CINCINNATI
AND THE X-FACTOR
BY
DANIEL LAZARE
It
is the theory which decides what we can observe.
--
Albert Einstein
What
caused a major outbreak of racial rioting in the historic riverfront
city of Cincinnati, the worst such eruption in the United States
in nearly a decade? The trigger, of course, was the April 7 killing
of an unarmed teenager named Timothy Thomas by a twenty-seven-year-old
cop who said he thought Thomas was reaching for a gun even though
no weapon was ever found. But as journalists started searching
for some deeper explanation, a consistent theme began to emerge,
one that from a national perspective was oddly reassuring.
The
story line, in a nutshell, was Cincinnati as a city still mired
in the racially benighted past. In The New York Times,
Francis X. Clines observed that "this patchwork city of black
and white enclaves" offered "time-warp facets of the old ways
of street protest and official crackdown." Clines quoted a thirty-nine-year-old
black resident saying of the riots, "This all feels kind of strange,
like a return to the 60s, you know?" In the Los Angeles Times,
Stephanie Simon wrote that the town labored under a racist legacy
going all the way back to 1841, when, in one incident, a white
mob dragged a cannon to the edge of a black neighborhood "and
fired it again and again as police stood by and watched." In The
Cincinnati Enquirer, Richelle Thompson cited a general failure
to deal with long-standing black grievances concerning poor job
opportunities and discriminatory lending practices. Another Enquirer
reporter, Kristina Goetz, reported on the lack of progress in
regard to such perennial inner-city problems as inadequate child
and health care, failing schools, and low rates of minority home
ownership.
The
upshot was a portrait of Cincinnati as a racial laggard, a point
that two British papers, The Guardian and The Times,
drove home by quoting Mark Twain's famous (but, alas, apocryphal)
line: "When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati
because it's always twenty years behind the times." The big news
in Cincinnati was thus that nothing was new. The subtext was that
a conservative stronghold, one that had previously made headlines
for the prosecution of Larry Flynt and the crusade against the
art of Robert Mapplethorpe, was paying the price for standing
pat. Among the few reporters who acknowledged that perhaps something
other than the same old same-old was at work were Louis Uchitelle
of The New York Times, who published a major takeout on
May 1 describing how black contractors had been all but shut out
of a massive waterfront development project just over a mile from
where Timothy Thomas had been killed; and Michelle Cottle of The
New Republic, who wrote on May 7 that rampant gentrification
on the edge of Over-the-Rhine, a black neighborhood bordering
Cincinnati's business district, was injecting a volatile ingredient
into the city's racial stew.
Useful
as such reporting may be, what was most notable about Cincinnati
riot coverage was the way it steered determinedly clear of a development
that is new, important, and about as hard to miss as an elephant
perched on a Chippendale chair. This is the War on Drugs and the
increasingly aggressive policing it brings. Over-the-Rhine, ground
zero in the riots, is also ground zero in a ferocious effort to
rid Cincinnati of certain prohibited substances. Showcased in
the recent movie Traffic as the burned-out neighborhood
in which Michael Douglas goes searching for his drug-addicted
daughter, it has a population of just 7,600 people, yet has averaged
nearly 2,300 drug arrests a year since 1995, a level that one
city official properly describes as "staggering." Of course, one
could argue that a huge volume of arrests is necessary to combat
a huge volume of drugs. "A lot of the community's concern is about
drug activity, and they want it to stop," says Cincinnati police
spokesman Ray Ruberg. "Right now enforcement is a big part of
our effort, getting people who buy and sell drugs out of that
community." But one could also argue -- and many in Over-the-Rhine
do -- that rather than helping the community, heavy-handed police
enforcement is an example of how the drug war has devolved into
a war against the inner-city poor.
In
the aftermath of the Cincinnati riots, this was a debate that
the press seemed determined to avoid. The exception that proves
the rule is the Dayton Daily News, which published a stunning
front-page story on April 22 detailing how, for more than three
years, Over-the-Rhine had been the target of a draconian local
ordinance that "gave police almost unfettered discretion to banish
people" from the community who had run afoul of the drug laws.
The article, by Lou Grieco, Wes Hills, and Rob Modic, described
how a drug arrest could get one banned from the Over-the-Rhine
"drug exclusion zone" for ninety days, a conviction for a year.
It told how one local woman, arrested on a marijuana rap that
was subsequently dropped, had nonetheless been charged with criminal
trespass when she tried to re-enter the community to visit her
children and grandchildren; how a homeless man, busted for possession
of drug paraphernalia, had wound up spending more than a year
in jail for the "crime" of repeatedly returning to the district
to obtain food and shelter; and how a third resident, a thirty-two-year-old
Navy veteran who works at a local recreation center, had been
stopped and handcuffed some thirty times by police checking whether
or not he had a "right" to be in the community.
All
told, more than 1,500 people were banished at some point or other
between September 1996, when the drug exclusion ordinance went
into effect, and January 2000, when a federal judge finally struck
it down on constitutional grounds following a suit by the ACLU
of Ohio. No other news outlet followed up. The rioters "weren't
talking about drugs, they were talking about police-community
relations," says Richard Green, assistant managing editor for
the Enquirer, "the perception that the Cincinnati Police
Division treats African-Americans differently than whites."
Yet
it requires a form of tunnel vision not to see a connection between
the aggressive policing of the drug war and deteriorating police-community
relations. In the course of an evening stroll through the neighborhood
in early May, for instance, this reporter found a community fairly
seething with outrage over trigger-happy cops, racial profiling,
and an increasingly militarized drug war. "You got so many cops
over here -- even if you're not a black man, they be drawing guns,"
said a sixty-five-year-old resident named Nathaniel Bayray, who
believes that conditions have been going downhill since the late
1980s. "I think they should start over with a whole new police
force," declared Mercedes Harris, an eighteen-year-old high school
senior hanging out with neighbors and friends in a trash-strewn
cul-de-sac a few blocks away. A twenty-five-year-old man who gave
his name as "Buck G." was even more emphatic, unleashing a string
of obscenities about the Cincinnati police: "They can't get out
of their car without pulling a gun," he said.
"We
got [police video] cameras on the corner watching people, we got
drug laws excluding them, yet they have no effect in fighting
crime," says the Rev. Damon Lynch III, a Baptist minister who
heads the Cincinnati Black United Front. "All they do is take
away people's civil liberties." John Fox, editor of CityBeat,
the local alternative weekly, argues that "a siege mentality"
has led cops to view the entire neighborhood as enemy territory.
Raymond Vasvari, legal director of the Ohio ACLU, maintains that
measures like the drug exclusion law are part of "a tapestry of
abuses that has led to a culture of hostility between the African-American
community and the police. It's one more way in which over-policing
has brought the community to the brink."
Fifteen
black Cincinnatians have been killed by the police since 1995,
including four since November. The circumstances vary, and in
many cases, the police appear to have acted properly. But at the
same time, the aggressive policing that comes with the drug war
has clearly raised temperatures on both sides of the line, raising
a legitimate question: has the War on Drugs made violence more
likely rather than less?
Cincinnati
does not exist in isolation. With total U.S. arrests now nearly
1.6 million a year, triple the level of 1980, the drug war's racial
cast is increasingly hard to miss. Where African-Americans were
twice as likely to be arrested for a drug offense as whites in
the 1970s, they were five times as likely by 1988. The U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services estimated in 1998 that, in all, five
times as many whites use illicit substances. Yet black males are
thirteen times more likely to wind up in prison on a drug charge
in the nation as a whole and twenty-eight times more likely, according
to 1996 data, in Ohio alone. In Illinois, the leader in this category,
black males are fifty-seven times more likely than white males
to end up behind bars. These kinds of facts have not escaped ghetto
residents.
There
is a good deal of speculation among drug experts as to why the
racial chasm has grown so wide. Police buy-and-bust operations,
for example, are easier in urban neighborhoods where drug transactions
are more likely to take place among strangers in public. Because
inner-city residents have less money, they tend to buy in smaller
quantities, which means more visits to the corner drug dealer.
But the bottom line is that the War on Drugs adds to social disparities
by weighing more heavily on the inner-city poor than the suburban
middle class, while the aggressive policing that inevitably goes
with it is clearly a factor in driving communities like Cincinnati
to the edge.
So
why is this an issue that the press seems unable to perceive?
Here's a stab at an explanation:
To
criticize Cincinnati as mired in the past implies that the past
was bad, the present is better, and the future looks better still.
If Cincinnati is falling behind, the suggestion is that the U.S.
as a whole is moving forward to racial progress. It's a comforting
thought.
Yet,
Cincinnati's drug and policing policies are not an anomaly; they
reflect the drug and policing policies of the nation. If the War
on Drugs is seen as a racially biased and destructive invasion
of Over-the-Rhine, then America -- not just Cincinnati -- is moving
backward, not forward, as far as its poorest and most vulnerable
sectors are concerned. Since this is a good deal more disturbing
than we care to admit, journalists zero in on all the ways that
Cincinnati is behind the times and fail to notice the various
ways in which it may be a leading indicator, the canary in the
coal mine. The resulting stories may be reassuring from the point
of view of middle-class readers who never tire of being reminded
of how enlightened and up-to-date they are. But they are far from
the truth.
Daniel
Lazare is the author, most recently, of America's Undeclared
War: What's Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It.
