Lucas is heard saying on the video. “You need to call Dr. Patton because they’re going to do it. You can’t stop them. This is city property, all right. They got a right to go ahead.”
An officer responds: “Ma’am, you can’t tell them to do that.”
According to the video, Lucas replies: “I’m not telling them to do anything. I’m telling you, you can’t arrest them. Call Dr. Patton.”
Then came the scene that has played out in one city after another. As police watched, demonstrators who claimed they were fighting “systemic racism” tried to destroy the memorial. As a band played and the unruly, out-of-control mob cheered, protestors beheaded the statues and pulled one down. It landed on the head of protestor Chris Green.
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Police Statement
Portsmouth Police Chief Angela Greene delivered the bad news to the marauding miscreants.
Noting the “countless monuments” defaced and otherwise vandalized across the country by protesters, Greene said that “our incident is the only incident that resulted in a man being gravely injured.”
As well, “at no point did any member of the Portsmouth Police Department condone the felonious acts that occurred on June 10th which culminated in the life-altering injury of Mr. Chris Green.”
The investigation of the “protest” showed that “several individuals conspired and organized to destroy the monument as well as summoned hundreds of people to join in the felonious acts, which not only resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the monument, but also permanent injury to an individual.”
One of them, police allege, was Lucas.
And so the department charged the senator and the others.
Above the Law
Not surprisingly, the state’s top leftist Democrats are backing Lucas. They think she’s a hero, the Postand other media reported.
“It’s deeply troubling that on the verge of Virginia passing long-overdue police reform, the first Black woman to serve as our Senate Pro Tempore is suddenly facing highly unusual charges,” leftist Governor Ralph Northam tweeted.
Of course, her arrest had nothing to do with “passing long-overdue police reform,” but in any event, a hosanna for the put-upon Lucas also came from former leftist Governor Terry McAuliffe, a former top torpedo in the Clinton Mafia.
“Lucas is a trailblazing public servant who isn’t afraid to do and say what she believes is right,” tweeted the man who gave felons the right to vote. “Her opposition to a racist monument is the definition of what John Lewis called ‘good trouble.’ I stand with my good friend.”
And just to make sure the vandals can destroy monuments when they wish, Delegate Lee J. Carter announced on Twitter that he “just started the process of drafting legislation to repeal the felony ‘injury to a monument’ crime from the Code of Virginia.”
“Ask me about socialism,” Carter’s Twitter profile reads.
And Lucas’ fellow senator, Mamie E. Locke, the Virginian Pilot reported, called the charges a “thinly veiled attempt to intimidate and silence the most powerful Black woman in the Virginia legislature.”
Police have not arrested Lucas, and nothing will happen to the angry politician most likely.
After cops issued a summons to two NAACP vandals for trespassing the memorial earlier that day, the Pilot reported, a judge dismissed the charges.
Image: Matt Gush/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
