“No Justice, No Peace,” the signs say at various protest rallies. But what exactly do they mean?
To me, they suggest that real peace won’t be at hand in Cincinnati until justice is available to all its people. OK, then what exactly are “peace” and “justice?”
Peace is more than simply the absence of conflict. Just because we haven’t had riots in our streets over the past nine months doesn’t mean Cincinnati is a more peaceful place. Healing certainly has begun here, but we still have a long way to go.
And justice? Well, in some ways it’s easier to define justice by what it’s not.
It’s not a black teen-ager with outstanding warrants for driving without a license being shot dead by a Cincinnati Police officer who is later acquitted of negligent homicide.
It’s not another black man dying in the custody of two Cincinnati officers who, after essentially blaming each other during separate trials, are both acquitted. It’s not the Hamilton County Prosecutor declining to retry those two officers while launching a dubious rehashing of a 38-year-old murder case in Greenhills.
Mostly, it’s not the United States Department of Justice deciding against charging the police officers involved in the infamous “drive-by” beanbag shooting after Timothy Thomas’ funeral last year.
The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, Greg Lockhart, recently told The Cincinnati Enquirer and Channel 9 that his bosses in Washington, D.C. didn’t think they could win cases against the eight officers who fired nonlethal ammunition into a crowd on April 14, 2001 — so they disbanded the grand jury and dropped the cases.
And so we’re left with the images of a little girl shot by a police beanbag crying in someone’s arms, officers in riot gear firing into a crowd with no warning and shocked witnesses demanding answers. And we’re left with Lockhart telling The Enquirer he believes the officers shouldn’t have fired into the crowd but that, technically, their actions weren’t “a violation of the law.”
It reminds me of the lawyer for Officer Robert Jorg, on trial for the in-custody death of Roger Owensby Jr., who argued the Cincinnati Police Division was responsible for Owensby’s death but Jorg himself wasn’t guilty (see Dead Right issue of Nov. 1-7, 2001).
Sure, Cincinnati police shouldn’t kill suspects in custody or shoot beanbags at bystanders, but they occasionally do. I submit that part of the reason they do is because there are no ramifications for doing it.
Three officers are acquitted in Thomas’ and Owensby’s deaths. The “drive-by” shooters get a free pass. Lt. Col. Richard Janke tells March for Justice participants last summer that “we are prepared to whack you and take you out if necessary” if protests get unruly, yet isn’t reprimanded. The police department holds a citywide work slowdown over the summer to protest criticism of their work, yet no one is fired or even scolded. And the police make a fiasco out of the November 2000 TransAtlantic Business Dialogue — dozens of illegal arrests resulting in several lawsuits against the city — yet more than a year later tell CityBeat they’re still “working on” their after-action report.
Meanwhile, those who are supposed to oversee the police department are, at best, asleep at the wheel or, at worst, purposefully negligent. No one leading the department is pressed to explain anything to the city manager, to city council or, in the beanbag cases, to a judge or jury.
Police officials cooperate with the media — who, of course, seek information on the public’s behalf — only when they feel like it. CityBeat, for one, hasn’t had a telephone call returned by the police chief or the Fraternal Order of Police president in more than a year.
Make no mistake: One of the underlying struggles in Cincinnati during the past few years has been over who controls the city’s police force — the chief and his aides or the citizens through their elected representatives. Civilian control of the military — or, in this case, the people’s control of their police — is a cornerstone of every successful democracy.
I hate to say it, but I’ve finally become afraid of the Cincinnati Police. I don’t know what to do about it, because no one in charge seems to know what to do either.
I do know that, without justice for all, there can be justice for no one. Without justice, there can be no peace. And without peace, there can be no recovery in Cincinnati.
This article appears in Feb 6-12, 2002.
