Inside Cincinnati’s model for change

Stephanie Kuzydym

They wanted a seat at the table.

They walked in the streets.

They demanded change.

They waited.

Those words could describe the people who protested following the death of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed Black woman Louisville police officers shot to death while serving a “no-knock” search warrant at her apartment in 2020.

Not this time.

This time they describe shootings and subsequent protests that happened before Taylor was born, and again when she was 3 and when she was 5 — all in a city where she didn’t live: Cincinnati.

Between 1995 and 2001, Cincinnati police shot and killed 15 Black men

Like Louisville, Cincinnati faced a Department of Justice investigation into its policing practices. But in response, Cincinnati created a first-of-its-kind police reform model that could help Louisville as it awaits the DOJ’s report on its policing practices, including use of force and concerns about discriminatory policing.

The DOJ announced its investigation of Louisville Metro Police in April 2021, after Taylor’s death and monthslong racial justice protests. Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said last month the DOJ report is expected in the “coming weeks.”

The Cincinnati Police Department went through its investigation 21 years ago. The Department of Justice came in, reviewed policies and was about to hand down changes when a civil rights lawyer and a civil rights activist offered an invitation to the city and the Fraternal Order of Police to collaborate.

Instead of people from outside the community issuing a consent decree, the stakeholders of Cincinnati − the city, the FOP and the ACLU − hashed out their goals for police reform, creating the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement. A fed- eral judge oversaw the agreement, which initially focused on use of force and discriminatory policing but later became a proactive and transparent way for all sides to discuss needed changes and adjust local policies and procedures based on issues in other cities.

The collaborative agreement, which ended in 2007 with the Cincinnati police department meeting 93% of the terms and conditions, is held up today as a gold standard for use of force and police accountability reform and is the only time the DOJ combined its agreement with a private one.

Louisville FOP President Dave Mutchler said he’s interested in seeing if such a collaboration would be accepted today.

The FOP is “always interested in having a seat at the table that would be trying to solve a problem that affects everybody in the community,” Mutchler said.

Raymond Burse, chair of legal redress for the NAACP Louisville Branch, said while on its face the agreement sounds good, the NAACP has questions about it.

“Our question is given that the police bill of rights is statutory in Kentucky – how agreeing to anything would in fact work when we have those kinds of prohibitions?” Burse said.

Jessica Wethington, director of communications for the Louisville mayor’s office, said Fischer and his team “have worked with protest leaders, the FOP and community organizations on more than150 ongoing changes”related to policing.

Usually when the DOJ finds systemic police misconduct, it negotiates a settlement with the city or county that lists specific remedies, which are included in a consent decree that a federal judge oversees.

In Cincinnati, it took a civil rights duo and another death of an unarmed Black man to pull off a different type of agreement.

Two in 24.

That’s what the community calls the incident in Cincinnati when two unarmed Black men were killed in 24 hours. The first death came on Nov. 7, 2000.

Roger Owensby Jr. served for eight years in the U.S. Army and died allegedly of asphyxiation from a chokehold of a Cincinnati Police officer. The next day, Jeffrey Irons died in a scuffle with police Neither officer was charged.

Civil rights lawyer Al Gerhardstein was hired to represent several victims’ families.

The Black community was just boiling,” Gerhardstein recalled. “They were tired of it. They couldn’t understand why we made no progress with police violence against citizens and yet there just wasn’t any end in sight to feeling safe in our own community.

“When the Black community got really upset, there would be protests and then there would be violence, targeting the police. Then that would wake people up wearing the suits.

“They would call for a blue-ribbon panel, the blue-ribbon panel would have a couple business people on it, a couple ministers on it, maybe one or two Black business people as well. They would hold meetings that seemed designed to wait out the angst of the community.

“And once people lost their fervor and their interest in the problem, the blue ribbon panel would come out with a set of recommendations.”

Those recommendations were rarely implemented.

The Black community and police: 33 years of history

Shortly after the deaths of Owensby Jr. and Irons, Gerhardstein showed up at New Prospect Baptist Church in the Roselawn neighborhood, just north of downtown Cincinnati. He brought three white binders with him.

Iris Roley, then the program director for the Cincinnati Black United Front, a social justice collective, was floored by what Gerhardstein had inside those three-ring binders: 33 years of history

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