It was an hour before midnight when a cop knocked on the door of local Black Lives Matter activist Patricia Cameron. She was asleep at home with her 8-year-old son. The officer called out her name and asked her to come outside. Cameron wasn't dressed, so the cop told her to put on some clothes—he had something for her to sign.
For the past four years Cameron has lived in the small mountain town of Manitou Springs just outside Colorado's second-largest city, a very white, heavily Republican Christian-conservative military city. As a young black woman, she says her encounters with police in the area haven’t always gone well. She’s filed at least one complaint against officers here.
“I was petrified,” she says when she found a uniformed cop at her door at 11:00 at night. In the hallway of Cameron's apartment building, the officer told her he was there to serve her with something, and handed her what looked like a ticket. He asked her to sign it, saying it had to do with an incident on July 4. The document was an arrest summons accusing her of fourth degree arson.
The single mom had organized an Independence Day public burning of a Confederate flag in a local park as a form of peaceful protest. She'd alerted the local police department about what she’d planned to do, tagging them in a post on Facebook, though a police spokesperson says the department never saw it. The police chief had also gotten an anonymous email about the event. (Weeks prior, the county sheriff's office had been on alert when a local biker club held a pig roast to protest the Islamic holiday of Ramadan.)
Cameron and a handful of others held their flag burning under a park pavilion that doesn’t allow barbecuing. There, she squirted lighter fluid on a large Confederate flag, someone else lit it, and a third man held the pole as the flag burned on a charcoal grill. Cameron clapped as others waved signs reading “Black Lives Matter” and “Who is burning black churches?” The local paper dispatched a summer intern to the scene. A video went up on YouTube. TV stations carried the news.
Now, an officer was standing in Cameron’s hallway asking her to sign an arrest summons that accused her of arson. She was not formally arrested and taken to jail. “I was confused,” she says about how it all went down, especially so late at night—and so long after the very public incident.
Manitou Springs Police say an officer showing up late at night to issue an arrest summons isn’t common for the department.
As for why it took so long for the cops to contact Cameron, the police said they had conducted a “pretty extensive investigation” after seeing video of the flag burning. While officers might have known the demonstration was happening that day, a large structure fire nearby attracted their attention, and no police were at the park when the flag went up in flames. Trying to identify all the people involved also took time, and the police wanted to make sure they had everything in order.
Under state law, fourth degree arson in Colorado is when “a person who knowingly or recklessly starts or maintains a fire or causes an explosion, on his own property or that of another, and by so doing places another in danger of death or serious bodily injury or places any building or occupied structure of another in danger of damage.”
The charge can be a felony or a misdemeanor.
“The situation posed a risk of danger to the property and citizens of Manitou Springs, as there were multiple people in the area,” reads a July 22 news release from the Manitou Springs Police Department. Camerons arrest has nothing to do with what whatever it was she was trying to get across. We’re just looking at the safety of anyone around there, and city property as well. Those flames got pretty big pretty quick.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/26/colorado-cops-arrest-mom-for-confederate-flag-arson.html
