Last November, Citizens Awareness Asheville, an organization of community activists concerned about purported excesses and misconduct by local law enforcement, announced the formation of a “Copwatch” program.

Such programs, active in cities including Los Angeles, Berkeley, Houston and New Orleans, involve volunteers going around neighborhoods on foot patrols, monitoring the activities of the police.

Just more than half a year later, the program is up and running with its first group of volunteers and its hotline operational, Copwatch organizer David Ireland tells Xpress.

“We’ve got 15 volunteers, with a core group of about eight,” he says. “We’ve been going out on foot patrols [and] we hope to expand that soon with people patrolling their own neighborhoods. That’s really the way this works best.”

About a month ago, Ireland says, members of established Copwatch groups came to Asheville to help train the volunteers and showed them the movie These Streets are Watching, which explores the groups’ purpose and activities.

Right now, most of the patrols have focused on “the projects,” Ireland says, such as Pisgah View Apartments and Lee-Walker Heights. “We haven’t gotten out to Shiloh yet, but we will soon,” he adds.

So far, the volunteers have mostly been telling the people they encounter about Copwatch, informing them about their rights under the law and showing them how to fill out incident reports. The hotline also handles individual complaints.

“In Pisgah View recently, one young woman told us about some problems she’d had [with the police] and filled out an incident report right there on her doorstep,” Ireland reports.

He’s optimistic about the program’s future, he says. “I think it’s working. We’re really getting the word out to people in the projects that they don’t have to be compliant to every little thing the police tell them to do. They don’t have to just let them search their backpacks or their pockets without a warrant.”

Asheville Police Chief Bill Hogan has said that he doesn’t have a problem with Copwatch groups, saying back in November “anyone’s free to videotape anything.”

Copwatch will make a presentation as part of a poetry slam at Pisgah View on Sunday, June 1.

Asheville’s Copwatch can be contacted at 398-4817.

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It was just after midnight on July 6, and the man was walking toward LaRue’s Backdoor, a side bar located inside O Henry’s, Asheville’s (and the state’s) oldest gay bar.

According to the police report, he was approached by two black males in their mid-20s who, after asking him where he was going, began punching and kicking him as they tried to rob him.

As the man (whose name has been blacked out in police records) fell down, he drew a pocket knife, hoping to fend off his attackers and escape by scaling a chainlink fence. But they pulled him down and kept on kicking him, shouting anti-gay slurs.

He fought back with his pocket knife, later estimating that he may have stabbed one of the attackers three times. But after taking his wallet and shoes, the two men fled, according to the report. One left on a dark scooter; the injured man got into “a silver full-size car with a white female driver and a black male passenger.”

The victim suffered only minor injuries, and the Asheville Police Department is still investigating the case. But as word spread around town, almost 100 people—members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and others concerned about violence—met at the Firestorm Café on Commerce Street.

Packed into the small space, they discussed how to respond to such hate-motivated attacks, and Safe Streets Asheville was born.

Various initiatives are in the works, co-organizer Louise Newton reports, including producing a flier with safety tips, raising funds for bigger projects, and setting up a central online information resource. There’s also been talk of setting up a service people could call to avoid having to walk alone through downtown at night.

Meanwhile, the group has designated a liaison to promote better relations with the police.

“We’re still looking for a regular meeting place, and we’ve got smaller work groups meeting on a lot of these topics,” says Newton. “We hope to keep the momentum going. We had a really great first meeting, but we hope to see some new faces and have this really be a multilocal movement.”

For details, e-mail safestreetsasheville@yahoo.com.