15 Dead in Ohio: Cincinnati's Black and Blue

By Tim Wise, AlterNet. Posted April 17, 2001.

Sometimes, folks don't even bother hiding their racism. Take Keith Fangman, President of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). In the wake of this past week's uprising to protest the killing of Tim Thomas and 14 other black men by his colleagues since 1995, Fangman said:

"If we give one inch to these terrorists in the form of negotiations, then we've got no one to blame but ourselves when we turn into another Detroit or Washington DC."

Now, he could have said that negotiating with the "rioters" would turn Cincinnati into another Boulder, Colorado, or Carbondale, Illinois, or East Lansing, Michigan, or Eugene, Oregon, or State College, Pennsylvania, or Storrs, Connecticut, or Pullman, Washington or Tucson, Arizona -- all sites of major riots by drunken white college students in recent years. But he didn't. He picked Detroit and DC -- two places that haven't had any riots lately, but which both have a lot of black people. And that, after all, was his point.

Now frankly, for any representative of the official Police Corruption and Brutality Protection Union (commonly known as the FOP) to refer to those who rebel against cop violence as terrorists, is, well, precious. I think the old saying "takes one to know one" probably applies here. Oddly enough the only "terrorists" in evidence in Fangman's town are the Klansmen he and his pals protect every Christmas season when they erect their lit cross in Fountain Square. The rights of a 135-year old paramilitary hate group apparently count for more to Cincinnati authorities than the lives of young black men.

To hear police representatives tell it, blacks in Cincinnati still have no rights that a member of the FOP is bound to respect. In seeking to justify the deaths of the 15 black males, Cincinnati Police Sergeant Harry Roberts noted that those killed were all "criminals who resisted arrest," leading one to wonder just what is the allowable punishment for "resisting arrest" in Ohio nowadays? I mean damn, I knew the death penalty was still popular with most folks, but execution for running away from a cop?

And as for the "criminals" whose lives have been snuffed by the Cincinnati police, they include not only Tim Thomas -- whose rap sheet was filled with traffic offenses like not wearing a seatbelt (the savage!) -- but also Roger Owensby Jr, who had no criminal record, but whose "attitude" convinced police to arrest him for "disorderly conduct" and apply a deadly chokehold in the process. And then there was Lorenzo Collins, a mentally handicapped and emotionally disturbed young man whose shooting was explained as necessary since he was wielding a solitary brick and threatening to throw it at police -- 15 of them who surrounded him before dropping him in a hail of bullets. Sounds like a fair fight. Or Michael Carpenter, who was shot in the back of the head during a traffic stop. Or Courtney Mathis, a "menace to society" all of 12 years old, who borrowed a relative's car and who was shot to death for trying to flee after being pulled over.

Apparently the Cincinnati police have a hard time distinguishing between children and hardened criminals. Following the funeral for Thomas on Saturday, cops opened fire with rubber bullets and beanbag ammunition, shooting a seven-year-old black girl during a demonstration and march.

But hey, as the FOP's official slogan boasts, they're just "building on a proud tradition." A tradition that reaches all the way back to 1915, to a time when many a proud member of this proud organization proudly and rather openly engaged in the murder of African Americans by joining in anti-black riots and lynchings. In the first forty years of the twentieth century, about half of all blacks who were killed, were killed by law enforcement, including, one can be sure, many a dues-paying member of the FOP's Aryan brotherhood in blue.

In recent years the Cincinnati police in particular have been building on a proud tradition of racism that has finally resulted in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and a local coalition of African-American leaders. Among the dozens of racist actions prompting the suit, perhaps the most egregious involves a pregnant mother of two and her husband who were detained and handcuffed at gunpoint in front of their children, even as the officers involved explained to them that they were looking for two adult males driving a similar kind of car.

But rather than focus their attention on weeding out those officers who engage in racist and brutal practices, the FOP prefers to concentrate on such important tasks as boycotting movies whose stars are supportive of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Seeing Mumia killed and picketing Rage Against the Machine concerts have been among the group's top priorities in recent years. And even though the FOP rejected racial profiling at their September 2000 National Board Meeting, they insisted on the legitimacy of "criminal profiling," the definition of which apparently still includes race as a factor of suspicion.

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