EDITORIAL: GSO city manager resigns, questions remain

On Tuesday night, just before polls were scheduled to close, Greensboro Communications Manager Jake Keys issued an email under the subject line: “Greensboro City Manager Resigns Effective Immediately.”

The news made one Triad City Beat staffer gasp while she was in a voting booth.

Former City Manager Taiwo Jaiyeoba has been under fire since the night of Dec. 28, when Greensboro police were summoned to his home on a domestic disturbance call.

From that point, it seemed that the Greensboro Police Department and Greensboro City Council tried to steer this thing into the ground.

Police insisted that they followed “normal investigative procedures” following the domestic disturbance, though no arrests were made. Council, after viewing police body-camera footage almost two months later, took no action other than to issue a statement agreeing with the GPD and the Guilford district attorney’s decision not to pursue charges, and to say that the footage would not be made public.

“City Manager Jaiyeoba and his family should be granted the same privacy as any other family deserves in similar circumstances,” the statement reads.

Kudos to the News & Record, who successfully obtained a judge’s order to review the same footage council got to see. And shame to the city, which is appealing that judge’s decision to release the video.

But for now, Jaiyeoba is no longer a public figure, which means that pursuit of this body-camera footage is likely over, and that we’ll have nothing but speculation to fill in the blanks.

Even without a resolution, the appearance of impropriety still lingers.

There’s another angle to this sticky situation. Historically, even in Greensboro, Black folks in positions of power are always vulnerable to attacks on their character and suitability for office. Skip Alston of the Guilford County Commission, who has faced accusations of impropriety most of his political career, and Dianne Bellamy-Small, who while on city council survived a recall election spearheaded by people who didn’t live in her district, could tell you more about this trend.

But we’ll probably never know what that footage would reveal, why Jaiyeoba resigned before it became public, where the cover-up began and ended.

“The bad man is gone,” the city is telling us with its press release. “You can go back to your daily lives.”