By Debbie Howlett, USA TODAY
The gasps and sobs of 300 people echoed through the Christ Emmanuel Christian Fellowship Church as a videotape showed police officers striking an unarmed but unruly black man with nightsticks.
The murmuring continued as the tape from a camera in a patrol car rolled on for six minutes more, until police had the man in handcuffs and realized he wasn’t breathing.
Then the lights came up.
A panel of city officials, including the mayor and the police chief, sat straight-backed at folding tables in front of the altar. For two hours Wednesday night, citizens stepped to a microphone between pews and cried, cursed and pointed fingers.
Amid the acrimony, spectator Roy Jones, 31, offered a concise but powerful summation: “There has to be a different way,” he said.
Many black residents here say that the Nov. 30 beating death of Nathaniel Jones proved that little has changed since April 2001, when the shooting death of an unarmed 19-year-old man by a white police officer sparked three days of riots and led to an unprecedented plan to overhaul one of the nation’s most troubled police departments. (Related item: Chronology of violent encounters)
“Black men are still dying,” said Ken Lawson, a prominent civil rights lawyer.
Jones, 41, was the third black man to die in an encounter with Cincinnati police since the riots and the 18th in nine years. “Sooner or later, one way or another,” Lawson said, “this issue has to get resolved.”
The police video showed Jones lunging at an officer and knocking him over as they investigated a report of disorderly conduct. Police struck Jones multiple times with their nightsticks to subdue him. The coroner ruled that the struggle was the direct cause of Jones’ death, but an autopsy showed that Jones suffered from an enlarged heart, was obese and had intoxicating levels of cocaine, PCP and methanol in his blood.
Jones was remembered Saturday at a memorial service that drew about 500 people. At his family’s request, a protest march to City Hall scheduled for Sunday was canceled.
Still work to be done
Cincinnati is a normally placid city of 320,000. About 40 percent of its residents are black. It is a prosperous city in many regards and headquarters for such corporations as Procter & Gamble and the Kroger grocery chain. The city is redeveloping its downtown and the waterfront along the Ohio River, where there are new football and baseball stadiums and a museum dedicated to the underground railroad that transported slaves from the South to freedom in the North.
Mayor Charlie Luken says he sees the police department changing along with everything else. “We are making every effort,” he says.
In April 2002, one year after the riots, Attorney General John Ashcroft came to Cincinnati to announce an agreement that he called a national model for community collaboration.
The city, police union and local community leaders drafted a 73-point plan to change the police department. It included provisions to rewrite policies on the use of force, create a board to review complaints from citizens and develop a database to track officers who showed a pattern of using excessive force.
The city hired Saul Green, the former U.S. attorney in Detroit, to track progress. Two months before Jones died, Green issued his latest report. Among his findings:
-- A lack of communication and cooperation among the groups who had signed the agreement had hindered progress. On the day Green issued his report, a federal judge denied a request by the city’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, to withdraw from the agreement.
-- The citizen board that reviews complaints against the police was not fully functioning. The first director hired, Nate Ford, resigned in July and has not been replaced.
-- The department has not created a database to track citizen complaints and every contact an officer has with a citizen.
“There is still significant work to be done,” Green concluded. “Success is not assured.”
On Sunday, a week after Jones’ death, the mayor urged the city to equip its police officers with stun guns. “I am looking for any avenue to avoid another struggle,” Luken told City Council members. He asked them to find $1 million to pay for the non-lethal weapons.
In the nave of Christ Emmanuel Church on Wednesday, Police Chief Thomas Streicher, his uniform sharply creased, listened patiently for hours.
He had spent three hours that afternoon being grilled by members of the City Council. He stayed at the forum until 9:30 p.m. to meet with citizens who didn’t get a chance to speak.
Asking for patience
Each time he was asked to account for Jones’ death, Streicher explained the events in the clipped manner of a police report:
Officers arrived at the White Castle restaurant about 6 a.m. Nov. 30. They were responding to a call from a fire department EMS unit about a disorderly man.
The six officers - five of them white, one black - found Jones behaving oddly, alternately shouting and dancing. Jones, who weighed 350 pounds, lunged at the officers. They took what they viewed as appropriate action to subdue him. When the officers realized Jones had stopped breathing, they rolled him from his back to his side to help clear his airway. They recalled the EMS unit, which had left the scene before the scuffle began.
Streicher asked the community for patience in the investigation of Jones’ death - and for changes in his department. “I don’t think there’s a light switch you can just turn on and things have changed,” Streicher said. “It’s going to take constant effort from each and every one of us to strive to do the right thing.”
But across town, six activists met to organize a campaign to recall Mayor Luken. The Coalition for a Just Cincinnati, which has urged a boycott of the city by groups planning conventions here, long ago demanded that Luken fire the police chief. Nathaniel Livingston, coalition co-chairman, says if Luken won’t get rid of Streicher, the community should get rid of Luken.
Amanda Mays, a teacher’s aide and coalition leader, says that many people have given up on the idea that political action will create meaningful change.
“It feels pretty hopeless here,” Mays says. “That’s what makes this city a powder keg.”