Peninsula school board member faces criticism for social media posts on race, Capitol riot
Chuck West, a Peninsula School Board member since 2019, is facing criticism for comments he has made on social media that some have interpreted as racist.
In posts on Facebook, West suggested that “inner city Black men commit a disproportionate amount of the violent crime,” and thus have more encounters with police.
He has also been criticized for seeming to downplay the seriousness of the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capital by a mob.
The more recent comments from West came in response to a post from Congressman Derek Kilmer, who was calling for then-President Trump’s removal from office following the Capitol riot.
In a comment on the Jan. 9 post, West appeared to downplay the incidents at the Capitol and claimed the full story wasn’t being told.
“Why is the media and big corporations shutting down the other side? What little I have been able to hear from unbiased sources it seems the attack was limited to a handful of people, that the peaceful protesters even tried to stop,” West said.
The comment drew more than 100 responses from other Facebook users, with some expressing concern when they discovered West was a school board member. One comment called for West to resign, calling his rhetoric “inflammatory, dishonest, and ill informed.”
West responded online by reaffirming his initial statements and claiming people wanted to silence his views.
“If you find it ‘inflammatory and dishonest’ for me to defend free speech then we have (a) bigger problem,” West said. “If you want to shut me down for defending the first amendment, you are the problem.”
West also has come under fire for comments he has made about the pandemic. This included a post West made encouraging people to watch a discredited video of two doctors providing false information about COVID-19. The post was labeled by Facebook as containing “false information” by the social media site’s independent fact checkers.
West, 62, is a battalion chief for the Key Peninsula Fire Department and serves as the volunteer president of the Key Free Clinic. He was elected to the school board in 2019 as the representative for District 1, which includes most of the Key Peninsula. His term ends in 2023.
Black men and crime
Students and community members raised similar concerns about Facebook posts West made in September.
“If Black men commit nearly 50 percent of the violent crime, what is the root cause? You can’t blame police for arresting based on who is committing the crimes,” West commented on Sept. 17.
West later apologized to the school board for any distraction his comments caused and said they had been misunderstood.
The Facebook comments came in response to an article from The News Tribune about a report that showed “Black people account for 5.6% of Pierce County’s population but made up 17.4% of arrests.”
The article was posted by Pierce County Council Chair Derek Young on Facebook and West commented in response.
“Did you take into consideration the fact the inner city Black men commit a disproportionate amount of the violent crime? We have a problem that needs to be dealt with in the inner city community,” West said. “If police are coming into contact with Black men more often, then the arrest rates would naturally be higher.”
In a series of replies, West defended himself against others who called his comments racist.
“The problem we have is how the Black young men being taught to view themselves thru Hollywood and peers. Society is blaming law enforcement for responding to a crime. If the Black man is committing violent crime at a higher rate it’s not the police who are to blame,” West said. “Police can’t be to blame for targeting Blacks if they are encountering a higher percentage.”
Few rules on social media
School board president David Olson said he is familiar with the posts and concerns about them.
“When you’re new to a school board and you’re used to posting on social media and stuff, sometimes it takes a while to be mindful of what you put on social media is out there forever for anyone to see,” Olson said. “Sometimes you need to remember that not everybody is going to agree with your opinion and especially during the time, the country was really on edge. Tempers were short.”
Olson said that members making posts on a personal Facebook account is outside his purview. There are no board social media policies about personal accounts.
“I don’t follow Chuck West’s personal Facebook page,” Olson said. “If he responds to someone on his private Facebook page and that person takes it the wrong way, I guess they could choose to unfriend him.”
Deb Krishnadasan, the outgoing president of the board, and board member Natalie Wimberley declined to comment, citing board policy that says the current president is meant to serve as a spokesperson for the board. Multiple attempts to reach board member Lori Glover went unanswered.
Coach speaks out
Maurice Hanks, 57, a Fox Island resident and former football coach at Peninsula High School, said the comments by West are “effing crazy.”
Hanks, who is Black, spoke at a Black Lives Matter march in Gig Harbor in June about the need to call out racism.
Hanks said any hint of racist ideas in the education system must be called out.
“Some of the people that have those ideas, they need to be weeded out,” Hanks said. “Guys like that need to be gone. They’re spewing hate. Kids don’t need that and the kids today get it, they understand it.”
Hanks said West doesn’t understand the reality of being a Black person who encounters the police.
“I can tell you that that man (West), he would not make it being a man of color,” Hanks said. “These stories are not fiction, they are real life. The problem that we have is a lot of these people that are policing don’t live in the neighborhoods. They don’t know the people. They don’t try to know the people. They automatically assume that everyone is a thug.”
Former students raise concerns
Former Gig Harbor High School students Finlay and Keir Adamson, both 20, took their concerns about West to a school board meeting on Sept. 24, where they expressed a desire for greater accountability from the board.
In the meeting, both were discouraged from making “personally directed comments” towards any one school board member. They also sent a formal letter to the board with two other students expressing their concerns.
The brothers were the first student representatives to the school board and now attend Hamilton College in New York. Though they didn’t know West in their time as student representatives, “we felt it was our responsibility as people who were on this board to speak up,” Finlay told The Gateway.
“It’s just our belief that someone espousing these kinds of ideas shouldn’t have this kind of power over children in the community,” Keir said.
Finlay said that neither of them received any formal response from the school board and “nothing more really came of it.” He now wants to see further action.
“I want to see calls for him to resign. I think it has gone on far too long. I think he (West) obviously feels like he does not need to have a filter in public any more,” Finlay said and pointed to West’s recent comments about the storming of the Capitol.
West defends comments
When reached by The Gateway, West defended his comments about race and policing.
“It was an ambush,” West said of the Adamsons’ appearance at the school board meeting. “In that article, it said that the police, and I’m paraphrasing, were arresting more Blacks than the population percentage. My comment was that if you look at statistics by race, the Blacks are committing more violent crime.”
West said he was basing his comments on FBI crime data from 2016, which he said should be prioritized over the more recent and localized study from Pierce County.
“Now, I realize that the Black community has been treated with racism, and it’s pushed them into a position of poverty, mainly in the inner city,” West said. “When you’re in poverty you do what you can to survive so if there is a higher crime rate in that community, you can’t blame the police for arresting the people that are committing the crimes.”
At the end of the school board meeting from Sept. 24, West apologized to his fellow school board members for creating “additional problems” for the board as a whole and that he was “sorry it was taken in that way.”
Cites good works
West said he hasn’t reached out to any of the students raising concerns directly and said he was “just stating facts.”
“I have a lot of friends in law enforcement, a lot of union friends, who are good people who are being attacked without the correct data,” West said.
West also noted that he is president of the Key Free Clinic, which provides free medical care to people who cannot afford it, a longtime battalion chief with the Key Peninsula Fire Department, and that “he does a lot of things for a lot of people” which he felt was being overlooked by critics.
“If I misspoke, it happens, and it’s also hard on social media or even in email form to understand tone,” West said. “I get it if somebody has mistaken what I’ve said.”
On his comments about the storming of the Capitol, West said, “I think pretty much what I said was very factual.”
West said he was “defending freedom of speech” and considers himself a Democrat who “is about ready to walk away from the Democratic Party.”
“Everybody is so polarized, and these are my Democrat friends who are attacking me now because I dare stand up,” West said. “I’m sorry that these people have tried to stab me in the back by going to you for these things that I say, even though they in turn will turn around and say the same things about the right side and expect no recourse.”
West said the bigger story should be about a failure to come together in the country.
“It seems like the bigger story might be about this whole societal thing of the disconnect and the inability for people to come together in the middle,” West said. “We’re trying to heal this country and we need to stop stabbing each other.”
Engaged in community
Friends and acquaintances on the Key Peninsula, where West is well-known and active in community affairs, say West has never given them any reason to believe he has racist views, although some wish he would “tone it down” online.
Dr. William Roes, one of the initial founders of the Key Free Clinic, said he has known West for more than 30 years and considers him a friend. Roes said that “not in any of my interactions with him with the Key Free Clinic or with the fire department or with anything else have I ever heard him say anything” that indicates racial bias.
“Nobody’s ever raised any concerns with me about that,” Roes said. “He seems to be an honorable person. When he told me he was going to do something, he generally did it. I know he’s done a lot of volunteer work.”
Anne Nesbit, executive director at the clinic, said no one has expressed concerns to her about anything West has said or done.
“If anything, people have expressed how helpful he has been in the community in respect to the clinic,” Nesbit said. “There has never been a concern of any racial bias from anybody connected at the clinic whatsoever.”
Nesbit said there is no social media policy on the books at the clinic, but added that she “would coach anyone to be very conscious of their word choice whenever engaging in social media.”
“Everyone needs to be mindful that social media and comments can often can be taken out of context. If they have concerns about Chuck and his behavior, they should ask him directly,” Nesbit said. “Anybody associated with the clinic, myself included, has nothing but a positive interaction with him.”
Tim Kezele is a Key Peninsula resident who said he has worked with West on projects such as putting up the yearly Christmas tree downtown.
“I’ve heard more than once about his comments on social media that I’ve scratched my head at,” Kezele said. “It’s a little much, you know? He gets a thought into his head and fires it out there.”
Kezele said he thinks West’s “heart is in the right place,” but that he needs to “tone it back a little bit” when it comes to social media posts.
“For being in that position where he’s at, he’s got to be unbiased,” Kezele said. “He’s got his finger in a lot of pies on the KP.”
Trusted at fire department
Chief Dustin Morrow of the Key Peninsula Fire Department, where West is battalion chief, says there is a policy in place when employees are representing themselves in an official capacity. However, personal social media use remains a gray area.
“We have a very purposeful written social media guideline that governs our employees’ actions as representing the district,” Morrow said. “As an individual, there is this amazingly blurry line that employers are constantly dealing with.”
Morrow said that West has been with the department for “almost 30 years” and said there has “not been any of those issues that I have dealt with Chuck on” within the organization.
Outside of the organization, Morrow said he has had some conversations with community members expressing concerns.
“There is heightened sensitivity, heightened concern among all community members about … public employees in general, making sure that we are continuing to be held to that higher standard,” Morrow said. “I would be remiss if I didn’t share with you, yes, I have engaged in conversations with community members about our employees’ engagement on social media.”
Morrow said that West “was included in the larger conversation with the larger employee group” but that he wouldn’t “disclose employee-related specific matters of discipline.”
Morrow said he trusts West as a battalion chief.
“I put tremendous trust in all of our chief officers or they wouldn’t be in the position,” he said.
‘Look at who I am’
Lynn Jabs is an aunt to two nieces in the school district. She said she commented in response to West on Facebook because she was concerned about what he was saying.
“I thought his comment was extremely racist and so I had made a comment saying that it alarmed me,” Jabs said. “It alarmed me that he was making decisions for the children in our community.”
Jabs said she then received a direct message on Facebook from West, which she shared with The Gateway.
“You might want to look at who I am before you commit slander,” West said in the Sept. 18 message.
“I took it as a threat. I took it as he thought that he could intimidate me,” Jabs said. “I didn’t respond to his message. To me, it came across threatening.”
West said he wasn’t trying to threaten anyone and was just trying to speak to his character, which he feels was being misunderstood.
“How can you call me that when you don’t know me? And she took that as a threat, it was never meant to be a threat. It was just that. I do a lot of stuff. If you know me, you’re going to know that it’s not true.”
West said that the phrase “you might want to look at who I am” was not in reference to his position of authority as a school board member but was meant to solely refer to himself as a person.
“There is no way I would threaten anybody,” West said. “I’m not like that.”
Reach Chase Hutchinson at chase.hutchinson@thenewstribune.com
This story was originally published February 8, 2021 at 5:30 AM.
