On Wednesday evening, outside the courthouse here, protesters’ cardboard signs dripped urgent slogans in the pouring rain.
Activists in the local chapter of Black Lives Matter stood alongside the family of Samuel DuBose, who was killed this month by a white police officer, this time a campus police officer at the University of Cincinnati. That afternoon, the officer, Ray Tensing, had been indicted for murder.
“It’s only a matter of time before he is proven guilty,” said Mr. DuBose’s nephew, Don Allen. “And that’s when justice will be served.” The activists around him called for more: indictments of the university police officers who had vetted Mr. Tensing’s account of being dragged by Mr. DuBose’s car, funeral expenses covered by the university, scholarships for Mr. DuBose’s 10 children.
During the rally, police officers from the university, city, and state highway patrol stood guard over the campus, on the lookout for trouble, but the campus was quiet.
That morning, the University of Cincinnati had braced for a dark day. The prosecutor’s office was planning to release video from the officer’s body camera, and the city’s police chief said what the video showed was “not good.”
The university closed offices and canceled classes. Soon after came news of the indictment and murder charge.
It’s a crisis that tests the relationship between the university and the city. It brings into stark relief the tensions of being an ambitious, growing institution in an economically depressed area. And the shooting shines a harsh light on campus police departments, raising questions about their capability, role, and jurisdiction.
The Hamilton County prosecutor, Joseph T. Deters, publicly challenged their authority. “I just don’t think a university should be in the policing business,” he said at a news conference.
Mr. Tensing had stopped Mr. DuBose on July 19 because he was driving a car without a front license plate. In the video, the officer asks Mr. DuBose for his driver’s license several times; the man says he doesn’t have it on him and tells the officer to look him up. As Mr. Tensing tries to open the car door, Mr. DuBose turns on the ignition, and as he starts to roll away, the officer shoots him in the head.
Following his indictment, university officials announced that Mr. Tensing had been fired. Already the University of Cincinnati Police Department had ceded off-campus patrols to municipal officers. On Tuesday the university said it would commission an independent evaluation of all police policies and procedures; on Wednesday the institution’s president, Santa J. Ono, promised a “top-to-bottom review” and committed new attention to the hiring and training of campus officers.
“We will monitor what we’re doing in a data-driven way for whatever length of time is necessary,” he said at a news conference, standing with the mayor, other public officials, and community leaders. Several speakers signaled the importance of those relationships.
“We’re in partnership with UC,” said the mayor, John J. Cranley, “and we will work all these things out together.”
Campus as Oasis
The University of Cincinnati is situated much like the Johns Hopkins University or Temple University or the University of Chicago: a pristine campus, dotted with world-class architecture and gleaming facilities for students, standing in contrast to blighted neighborhoods only blocks away. Over the years, like many large universities, Cincinnati has raised its standards, shifting from open-access to more-selective admissions, striving for elite status.
As a result, students today are less likely to come from working-class or poor families, says Jennifer Malat, a professor of sociology and director of the Kunz Center for Social Research. When she started teaching at Cincinnati 15 years ago, the student body, she says, was more socioeconomically diverse.
“I really loved that because the students who were disadvantaged worked hard,” Ms. Malat says. “Now we don’t have those students anymore. We have students who have never been downtown, whose parents tell them not to leave campus.” The university struggles, she says, to make them feel comfortable.
Since 2000, the institution has promoted development (some might say “gentrification”) in parts of the surrounding neighborhoods. On the southern border of the campus, in an area known as Clifton Heights, swank bars, restaurants, and retail stores have replaced run-down fast-food joints on Calhoun Street. Before the redevelopment, a boarded-up Hardee’s was known for muggers hanging out late at night, waiting for drunk or unsuspecting students, says Matt Bourgeois, director of the Clifton Heights Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation.
The university has also ramped up policing. Since April of last year, it has hired 33 police and 16 security officers, including Mr. Tensing. They were encouraged to patrol the areas off campus where many students live and shop. Under an agreement the University of Cincinnati Police Department had established with the municipal police in 2009, campus officers could respond to crimes and make arrests outside their “home jurisdiction.”
With more officers and more attention on the area surrounding the campus, crime — especially violent crime — dropped significantly. On the campus, all crime in the past year went down by 30 percent compared with a five-year average, while surrounding the campus, it dropped by 18 percent. Violent crime fell by 47 percent on the campus and 40 percent in nearby areas.
Compared with many campus police forces, the UCPD deals with a lot of crime, says Nicholas Corsaro, an assistant professor of criminal justice. “They are in a tough spot in that they have to balance university concerns with real violent-crime problems that happen around campus.” Jason Goodrich, the campus police chief, was not available for an interview.
Campus police departments first expanded with the rise in college enrollments and the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and ‘70s. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 led to greater professionalization. Expectations for campus security have risen as well.
Yet campus police officers are often perceived as glorified security guards, with a kind of “mall cop” stigma. People, even other law-enforcement authorities, often believe that they’re insufficiently prepared to handle intense police work.
“I don’t even understand why campus cops have weapons at all,” said Jon Stone, an alumnus and activist in Cincinnati, echoing concerns others have expressed at protests. “There is no reason why anybody on this campus should die at the hands of a cop.”
That also happened a few years ago here. In 2011 a campus police officer used a stun gun on Everette Howard Jr., a teenager in a college-preparatory program at the university. The officer said Mr. Howard, who was black, had refused to back off during a confrontation outside a dormitory. After being stunned, Mr. Howard had a heart attack and died.
The incident this month brought race and class to the fore. Many protesters here said the tragedy underscored the divisions between the lives of black and white Cincinnatians, between the campus and the community. Brian Taylor, a spokesman for Black Lives Matter Cincinnati, said campus amenities had cut out folks from the surrounding neighborhoods. Ishaq Nadir, an alumnus who works in social services, said the development around the university had given it “a better look, but not a better heart.”
Embracing the Community
Campus and public officials, along with community leaders, urged calm on Wednesday. Some protesters wondered if the city was using the campus police force as a scapegoat for deeper problems.
Many residents here remember 2001, when a city police officer killed Timothy Thomas, an unarmed black teenager pursued for a traffic violation. He was one of several black men killed by Cincinnati police officers in a six-year span. The resulting riots led to $5 million in damages and costs to the city, and resulted in widespread police reforms.
City officials signaled on Wednesday that they wanted to help the campus police force learn new lessons. “We will continue to work with our great university, the University of Cincinnati,” said the mayor, Mr. Cranley. The campus and city police departments were standing “shoulder to shoulder,” he said. And Mr. Ono, he added, “has really epitomized the spirit of Cincinnati.”
With a strong presence on social media, the university’s president is known to be responsive and open. After pledging to review the campus police department’s policies, procedures, hiring, and training, at a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Ono acknowledged, in response to persistent questions, its demographics. “Definitely there’s room for more diversity in that force, and that’s something that the new chief of police, Jason Goodrich, is really committed to doing,” he said.
That morning he had met with the family of Samuel DuBose. “The best interest of the family is front and center with me,” he said, mentioning that Mr. DuBose’s stepdaughter is a student at the university.
In the case of Mr. Howard, the student who was hit with a stun gun, the university reached a $2-million settlement with his family, dedicated a bench to Mr. Howard, and vowed to give his siblings a free education.
“One of the things I am trying to do as a university leader is to create peace and calm, not only on campus but also with the relationship with the community,” Mr. Ono said in an interview. Sometimes that means engaging, but it’s a balance, he said. “You can imagine that when attention results from a UCPD officer tragically killing a community member, it’s probably prudent for us for some period of time to retract back on campus.”
However, “we don’t want there to be any perception or do we have any intention of creating a wall,” Mr. Ono said. “If anything, we want to embrace the community and welcome them.”
Administrators and professors at the university point out its educational programs in public schools, work on public health and infant care, scholarships for African-American and lower-income students, and hospital that provides services to the indigent, with millions in unreimbursed care.
The killing of Mr. DuBose may open new opportunities for conversations about race and class. Some professors are talking about new courses, required for all students, that focus on those topics.
That learning may also happen in the streets. On Sunday night here, a week after Mr. DuBose’s death, a crowd of perhaps 200 near the campus — a roughly equal mix of black and white — carried signs that said “Rage Rage” and “Black Lives Matter.” Cars cruised by, honking in support. A young African-American man leading chants like “No justice, no peace, no racist police” called out to a small group of Cincinnati Bearcat athletes, inviting them to join the throng: “It could happen to y’all!”
The march started at the southeast corner of the campus, not far from the UCPD station, and moved a half-mile down the street, to a makeshift memorial at the site of the shooting. The crowd then walked back up to the campus, to the police station, past the administration building and the new storefronts on Calhoun Street, their chants echoing off the walls.
That’s when Morgan Griever, emerging from a gym dressed in workout clothes, ran across the street to the marchers. “Hey, can I join you?” she said. Petite, with fair skin and wavy blonde hair, she raised her hands to the chants of “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
A psychology major with hopes of going to medical school, Ms. Griever grew up in an affluent area of Cincinnati, she said, and knew few African-Americans as a kid. Recent incidents in Baltimore, Staten Island, Cleveland, North Charleston, S.C., and Ferguson, Mo. — along with contact with black professors and students — led to an awakening.
“Now that this has happened, this has opened my eyes to the fact that there are so many problems,” she said. “This was a wake-up call for me, that there is so much work to be done. So when I saw them marching, I just had to be a part of it.”
From her first days at the University of Cincinnati, Ms. Griever said, she has been told of the dangers and crime around the campus. At the local grocery store, “you can see easily who goes to UC and who doesn’t, and it changes how you look at them and interact with them,” she said. Her orientation leaders and others made her wary: “They tell you, ‘Watch where you go, watch who you talk to,’ and it has created a divide.”
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
