Hello all. Hope you had a great Opening Day and enjoyed the parade as much as I did. Apparently, there was also some kind of ballgame that happened downtown after the parade, but we won’t talk about that. Instead, let’s talk about news.
Here’s an interesting story about a forgotten moment almost a decade ago when the city of Cincinnati turned away state funding for an office in the city’s Health Department that would have studied minority health disparities. In 2008, Cincinnati City Councilmembers, including now-Mayor John Cranley, voted against accepting the $250,000 in start-up state funds, which required a $100,000 match from the Health Department. That vote allegedly came after intense lobbying by Center for Closing the Health Gap CEO and former Cincinnati Mayor Dwight Tillery. Tillery, and councilmembers like Cranley, argued that the center would duplicate services already offered by the Health Gap. But former Cincinnati Board of Health members worry that the city passed up a valuable opportunity to address health disparities among minority residents. Today, seven cities in Ohio have the state-funded offices, but Cincinnati does not. Tillery says the city made the right choice, and that the office would have undermined the Health Gap’s work. But critics aren’t so sure.
• A second person has died in the aftermath of the Cameo Nightclub shootings. Deondre Davis last night succumbed to injuries he received during the March shooting. Police have named Davis a suspect in the firefight that killed O’Bryan Spikes and injured 16 others. He had been hospitalized since the incident. Davis’ family says he was innocent of the charges against him, and his lawyer, Carl Lewis, says he has evidence that the 29-year-old was trying to mediate in the argument that sparked the shooting when he was hit by gunfire. Another suspect in the shooting, 27-year-old Cornell Beckley, is currently held on $1.7 million bond at the Hamilton County Jail.
• Will Cincinnati’s iconic Delta Queen sail… or well, paddle… through the night again? A proposed law in the U.S. Senate could bring it one step closer to doing so. Sens. Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman are touting a bill that would extend into 2028 exemptions for boats like the Delta Queen to laws that prohibit large wooden watercraft from carrying passengers on overnight trips. The Queen was exempted from those laws until 2008, and the lack of exemption has more or less grounded it. The Queen was docked in Cincinnati from 1946 through 1985. The boat is currently undergoing renovations in Houma, La. and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was named to the Register’s 2016 most endangered places list. On a side note, here’s my favorite song name-dropping the Delta Queen.
• Ohio today becomes the first state in the nation to make it illegal to board up vacant buildings with plywood — a law that could have big implications in Cincinnati. Supporters of the law call it an anti-blight measure, saying that plywood boarding makes surrounding property values lower, is much more susceptible to vandals and blocks views into the building for firefighters and other first responders. An alternative method for securing empty buildings, called clear boarding, uses transparent plastic windows. It’s more expensive than plywood, meaning the potential for more difficulty for property owners without lots of money to rehab their buildings.
• Finally, in national news, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions yesterday ordered a review of all federal police reform efforts, including consent decrees like those in progress in cities like Chicago, Cleveland and Baltimore. Cincinnati’s 2002 Collaborative Agreement was an example of such a decree and has been credited with reforming racial disparities involving the city’s police department and law enforcement efforts, though some data shows work remains to be done. Sessions has expressed distrust in federal efforts to reform law enforcement efforts, saying they make police feel vulnerable.
“I think there is concern that good police officers and good departments can be sued by the Department of Justice when you just have individuals within a department that have done wrong,” Sessions said at his confirmation hearing in January.
Sessions also said the federal actions undermine respect for police officers. The federal decrees have come after investigations found extreme examples of racial disparities in law enforcement efforts including police shootings of unarmed minorities.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 5, 2017.