When Student Activists Discovered Their New Friend Was an Undercover Cop

Since the beginning of the fall semester, student activists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been protesting the presence of a Confederate statue on the campus. And at the same time, the university police have stepped up their presence around the monument, known as “Silent Sam.”

But one officer went further, the activists say, dressing in plain clothes and pretending that he was a mechanic who sympathized with their cause. The Herald-Sun, a newspaper in Durham, N.C., reports that the students learned last week that “Victor” was actually a campus police officer, named Hector Borges, when they saw him in uniform responding to the explosion of a small bomb on the same quad as the statue.

One activist shot video of the students confronting the officer; The News & Observer, a Raleigh newspaper, posted the video:

Lindsay Ayling, a Ph.D. candidate in history, told The Herald-Sun that the officer “seemed like a nice guy.” She continued: “I talked to him a lot about my dissertation research.”

According to a statement by a spokesman for the campus police, Randy Young, quoted in The Herald-Sun, officials are “aware of the recorded conversation.”

Mr. Young also acknowledged that the police department had “assigned officers to the area around Silent Sam, both in uniform and plain clothes,” ever since the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va. Days later, activists pulled down a Confederate statue in Durham, not far from Chapel Hill.

The activists are calling on the university to remove the Silent Sam statue, but administrators have responded that a 2015 state law prohibits the removal of certain monuments on public property without the approval of a state commission.

Andy Thomason oversees breaking-news coverage. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.

Correction (11/9/2017, 9:09 p.m.): This article originally misstated Randy Young’s job title. He is a spokesman for the campus police; he is not the police chief. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.