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| At-large city director Joan Adcock is well-known for her opposition of actions to remove racist social constructs in the city |
Emails obtained via the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act reveal that long in the tooth at-large city director Joan Adcock once again has targeted a minority individual and spared no efforts to harass them.
Back in 2013, The Arkansas Times had several stories about Adcock going after minority owned food trucks.
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My attention was called by someone who was there to the waning minutes of the Little Rock Board of Directors meeting Tuesday, when Director Ken Richardson took the mike to ask for a reminder for the board about a policy directive concerning contact between directors and city departments.
Directors, in theory, are supposed to work through the city manager or department heads, not directly with staff members, and not micromanage city government. Policy making, not management, is the ideal.
But, said Richardson, he’d been contacted recently by food cart vendors in his ward who said they’d been “repeatedly targeted” for inspections or observation by the city and he suspected another member of the board was responsible. “Every time they’re inspected they get a clean bill of health,” Richardson said. But he added that the vendors, all Latinos, said they were beginning to feel “some form of discrimination” was at work. “I’d like to look at this before it becomes a serious liability for us.”
I talked further about this Thursday with Richardson, who declined to identify specific complainants. They fear retaliation, he said. I asked City Manager Bruce Moore for a record of requests on taco truck inspections. He later provided a three-year list of violations by traveling food vendors that showed only two in 2013, neither for a Latino vendor. I haven’t heard back from Moore, however, on my followup question: whether there was a record on the specific complaint Richardson made — multiple visits to vendors who were NOT guilty of any rule violations.
Richardson said he couldn’t say where the complaints have originated. Since he suspected a city director is responsible for inspection requests, I turned first to at-large Director Joan Adcock. Adcock is known for aggressive involvement in City Hall business. She rose to political power from Southwest Little Rock, a big chunk of which Richardson now represents and home to many taco trucks and wagons. She once was an opponent of a Latino nightclub in the rapidly changing neighborhood, now heavily minority after beginnings as a working class white community. She is not particularly noted for sympathy on minority issues. She was a student at Central High during the 1957 school crisis and has been cool to events commemorating that episode, including a symbolic city board repeal of a pro-segregation resolution approved by the city board more than 50 years ago.
I sent Adcock questions and left her a phone message. Late last night, I got an e-mail response that said, “Sorry I am so late it has been a very busy day. I am not the person you are looking for.”
Richardson said the person responsible is less important than the action itself.
Sure, city directors have broad portfolio — and a 1st Amendment right — to go to anyone in city government with a complaint about a city business.
But, said Richardson, special requests for city inspections “create confusion for staff, add workload and are ridiculous,” he said. More broadly, he said that the message of the repeat visits is, “You’re not welcome here, even if you’re playing by the rules.”
Richardson, himself a graduate and former student body president at Central High, says the city regularly observes anniversaries of the triumph of the rule of law in Little Rock in the school crisis. “We talk about how far we’ve come. These kinds of actions are a stark reminder that we might have farther to go to move our city to a level we want to move.”
He said city pressure on Latino vendors comes as the city school district deals with allegations that it has been insensitive to bullying of Latino students. “I don’t want that same kind of activity or perception from city government,” he said.
Richardson and I agree on a purely personal level about the gravity of equal treatment of taco trucks. He says he likes them as much as I do. For illustration, I’ve used one of our file photos of my favorite taco wagon, Taqueria Samantha, which sets up on Geyer Springs Road in Richardson’s ward. He tells me that it’s his favorite, too. (Steak quesadilla for him; carnitas burrito for me.) He said he’d checked with Samantha’s operator and it has not been a target of recent inspections. But he said the advent of warmer weather and more activity at the food carts seemed to have spurred the scrutiny.
“Specific targeting of Hispanic food vendors is a bad practice,” Richardson said. “I don’t want us to get in the bad habit of — or being perceived as — practicing discrimination.”
UPDATE: Director Adcock responded further to a followup question I posed after receiving her brief response last night. She says she HAS gotten involved in vendor issues in the past, though not recently.
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Records we obtained from the city of Little Rock and the Arkansas Department of Health reveal Adcock is still using her position to harass minority citizens.
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