As the trial for a University of Cincinnati police officer involved in a high-profile, racially charged police shooting moves forward, new data shows what progress has — and hasn’t — been made by Cincinnati Police Department, which has faced its own scrutiny over similar incidents over the last decade and a half.
The number of use-of-force incidents by Cincinnati Police officers has dropped since 2000, police records now available on the city’s open data portal show. But that data also shows that police-involved shootings by CPD still disproportionately involve black Cincinnatians and that complaints against CPD officers are very often filed by black citizens against white officers.
Cincinnati is about 45 percent black and 50 percent white. But since 2010, 28 black individuals have been involved in officer-involved shootings, while seven white individuals have been involved in similar incidents. That doesn’t include officers accidentally discharging their weapons or firing at animals, which are also included in the data released last week. The data does not include information on fatalities.
City officials say the data portal is designed to increase transparency in city government and allow citizens and media greater access to public records. The release of the police data is part of the city’s participation in the White House Police Data Initiative, an effort by President Barack Obama’s administration to increase transparency around policing. Cincinnati’s portal also includes data about city contracting, crime incidents, the city’s fiscal records and more.
“Transparency is a core value and people have a right to know what their government is doing,” said Mayor John Cranley in a statement about the data release. “Making this data publicly available increases transparency and I believe will reveal that we have the most professional police department in the country.”
The data release comes as Cincinnati is once again in the national spotlight as the trial of Ray Tensing begins. The white University of Cincinnati Police officer shot and killed unarmed black motorist Samuel DuBose in Mount Auburn on July 19, 2015. Tensing is currently standing trial on murder and manslaughter charges for that shooting.
Tensing wasn’t a Cincinnati Police Department officer, but the incident has intensified scrutiny around police use of force. That’s been a heady issue here since civil unrest touched off by the 2001 shooting of 19-year-old unarmed black man Timothy Thomas at the hands of CPD officer Stephen Roach.
The shooting and attendant unrest led to years of reform efforts to CPD at the request of the U.S. Justice Department and local activists. These reforms, codified in a document called the Collaborative Agreement, included the institution of a Citizens Complaint Authority to follow up on accusations of bad behavior by cops, new training and strategies involving more community-oriented policing efforts and more.
Many outside the city have lauded changes undertaken here. Cincinnati has been heralded by national publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic and others as a model for a nation experiencing a crisis around issues of police and race relations.
“The city that once served as a prime example of broken policing now stands as a model of effective reform,” reads an Atlantic article published last year.
Both President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which visited Cincinnati, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s Taskforce on Community-Police Relations have also held up the city’s Collaborative Agreement and problem-oriented policing approach as worth emulating.
But data suggests there is much more work to do. Arrests and stops by police still fall disproportionately on blacks here. The demographic makeup of area law enforcement agencies still doesn’t mirror the population they serve. And pervasive economic segregation in predominantly black neighborhoods continues to put stress on those communities
Some progress has been made in the number of use of force incidents CPD officers are involved in. In 2001, CPD records show 1,148 use-of-force incidents, compared to just 437 in 2015. This use-of-force data is not broken down by race on the city’s website, though officials say that’s coming.
Meanwhile, police shooting incidents have remained steady, averaging about four a year, with occasional dips and spikes in outlier years like 2011, when there were 10.
In 2001, there were six police shooting incidents involving five black individuals and one white individual. 2015 also saw six police shooting incidents — five involved in the 2015 incidents were black, while one was Hispanic.
The Citizens Complaint Authority has been among the most-heralded components of the collaborative agreement. Last year, 168 complaints were filed, and 70 percent of them were filed by black Cincinnatians; 81 percent of officers who were the subjects of those complaints were white, according to the data. In 2014, 87 percent of complaints were filed by blacks; 77 percent of officers involved in those complaints were white. CPD’s police force is about 70 percent white and 30 percent black.
Of the 650 cases investigated by the CCA since 2010 (not all allegations were investigated by the CCA, and some complaints contained multiple allegations), 62 were sustained, or turned over to the Cincinnati police chief. How complaints are handled by CPD is somewhat unclear, however, an issue the authority says it is working on.
The data listed on the open data portal appears to be somewhat incomplete — the Aug. 7 officer-involved shooting of Jawari Porter downtown does not appear in the data set, for example, and records for the Feb. 17 shooting death of Paul Gaston list him as white. He was black.
Porter was shot after authorities say he threatened an officer with a knife. Gaston was shot in the street in Cheviot while on his knees after officers say he reached for his waist. He was carrying a BB gun.
With those shootings included, there have been at least four officer-involved shootings so far this year — three involving blacks and one involving a white man named Robert Tenbrick who was a suspect in a West Price Hill robbery.
Staff at the city’s Office of Data and Performance Analytics said that the Porter incident isn’t shown in the data because it happened rather recently and that earlier data is accurate. ODPA says it’s working to fine-tune the data portal to work out kinks and make it easier for the public to use
Officer-Involved Shootings Classified as Use of Force
1996: 2 (1 white, 1 Asian)
1997: 0
1998: 5 (3 black, 1 white, 1 unknown)
1999: 2 black
2000: 1 black
2001: 6 (5 black, 1 white)
2002: 0
2003: 2 (2 black)
2004: 4 (4 black)
2005: 6 (6 black)
2006: 4 (4 black)
2007: 6 (6 black)
2008: 4 (3 black, 1 unknown)
2009: 5 (5 black)
2010: 2 (1 black, 1 white)
2011: 10 (9 black, 1 white)
2012: 4 (4 black)
2013: 6 (4 black, 1 Hispanic, 1 white)
2014: 5 (3 black, 2 white)
2015: 6 (5 black, 1 Hispanic)
2016 year to date (Oct. 25): 4 (3 black, 1 white)
This article appears in Oct 26 – Nov 2, 2016.