Racial Wounds Don’t Heal With Time in Cincinnati

Brenda and Roger Owensby stand at the curb, asking strangers to help them get justice for their son.

Roger Owensby Jr. was killed in a scuffle with police a year ago. A group of officers--black and white--confronted the young black man at a gas station. He darted away. The cops knocked him to the pavement, swarmed him, struck him, grabbed him around the head. He died of asphyxiation in the pileup, coughing up so much bloody fluid in his last gasps that one officer’s uniform sleeve was soaked. The coroner testified that Owensby was already dead when police put him into the back seat of a patrol car. One said: “We kicked his ass.”

Two officers were indicted in Owensby’s death. Both were acquitted in trials this fall. Now the Owensbys walk the city with a petition, demanding a federal investigation. They say they no longer trust Cincinnati--not the police, not the prosecutors, not the politicians, not the courts--to give them justice.

And they are far from alone.

Nine months after race riots resulting from an earlier police incident tore through this polarized city, progress is hard to spot.

There have been many earnest attempts at healing, focused especially on the anger toward police that many African Americans here feel. Professional mediators have spent months trying to craft police reforms. So has the U.S. Department of Justice. There have been town hall meetings, open forums for airing complaints. Earlier this month, the Rev. H.L. Harvey invited the city’s police officers to a reconciliation service at his church. More than 70 showed up for talk, prayer and a chicken dinner. “I was trying to bring some healing to the city,” Harvey said, “because there is none.”

Yet despite such goodwill efforts, the rhetoric remains sharp, the anger fierce. The frustration has not abated.

Tensions surged earlier this month when the city’s most prominent black leader acknowledged writing a letter that called police officers rapists and killers.

Letter and Dismissal Stir Up a Firestorm

The Rev. Damon Lynch III said the letter was mailed to tourist and business groups across the nation; it urged a boycott of Cincinnati because of an intolerable “level of racism, discrimination, tyranny and general oppression in every area of life here. . . . Police are killing, raping, planting false evidence.”

Incensed, Mayor Charlie Luken fired Lynch from a much-touted race relations commission set up after the riots.

That, in turn, set off a firestorm in the black community. The morning after Lynch was ousted, callers bombarded WDBZ-AM talk radio with protests. “Damon Lynch stood by the truth,” one caller insisted, practically shouting. “The black community needs to go out in the streets and . . . put this city in an uproar.”

Another caller, moments later: “No justice, no peace. Cincinnati does not deserve peace.”

Despite the tough talk, there are no indications the city will again collapse into civil unrest. There are no protest marches. The proposed boycott of downtown businesses has been a flop. Yet the us-against-them stance that provoked the riots clearly has taken hold.

“There are a lot of people, black and white, who are afraid of Cincinnati cops--afraid of the very men and women they’ve hired to protect their lives and property,” the Cincinnati Post said in a November editorial.

“What I’m hearing on the streets,” Roger Owensby said, making clear he disapproves, “is that we’re going to have to go out and kill some police officers to get attention, to get some justice.”

The frustration has been building for months, stoked by the acquittals of the officers in the Owensby case and by a series of personnel decisions at the Cincinnati Police Division.

Two officers with troubling records were promoted to sergeant last month; one had body-slammed an Alzheimer’s patient while responding to a disturbance call, and the other had menaced a colleague on the force, hitting her in the lip and threatening her with a gun. A third officer, who admitted to planting drugs on a suspect to trick him into a confession, won his job back in arbitration after the city tried to fire him.

The cases revived old resentments among critics who long have complained that police here are above the law--and act it.

“Cincinnati has three sacred cows: [controversial baseball icons] Marge Schott and Pete Rose and the Cincinnati police,” said the Rev. Damon Lynch Jr., a civil rights leader who is less flamboyant but just as passionate as his better-known son. He had stopped by the back table in a soul food restaurant where Brenda Owensby was eating barbecued ribs. Lynch took a stack of petitions from her and promised to return them, full of names, after church Sunday.

He started to walk off, then leaned back to finish his thought: “Cincinnati police can do no wrong,” he said, voice bitter, “according to Cincinnati.”

Over at police union headquarters, Officer Keith Fangman scarcely feels untouchable. Quite the contrary, he feels besieged.

In the last year alone, the Justice Department and the FBI have launched separate investigations of the Cincinnati police. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a class-action lawsuit accusing police of racial profiling. Three officers have been put on trial and acquitted: two for Owensby’s death and one for the incident that sparked the April riots, the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man who was fleeing arrest on foot. In addition, 57 officers have been named as defendants in civil suits, many accusing them of excessive force.

In his office, facing his desk, Fangman has hung a piece of poster board scrawled with an ugly, anti-police expletive. He found it on the front door of the union hall the second night of the riots, next to a spray-painted swastika. Fangman, the union president, keeps the sign where he can see it “as a reminder of what we’re up against.”

It does not put him in a conciliatory mood.

Police Union Chief Scoffs at Some Reforms

One by one, Fangman ticked off the complaints directed at his cops. One by one, he ridiculed them.

Take the Justice Department’s preliminary report with 25 recommendations for reform. Fangman supports a few of them, including a call to consolidate officers’ disciplinary records so that it’s easier to spot and track problems. Others, however, strike him as lunacy.

The report suggests that Cincinnati officers may be too quick to brandish their guns--pulling them out, for instance, any time they make stop a car with tinted windows. Fangman snorted. If he stops a car in a bad area at night and he can’t see in the windows, he’s going to unholster his gun, no matter what the federal government says. “If people are offended at that, tough. This is the real world. My safety is more important than their feelings.”

Another critique from the report is that Cincinnati police are too hasty to use Mace and sometimes use too much of it. Citizens “ought to consider themselves lucky that we have chemical irritant, because if we didn’t, a lot more people would be going to the hospital before they go to jail,” he said, insisting Mace is the best way to subdue a suspected criminal without injury. “That’s my response to a lot of black leaders who whine about chemical irritant,” said Fangman, who is white.

Cincinnati’s use of dogs? The Justice Department suggests police canines are too quick to bite and are released without warning. “This isn’t Birmingham, Ala., 1963,” Fangman retorted. “We don’t unleash our dogs and say: ‘Go get ‘em.’ But if a suspect refuses to follow verbal commands, of course the dog may be deployed. If anyone has a problem with that, they need to have their head examined.”

Yes, Fangman said, Cincinnati police have killed 18 suspects--all but one of them black--over the last six years. But he pointed out that 14 of the victims were threatening police with deadly weapons; one other was brandishing a BB gun that looked just like a firearm. Among those lumped together as victims of “police brutality” were an ax-wielding man who had just decapitated a teenager, a bank robber who shot at a teller as he fled and a 12-year-old driver who dragged a police officer to his death rather than pull over.

Roger Owensby Jr. was unarmed. And he was not wanted for any violent crime. The officers who stopped him at the gas station believed he had pushed an undercover cop and then fled during a drug investigation several weeks earlier. They wanted to question him about the incident. Owensby at first seemed to be cooperating, even letting police cuff one of his hands. Then he bolted.

He fought arrest so fiercely, the officers said, that they had to use force to subdue him, including a “head wrap” to prevent him from banging his own skull against the pavement in the tussle.

“I don’t want to sound overly callous,” Fangman said, “but the moral of the story is: When you violently resist arrest, sometimes bad things happen.”

That’s a moral Owensby’s parents cannot accept.

Their son was 29 when he died, the father of a 9-year-old girl. He and his father, both sergeants, had served in the Army in Bosnia, Kuwait and Germany. After eight years in the service, he had returned to Cincinnati and was planning to study music in a local technical college. He had already paid his first semester’s tuition. Roger Owensby Jr. was a charmer, shamelessly good at wooing the ladies, impressively loyal to his friends.

“He was my heart and soul,” his dad said. “We won’t let his death be in vain.”

So Roger and Brenda Owensby walk the streets with their petition, hoping federal intervention will curb a police force that they view as out of control.

Rebecca Elliott, a social worker, stopped to add her name. She was asked if she thinks the petition will make a difference. “Make a difference? We’re in Cincinnati. I’m not feeling a whole lot of hope.”