Racial Profiling Injected, Spreads
In 1988, there were some very strained relationships between the police department and the city that needed to be addressed. Perhaps you have heard about it.
Before what happened on the front pages and national news across the country, then-president of the HRC, Thomas wrote a report that addressed the direction in which the police department was heading in relation to the citizens of the African American community in hopes of providing some crucial insight.
“Back then the department was in a ‘law enforcement’ style of policing,” Thomas explains. “[It was] a very aggressive kind of policing coming out of the war on drugs… and Ronald Reagan poured an enormous amount of money in policing to address the issue of War on Drugs. That’s when the [Department of Enforcement Administration] began to establish the profile of a potential drug carrier.”
“They established the profile and then they started to enforce that on the main drug arteries in the country: I-90 coming from Florida to Washington D.C.”
The aggressive law enforcement worked on interstates. It was based on keeping eyes out for rental cars or specific kinds of cars, or what were considered comparable earmarks for drug carriers. When police used the same theory in neighborhoods, however, it was not so successful.
Thomas explains, “Police started to use that same methodology in our urban cores and our cities, and that’s when you start to hear more about racial profiling.”
“That put a lot of pressure on city council to do something. Well, council didn’t do what was expected. And … citizens came down to council and pretty much took over chambers, echoing their concerns out into the neighborhood later on.”
At Its Roots
For most casual observers who were in the city at the time, the breaking point pointed to the murder of Timothy Thomas.
“That wasn’t the case.” says Cecil Thomas. “It was the systemic problems that had been ignored for a very long time in the city of Cincinnati—you can go down to Over-the-Rhine and see how some of the systemic problems have been ignored.”
Councilman Thomas believes that the way in which the city has manicured its different neighborhoods has as much to do with attitudes among classes as events like the Thomas shooting, the Owensby death and those that would follow – all of these cases with the superficial earmarks of a specific class at the hands of the police.
He says, “If you’re standing in front of the Aronoff Center, and there’s a sidewalk that has been lifted up by a tree, there’s no way that it would stay like that. But if you walk down to Music Hall on Elm Street, there are sidewalks that are turned over, flipped up, all kinds of mess. And I pointed out in 2001 that that kind of situation, a child could trip and break a leg.”
Not “taking a serious approach” – what Thomas characterizes as important beginnings to the ultimate problems – are what enable chaotic ends. Particularly, he feels, when they are being watched over in one neighborhood and not another.
There were many other problems that were rooted in a system. “When I was a police officer, I used to go in houses in Over-the-Rhine and I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, how are these folks allowed to live here when I’m looking at all kinds of code violations?’” says Thomas, of what would be the stage for the Civil unrest. “...So that we see issues of housing, when you have a city that has [high school] drop out rate of over 50 percent as it relates to African American males, that’s another prescription for civil unrest waiting to happen. And we were not really paying attention to our school system … and the effects of that… then you have an unemployment rate of 20-23 percent, which is a prescription [for chaos].”
Ground Zero
On the heels of crisis, Thomas saw it was time to look outside of the city for help.
“[I contacted] the Justice Dept Community Relations Division to come in and take a look, and I believe Mayor Luken also asked for the (Federal) government to come in and take a look at what we could do.”
But when federal agents came to Cincinnati to get a closer look, local police initially took the attitude of a drug addict who “didn’t have a problem.”
Thomas recalls the conversation between the two parties, “[The Feds] said, 'Yeah, you’re doing good, but you need to do this… you need to do [that].' There was a lot of tweaking of the police department. And that’s when the collaborative process began to evolve. In fact, there were two documents that came out of that. There was the Memorandum of Agreement, which has all of the policies and procedures in the PD that needed to be changed ( April 12, 2002), and then there was the Collaborative Agreement.
“The idea was that everybody agreed to the changes, [but] there was some friction. Most departments do not like to be told that changes must take place but the friction was, in my opinion, that no one [the police department, the plaintiff community in the collaborative agreement, nor City Hall] really understood what was expected from the other.”
Is Council Better Prepared Now?
Councilman Thomas has seen three sides of public service. He has been an appointed public administrator, head of a major city police organization and now elected official. Given his earnest perspectives, does he feel that the city council he is a part of can tackle huge storms like the ones he’s been in the eye of?
He says that Cincinnati Community Action Now (Cincinnati CAN) pinpointed priorities that needed to be addressed. They were education, jobs, health, housing, police-community relations and the effect of the media. The priorities were qualified as immediate and ongoing so that Cincinnati would not find itself in civil unrest again.
Strikingly, Thomas says that he believes that sitting council has the “guts” to handle what happened in 2001.
“I think that the first step is that this current council must learn from the history of the civil unrest and even before that. [We] need to look at the mistakes that have been made and not fall into the same areas again. What I did was look back to when there was civil unrest in the 1960s. There were studies back then all the way up to where we are now and every one of those studies—and a lot of those have to do with the relationship between citizens and the police in their community—all those things were put on shelves.”
Thomas has taken an ethic of taking the studies off the shelves and into use in his office. He continues to be an active student as his studies have taught him bold lessons – most notably that, as soon as the reports go on the shelves, the same missteps conclude in the same misery.
“In 1998-99, I put in my report—I sent this to the Federal Government—unless you all come in and take a serious look at how we are doing in Cincinnati, I think we may end up in civil unrest.”
