Just a month after the city of Cincinnati finalized a $4.5 million settlement to families of black males wrongfully killed by white police officers - as well as others claiming racial profiling in traffic stops - the city is again immersed in issues of race and a questionable police-related death.
By now most Americans have seen the videotape of Nathaniel Jones being beaten repeatedly with clubs by a half dozen police officers. Jones, who weighed 342 pounds, had an enlarged heart and was intoxicated on cocaine and PCP, died from the stressful effects of the beating, according to the coroner's report.
And once again Cincinnati, plagued in recent years by charges of police brutality and protests leading to riots, is split along racial lines.
The city's black community sees yet another incident of white police brutality, though one of the officers involved in Jones' beating was African-American. Jones is the 18th black male killed by police since 1995.
Whites once again see, what? Scary black people on drugs? Police just doing their jobs?
Watching this saga unfold, it's disheartening to see opinion divide along racial lines. If a black man is threatening, should police slacken their normal response in order to avoid racist charges? If a white cop reacts incorrectly to a confrontation involving a black, does that always make him a racist? Or, if he is in fact a racist guilty of excessive force, must whites defend him because he's a cop just doing his difficult, thankless job?
Fairness and justice are supposed to be colorblind and yet we seem inevitably to side with "our own kind." If blacks suggest white cops are heavy-handed, they're considered stuck in a civil rights rut; if whites suggest cops are heavy-handed, they're ACLU-lovin' liberals.
Just when did it become liberal to be skeptical about arming the government against its citizenry? The police have guns and the legal prerogative to shoot me anytime they deem appropriate, and I'm not supposed to question their judgment?
I ran into this mindset recently when I criticized the Goose Creek, S.C., police for a drug raid on a local high school. As armed police and drug-sniffing dogs swarmed into the school, kids walking to class were forced onto hallway floors and, in some cases, handcuffed. A videotape of the raid, in which no drugs were found, showed police with guns drawn.
As I watched those tapes, all I could think was, what if one of those kids had reached for his pocket? He might have been shot, just like 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, who Cincinnati police fatally shot two years ago, provoking four days of riots.