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Nobody said this was going to be easy. Any serious effort to change the Cincinnati Police Division will generate resistance.
Civil-service reform — Issue 5 on the city ballot — will enable the city manager to fire future police chiefs for cause and to hire new chiefs from outside the city. It will not, however, “politicize the police division,” as critics allege. That happened a long time ago.
Issue 5 will end civil-service protection for about 100 city department heads and administrators, including the fire and police chiefs. But if the measure passes, it will be because of one man: Police Chief Thomas Streicher.
‘No telling how long he’ll stay’
Interest in getting rid of the chief is one of the continuing aftershocks of the April riots. Many citizens had no idea it’s so hard to fire a police chief in Cincinnati or that the city charter requires new chiefs to come from within the ranks of the police division.
Simply put, civil-service reform got back on the ballot — voters rejected a similar measure in 1997 — because it’s the only way to prevent another Streicher. But few want to say that aloud — certainly not Cincinnati City Council, which put Issue 5 on the ballot, but only after exempting Streicher and the other 97 managers now working for the city.
A Better Cincinnati (ABC), the group supporting reform, is careful in addressing the issue of the chief.
“Issue 5 will apply to some 98 senior positions across city government and includes, but does not single out, police and fire chiefs and assistant chiefs,” says an Oct. 15 statement by ABC.
Calls for Streicher’s resignation filled the streets of Over-the-Rhine in the days following the fatal police shooting of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, the second unarmed man killed by police in the past year.
On April 24, barely two weeks after the riots, Mayor Charlie Luken told The Cincinnati Enquirer he supports civil-service reform. It wasn’t the entire managerial staff he had in mind, though — just the police and fire departments.
“I would extend it to police chief and fire chief assistants, but I wouldn’t go any deeper than that,” Luken said.
Streicher has ignored calls for his resignation. He also ignored a call from CityBeat seeking an interview, as he has continued to do since November 2000.
Three former Cincinnati city managers have endorsed civil-service reform.
“Right now, civil service restrictions needlessly limit the pool of applicants,” says Scott Johnson, city manager from 1986 to 1990. “No business could be successful without the ability to hire the right people. I enthusiastically support the passage of Issue 5.”
Gerald Newfarmer, city manager in 1990-93, is now president of the Charter Committee, Cincinnati’s third party, which was founded as a reform movement early in the 20th century. Issue 5 will improve local government, he says.
“It will help cut through some of the red tape and restrictions that make it difficult for the city to hire the very best top management employees from across the country, “Newfarmer says. “This is necessary reform.”
Backers of Issue 5 include the Coalition for a Just Cincinnati, the African-American Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, local offices of the NAACP and the Urban League and Cincinnati Community Action Now (CAN).
Opposition to Issue 5 includes organized labor, even though the proposal wouldn’t affect civil service protection for the great majority of city employees. Independent city council candidate Nathaniel Livingston Jr. opposes Issue 5 because he says it doesn’t go far enough.
“Chief Streicher’s young,” Livingston says. “There’s no telling how long he’ll stay on the job, and he’s grandfathered in. This is to make the city feel good about change, because that’s the buzz word. I’m for change — real change, not just something that feels good.”
One more in a line
It’s tempting to embrace Issue 5 for the enemies it has made — Streicher, of course, but also Keith Fangman, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police chapter. Fangman, as usual, leaves no doubt where he stands, denouncing Issue 5 in the September edition of the FOP newsletter.
“What this means is we will be given a group of politically appointed police administrators who will do exactly as they are told to do by anti-police members of council, and if they don’t, then they are simply fired with no appeal rights,” Fangman writes.
The anti-reform forces even trotted out former Mayor Eugene Ruehlmann for a guest column, “Beware of Pitfalls in Issue 5,” in The Cincinnati Post.
“Should some event occur, such as a riot, which makes it politically expedient to fire the police chief and/or fire chief, the mayor could simply direct the city manager to do so,” Ruehlmann writes.
Exactly.
Situations sometimes arise in which political expedience is also the right thing to do. If, back in April, Luken had the power to fire Streicher and found the nerve to do so, he might not be fighting an uphill reelection battle today.
Existing civil service law hasn’t served the Cincinnati Police Division well. In the past year alone, arbitrators have ordered the reinstatement of an officer who admitted planting marijuana on a suspect and an officer videotaped body-slamming an elderly Alzheimer’s patient.
Nor has the history of the selection process led to what anyone would call consistent excellence in the position of Cincinnati Police Chief. Streicher isn’t an aberration but rather one more in a line of chiefs whose legacy is a department now under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for excessive force.
The problem goes back at least as far as Chief Carl Goodin, whose 1976 conviction for perjury and tampering with evidence was later reversed on appeal; Chief Myron Leistler, who admitted in 1989 he’d used illegal wiretapping; and Chief Larry Whalen, best described by Peter Bronson, cop-loving Enquirer editorial page editor who in 1997 wrote, “The ‘bad-cop’ was Chief Larry Whalen — not corrupt, just a species of largemouth brass who liked to thump heads with a verbal nightstick.”
That was part of Bronson’s argument against civil-service reform in the chief’s office four years ago. Since then, we’ve moved on from verbal nightsticks to the kind that draw real blood. ©
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2001.