After calling for the local police chief to be fired, Lisa Lucas-Burke, the vice mayor of Portsmouth, Virginia faces criminal charges.
What We Know:
- Lucas-Burke is being charged with violating the “noninterference in appointments or removals” provision of the Portsmouth city charter, an obscure and outdated city statute that nevertheless still remains on the books. Virginia allows citizens to bring criminal charges against others by making their case in front of a magistrate judge, which is exactly what Tommy Dubois, a white resident, chose to do with Lucas-Burke.
- It is believed that Dubois got the idea to file a criminal case against the vice mayor from a Facebook group. The Facebook group was created to advocate for the recall of Lucas-Burke’s mother, Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas, seat in the senate. Lucas is currently the highest-ranked Black-female elected official in the state. A Virginia Beach attorney, Tim Anderson, leads the Facebook group effort to remove Lucas. He accused the senator of inciting a riot. Lucas currently has a $20 million defamation lawsuit against the lawyer, claiming he knowingly published false information about her, harming her reputation.
- Senator Lucas faced felony charges in June following protests against Confederate monuments where she and a group of protesters were arrested and charged with the conspiracy to commit a felony and injury to a monument in excess of $1,000. Lucas allegedly also informed protesters they had the right to demonstrate and attempted to block the arrest of two leaders against the wishes of police chief Angela Greene.
- The Portsmouth Police Department circumvented the city’s elected local prosecutor to bring those felony charges against Lucas as well as local civil rights leaders and Portsmouth public defenders. The sergeant in the department’s property crimes unit, who brought the felony charges against Lucas, has previously lashed out against her and the other defendants, criticizing both their actions leading up to the monument’s destruction and the public criticism of the city’s police chief.
- Critics believe that both cases of Lucas and Lucas-Burke highlight a pattern of misuse of the criminal justice system for personal motives against Black politicians. State Delegate Don Scott, who is representing Lucas told reporters, “It appears that the political enemies of Sen. Lucas are also the enemies of her daughter.”
- Dubois, who supports Greene as the police chief, claims that Lucas-Burke’s public demand for the firing of Greene constitutes a misdemeanor crime, something he would have been filed regardless of her race, claiming that the “race card is played way too often”.
Dubois continued saying, “If I didn’t know any better if I just woke up out of a coma and I watched that press conference, I would think we were living in a time that was 300 years ago. They made it sound like Black people had no rights whatsoever. Yes, there is racism in the world, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people make it to be.”
- Dubois said he supported moving the city’s Confederate monuments but wanted the matter to play out through a normal civic process. “She broke the law, or the city charter, which is essentially the law,” Dubois said. “You can’t have politicians doing whatever they want whenever they feel like it, and that would be for anybody, whether it was another city council member who was white, or whatever the case, I would do the same thing.”
The charges brought against Lucas-Burke carry no jail time, but if she is convicted she would be forced to resign from her position as a city council member and give up the vice mayor’s post. Lucas-Burke called the charges “bogus” and declined further comment.
