Good morning Cincy! Here are your morning headlines.  

• A rally and march in Cincinnati last night drew more than 100 people protesting a Cuyahoga grand jury decision not to indict officers in the Cleveland police shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. The event drew a diverse group of activists and speakers from Black Lives Matter Cincinnati, local unions and workers’ rights advocates, representatives from Cincinnati’s Islamic community, the Cincinnati Radical Feminist Collective and others. The rally began at Findlay Park in Over-the-Rhine followed by a march to Cincinnati Police Department District 1 headquarters in the West End. Attendees brought toys to symbolize Christmas gifts Rice was not able to receive this year due to his death. Those toys will be distributed to disadvantaged children in the community, BLM organizer Brian Taylor said.  
 
Earlier this week, a grand jury declined to bring charges against officers involved in Rice’s Nov. 2014 death, a move which has sparked outrage from Rice’s family and anti-police violence activists across the country. In Cincinnati, march organizers released a list of demands aimed at Cuyahoga County, including the firing of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty, a reopening of the Rice case against officer Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, an indictment for those officers, and a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the shooting. At the rally and march in Cincinnati, activists also drew parallels to the July police shooting of Samuel DuBose, a black motorist killed by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing. Tensing was charged with murder for that shooting, but has yet to stand trial. 

• The U.S. Department of Justice announced earlier this month that they will be suspending the equitable sharing program that allows police to keep a large chunk of money and property seized from individuals. Local law enforcement will still be allowed to do it, but they will no longer be able to keep up to 80 percent of it. The program is controversial because police are able to keep property from those who are never actually charged with a crime like Charles Clark II, who now famously had $11,000 in cash seized by police at the CVG airport in February of 2014. CPD says they use the reportedly received $1.1 million they received from the program between 2010 and the middle of 2015 to pay for outside training for their police force, but non-profits like Washington D.C.-based Institute of Justice say the current program is problematic because it’s become a money grab for law enforcement. 

• Who exactly voted against ResponsibleOhio’s failed attempt at marijuana reform this past election? According to an analysis by Mike Dawson, a Columbus-based election statistics expert, well-to-do suburbanites represented the group with the highest amount of opponents to the measure. Nearly 70 percent of voters in the suburbs of Toledo and Columbus voted against it, while 60 percent of Dayton, Cleveland and Cincinnati suburbanites opposed it. Urban voters favored the legalization 5 percentage points more. While many opposed Issue 3 because it limited the growth of marijuana to just 10 commercial farms, Dawson told the Associated Press that suburbanites also fear that marijuana will be a gateway drug in their communities. 

• Cincinnati ranks as one of the best cities in the U.S. for beer drinkers. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent time in this city with its many breweries, beer-centered bars and massive Oktoberfest that rivals Munich, but the website SmartAsset ranked Cincy as number 10 in the U.S. It beat out Columbus and Cleveland in the ranking, having 14 breweries and 4.7 microbreweries per 100,000 people. With the average beer costing a mere $3 a pint, I’ll drink to that.    

This article appears in Dec 30, 2015 – Jan 5, 2016.

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