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By Christopher Witflee
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In Cincinnati's favor on the heels of riots and curfews, at least one can say the city went into upheaval for serious reasons. The news of recent years had nearly discredited rioting as an expression of rage, for many cities and college towns have turned chaos out of the fortunes of their athletic teams, as if to make a party out of car fires and bottle throwing.
Perhaps the same kind of eruption would have disgraced Cincinnati if one of its favorite teams were good enough to almost win something, but there's much more gravity to last week's crisis, which has been decades in the making. Race relations in Cincinnati have always been tense, and the problem is much more subtle and homely than cops shooting blacks or blacks smashing windows.
Cincinnatians have long displayed an alarming tendency to make racism a bigger problem than it really is by promoting race as the source of conflict when it isn't necessary. In far too many of the day-to-day transactions that are the grist of ordinary life, the dispute between a white and a black will result in one party or the other, if not both, claiming the other person's racial agenda as the cause.
Too seldom does one acknowledge that the other is simply trying to satisfy his own interests. Too often, one will assume that the other is motivated, above all else, by racial hostility. And it cuts both ways. Blacks do it as well as whites. None of this is necessarily anyone's official policy, but it's an insidious sort of racial profiling, the kind of ground-level interaction that creeps unremarkably through the society and stands to be subtly institutionalized in government and business.
The trouble precipitating last week's outbreak is so brutally fundamental as to mock larger discussions that couch racial equality in class struggle or economics. Simply put, black folks despair of mounting evidence that their community is under slow burning siege by the Cincinnati Police.
We've all seen the statistics. Since 1995, 15 blacks in Cincinnati have been killed as the result of police interventions. According to the police, seven of the victims were armed with guns, two used cars as weapons against the police, one threatened officers with a brick, one waved a board with nails at officers and one had a knife. Three were unarmed. Timothy Thomas, the 19-year-old shot dead on April 7 by a white officer who tried to serve him with warrants, not only was unarmed, but the fifth African American killed by Cincinnati police in seven months.
While it's sad and regrettable that three Cincinnati officers have been killed in the line of duty since 1997, it's understood that police work is inherently dangerous. But it shouldn't be as dangerous to be a black citizen as it is to be a police officer and, if it is as dangerous, the danger definitely shouldn't be coming from the police.
If the killings were contextualized only in heated moments of split-second police work during which an officer must decide quickly whether he or the assailant is going home that night to his family, the reaction might not have been so violent. But the context is much more broad.
A recent CityBeat analysis of traffic citations issued by Cincinnati police from March 1999 through December 2000 showed that blacks are between two and four times as likely as whites to be issued secondary violations like driving without a license, driving without proof of insurance, driving without a seatbelt or jaywalking. And if the study didn't control for social and economic variables to make the numbers conclusive and meaningful, they still raise questions, especially as everyone who has dealt with police knows they operate with much discretion in these matters.
Furthermore, Cincinnati Mayor Charles Luken and Police Chief Thomas Streicher have acknowledged a problem with racial profiling by the city police. And three attorneys are attempting to make a class action case out of a two-year old police misconduct suit originally filed by Bomani Tyehimba, a Bond Hill resident who accuses an officer of unjustifiably pulling a gun on him during a February 1999 traffic stop.
One of the attorneys, Scott Greenwood, said the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which he represents, has filed 16 racial profiling cases across the country without losing any. Another of the attorneys, Ken Lawson, had more than 300 people come forward when he solicited statements from black Cincinnatians who believe they have been subjected to racial profiling. That's in addition to dozens of stories that have come out anecdotally and in community hearings.
All of this, taken together, is insufficient evidence that the Cincinnati Police is a government-sponsored lynching mob. But it is enough to agitate the concerns of black Cincinnatians who have to be apprehensive about what day-to-day life will bring. Breaking even economically goes on the back burner when you can't even be reliably sure you'll pass the day without being pulled over for no good reason, confronted by a police officer who's trying to find something on you, then stuck with an expensive ticket, if not a bullet.
The black community in Cincinnati hasn't, through the years, been especially militant or aggressive. Blacks who have come to Cincinnati from other towns have remarked, with some disgust, that Cincinnati blacks "know their place," and one wise black elder offered this advice for getting by in Cincinnati, which is actually a pretty good keynote for any newcomer to town: "When you live in Cincinnati, you have to create a world of your own."
But even that requires some measure of liberty, let alone safety, which is precisely what many Cincinnati blacks feel has been denied them through official channels. And they're not wrong. Incredibly, after all the questions about police conduct raised by recent events, officers pulled up around a small group gathered right after the Thomas funeral on Saturday, April 14, and fired beanbags out of shotguns.
Witnesses reported no warning or provocation for this attack upon citizens. One of those hit, a high school French teacher from Louisville, was helping hold up a banner that said, "Citizens Against Police Abuse." She is hospitalized for a cracked rib, bruised lung and bruised spleen. So much for free speech in a police state. True to Cincinnati style, this happened on Liberty Street, which isn't even an irony. It's a disgusting farce.
See, all the rioting from last week, the window smashing and fire setting, it has nothing to do with justice. But it's pretty safe to say, given the mounting evidence, that where the rioters are concerned, nothing has anything to do with justice, because law and order has become a pretense for harassing black folks. Liberty isn't even in the picture. Justice is out the window. They have nothing of that sort to preserve or protect. Yes, the unrest was stupid and reckless. But is it any more stupid and reckless than long-standing ignorance and indifference to the conditions that brought it about?
The looters and rioters not only don't have a stake in the society, but they've got good reason to suspect that blacks have been tagged as a civic nuisance to be kept in oppressive check by the police. A seven-year-old black girl struck by a police beanbag after the Thomas funeral probably knows that score already.
Many Cincinnati cops, if not most, take seriously their charge to preserve public safety, do their work with a sense of proportion and the community is in their debt for undertaking this often thankless, difficult task. There's no question that a severe black-on-black crime problem cries for preventative policing. And, in any community, kids hanging out in the streets doing nothing is cause for worry. So, the police have hundreds of tough calls to make every day.
But a very fine line has been obliterated. Events are showing too many cowboys and reactionaries on the force, giving the good cops a bad name. Some in the community are calling for the loose cannons to be purged, which would be more than a symbolic gesture. It would make the streets more safe.
To his credit, the mayor is calling for voters to approve changes in the civil service rules, so unstable officers can be more thoroughly disciplined and removed. He wants City Council to cooperate with plaintiffs and settle the federal lawsuit. Black leaders have consistently called for peace and legitimate political action. Race warriors will solve nothing. Community cooperation and political participation are steps to solutions.
But the larger problem isn't ultimately going to be solved by official channels. Racism is a people problem, which persists, even when there's no presumption of racial superiority, as long as we're better at spotting racial agendas than personal reasons. To try identifying a person's racial agenda is to treat him as part of a larger, monolithic force. To try identifying a person's reasons is to treat him as a person. To try defending and advocating a person's liberties is to treat him as an American.
And that, at bottom, points to how breakdowns like this occur. It's much too common to identify whites and blacks by racial agenda or profile, and it's not common enough to identify persons and Americans by reason and liberty. Reason and liberty need to be practiced and defended. Otherwise, they go away.
It's long been one of Barry Larkin's virtues that he has stayed away from the racial fray, understanding he can make no better contribution at this point in his life than to be a complete ball player. In character, the Reds shortstop refused comment to reporters about last week's trouble.
That said, it was good to see remarks from Ken Griffey, Jr., even though regular readers will know this space has suggested he talk only about baseball. But Griffey stayed above the fray, too. He spoke about the crisis in human terms.
"It's upsetting," Griffey told reporters in Pittsburgh. "Not only for (Thomas') family, but for the 3-month-old baby who won't know his father, for the girl who was about to marry her husband, and his mom ... I understand the frustrations of the people because (Thomas) wasn't armed."
It is upsetting. Too many Cincinnatians believe that could have been them, instead of Timothy Thomas, on April 7, for no good reason and all the wrong reasons. And, yet, that bullet hasn't been dodged. Tomorrow is another day.
CONTACT BILL PETERSON: letters@citybeat.com
