Confrontation in Cincinnati

The kinds of answers we get are almost always determined by the questions we ask. In the recent, tragic death of Nathaniel Jones of Cincinnati, Ohio, we appear to be asking the wrong questions.

To recap for those who may have missed it: Police were called to a Cincinnati fast food restaurant on a Sunday morning in early December after reports that a man who had passed out on the lawn outside had awakened and was making "a nuisance" of himself. (What one must do in Cincinnati to become a nuisance has not yet been defined, but that is another question.)

In any event, police arrived, and beat Jones to death with billyclubs. The county coroner later said that an autopsy of the 41-year-old Jones showed that he had an enlarged heart, suffered from obesity and had intoxicating levels of cocaine, PCP and methanol in his blood.

"Absent the struggle," the coroner said, "Mr. Jones would not have died at that precise moment of time." But while the beating led directly to Jones' death, the implication of the coroner's public statements was that the victim's health and stimulant conditions were the actual, inherent causes of death, with cardiac dysrhythmia being the immediate culprit.

What brought this case to national attention was the fact that the confrontation was recorded on a videotape camera mounted on the police cruiser. Within hours of the incident, the video was broadcast by television stations across the country; Rodney King, the Remix, over and over, its images imprinted on our brains in the sort of national, mass visual experience we've come to expect in these days of 24-hour-cable news.

With predictable reaction.

"The sight of police officers repeatedly beating Nathaniel Jones with metal night sticks is sickening and appears well outside of the norm for subduing an unarmed suspect," said NAACP president Kwesi Mfume.

"Why didn't they use a stun gun or other nonviolent means to subdue him? Police officers have options available to immobilize citizens short of death," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

"If proper procedure means that you can use that kind of force to clobber people repeatedly who are clearly disarmed, then there's something wrong with the policy," said Calvert Smith, president of the Cincinnati NAACP chapter.

"You don't keep beating on him; you give him a chance to surrender," said Ken Lawon, the Cincinnati attorney called in by the Jones family to represent them in the matter. "No-one is going to surrender as long as you keep slapping them across the head or body."

Referring to the 19 African-American men who have died in encounters with the Cincinnati Police Department in the past eight years, Malik Shabazz, the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party, charged the Cincinnati police chief with "running a criminal organization that has the blood of 19 black men on its hands."

To their credit, a number of African-American leaders and organizations called for an investigation into all of the circumstances surrounding Jones' death, including how police respond to citizens who may display symptoms of mental instability. But in the seductiveness of the video itself, those nuances were lost. And the problem is, by itself, the Nathaniel Jones video does not support a charge of police excess. Watch it yourself, in the quiet of your home, now that a little time has passed, and the emotion of the initial event has somewhat eased.

What the video shows is a large man (Jones was reportedly some 350 pounds) lunging at one police officer, swinging at him, and then attempting to collar him. Under those circumstances (and remember, we're considering only the video itself), the police response appears appropriate, and may be more properly be defined by what they did not do than what they did. The police did not pull out guns and shoot Nathaniel Jones. They did not strike him in the head with their clubs. Once Jones was on the ground, they did not kick him, nor try to raise up his head and strike it against something. Instead, they jabbed and beat him with billyclubs on his upper and lower torso until they were able to get him subdued.