I direct this principally to the potted plants on Charlotte city council. Someone you hired — either the city manager or the chief of police — came before you last month and flat-out lied to you.
Steve Harrison has chased down the federal security rabbit-holes — a tedious exercise it looks like someone figured would never take place — to confirm that contrary to the public claims of the city manager and the chief of police — the federal government did not classify CMPD’s report on the Delvonte Tisdale’s death and security at the city-owned airport.
In fact the TSA has not even seen the report. And wily old Jerry Orr pretty much spilled the beans on what went down:
The city has refused to release a redacted report, saying the entire report had been sealed.
The Observer also requested written correspondence between the city and federal government about the Tisdale investigation, specifically regarding the report being labeled security sensitive.
Charlotte assistant city attorney Mujeeb Shah-Khan said the city has no written correspondence with the federal government about the case. Shah-Khan told the Observer that the federal government informed the city verbally that the report would be classified, which was apparently incorrect.
The city released Monroe’s Wednesday letter to David Wray, the TSA security director at Charlotte/Douglas. Monroe said the city report contained previously stamped SSI documents from Joint Vulnerability Assessment Reports, and “as a result we were obligated to follow the law and not release the report.”
Charlotte/Douglas aviation director Jerry Orr said Wednesday that he wasn’t directly involved in the CMPD probe, and wasn’t part of the process that determined whether the report was classified.
“I wasn’t in on the police report,” Orr said. “But I think sometime in the last 24 hours is when the TSA indicated that it wasn’t Security Sensitive Information (SSI). They didn’t exactly say it wasn’t SSI, they said they would have to go through the report and classify it. I think (Monroe) thought it had already been labeled that way.”
On Feb. 28, Monroe and City Manager Curt Walton read a three-page summary of the report to City Council.
Under a section called “City Manager Walton’s report,” the summary said the report was controlled under the Code of Federal Regulations, and no part of it could be disclosed to people without a “need to know.”
We now know that not to be true — the only question is if Walton believed what he said or was part of a conspiracy to mislead council and the public.
For his part Monroe is either so incompetent he does not understand basic concepts used by the federal agencies his department works with on a regular basis or he lied to Walton and council. I would also like to see Mujeeb Shah-Khan’s phone records from January and February to confirm that he actually spoke to someone at TSA.
Just as we immediately said upon the city’s wholly fraudulent “classified report” gambit, this episode is a shame and mockery — of any sort of responsible local government.
If Charlotte city council does not move to fire those responsible for this latest travesty — the inability to investigate honestly and openly a deadly accident on city property — then they’ll demonstrate their own incompatibility with public office.
