Fallout From African Meeting House Hate Crime Report On Display At Select Board Discussion

A report on the town’s investigation into the 2018 hate crime at the African Meeting House on York Street drew mixed reactions at the Select Board’s meeting on Wednesday.

“Perhaps we have reached the limit of what this particular process can produce,” said island resident Mary Longacre, who has served on a number of local government bodies, including the Nantucket Planning and Economic Development Commission, Coastal Resilience Advisory Committee and Tree Advisory Committee. “Perhaps we have to consider that town government has lost the trust of a portion of this community, and perhaps the better way forward at this point would be to ask the question: how can we regain that trust?”

The report found “no evidence suggesting the incident was ignored or intentionally minimized,” but did suggest that the investigation failed to follow up on all potential leads, which could have hampered efforts to identify the perpetrator.

Critics repeatedly emphasized that the vandalism, which included a racial slur and a phallus, was a hate crime and that town administration has lost community trust in its handling of the investigation..

“This whole situation hasn’t been very transparent,” said Brewster resident Barbara Burgo, the former chair of the Barnstable Human Rights Commission and an outspoken critic of the town’s handling of the investigation.

Noelle Trent, the president of the Museum of African American History, which owns and operates the African Meeting House, said that the museum was “grateful” for the report, and called for the Select Board to “put together an action plan” to prevent future hate crimes on Nantucket.

“I understand how challenging this has been for the community, and we do hope that as we move forward we can continue our relationship with the Select Board and the community and look at how we can continue to preserve and promote the illustrious work of the African Meeting House,” she said. “It has been here since 1825, and it will continue to be here.”

Trent was also a member of the African Meeting House Procurement Work Group, which selected the Texas-based digital forensics firm LCG Discovery Experts to produce the report.

Town attorney John Giorgio defended the report and the investigation on behalf of the town Wednesday.

“I, for one, was impressed with how thorough that investigation was. They were not denied a single scrap of information from the town. We bent over backwards to provide everything. All of the policies, all of the statistics, all of the police reports,” Giorgio said. “There were no laws broken. There was good and accepted police investigative tactics. That was the conclusion of the investigator time and time again.”

The report claims that “overall, the investigative record demonstrates that the incident received substantial attention and sustained investigative effort,” but noted, “missed evidentiary opportunities, incomplete documentation, and limited verification or corroboration of certain investigative leads that likely reduced the ability to fully evaluate potential suspects and preserve potentially valuable evidence.”

Select Board member Brooke Mohr gave a mixed verdict in her comments on the report, stressing the limitations of what the town can do now.

“The report indicates the investigation was imperfect. I don’t hold myself to a standard of perfection. I don’t know anyone in the room who can hold themselves to a standard of perfection. I think that it’s clear this independent review of the investigation indicates that the police followed protocol and took this hate crime seriously,” Mohr said. “This has gone, criminally, as far as it is going to go, and I believe that, as a community, we failed to have the conversations that we need to have.”

Work Group member Clifford Williams called for the Work Group to meet again and attempt to answer questions that he claims were raised by the report.

“There’s probably more questions than answers, for me at least, and that’s why I think it’s more important that this group stay together and look at this report and discuss this report and review what needs to be done in the future,” he said. “I think we just need to regroup, as a group, and address all these questions and move on from there and answer all of these inconsistencies that we have.”

The town’s initial handling of the hate crime drew intense backlash from the community, the reverberations of which are still being felt today. No one was ever criminally convicted for vandalizing the historic building, but Dylan Ponce was found responsible for the hate crime in a civil rights case in 2022.

Mohr called for the community to move forward while acknowledging the issues exposed by the hate crime.

“I believe we can do a better job in this community to identify, recognize, acknowledge and address the existence of racism here in our community,” Mohr said. “But please, how this investigation went, and the conspiracy theories around it, I think we need to move on from that and do the work to recover as a community from the harm that was caused by this incident, which indicates things that we need to address as a community…I will start with taking the results of this report and asking the police chief to review policies and procedures and trainings within the police department around racial sensitivity and how our officers interact in our community with our beautiful and highly diverse community, and then I think we need to do things like community engagement.”

Neither Police Chief Jody Kasper nor Town Manager Libby Gibson were present in the room at Wednesday’s meeting.

The Current previously covered the report in more detail here.