In a quiet grove of trees at the northeast corner of the University of Cincinnati’s downtown campus, a memorial to Samuel DuBose sits unfinished. There are plans to put a bench here with a portrait of Mr. DuBose. For now there is only a cement foundation.
One year ago Mr. DuBose, a 43-year-old music producer, was shot and killed by Raymond Tensing, an officer with the university’s police department, during an off-campus traffic stop about a mile and a half from this spot.
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In a quiet grove of trees at the northeast corner of the University of Cincinnati’s downtown campus, a memorial to Samuel DuBose sits unfinished. There are plans to put a bench here with a portrait of Mr. DuBose. For now there is only a cement foundation.
One year ago Mr. DuBose, a 43-year-old music producer, was shot and killed by Raymond Tensing, an officer with the university’s police department, during an off-campus traffic stop about a mile and a half from this spot.
Mr. Tensing had pulled over Mr. DuBose, who was black and unarmed, over a missing front license plate. What started as a routine interaction escalated quickly after Mr. DuBose restarted his car’s engine and Mr. Tensing reached into the car. There was a brief scuffle, during which the officer drew his gun and shot Mr. DuBose in the head.
In the year since, the university has embarked on a journey of self-reproach and atonement. It culminated in a settlement in which the university agreed to pay a total of $4.85 million to various members of Mr. DuBose’s family, and to waive tuition for any of his 13 children who want to enroll, provided that they qualify for admission. The university also issued a formal apology and agreed to build the memorial bench.
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Making amends with the victim’s family was only a start. Cincinnati hopes the shooting will give the university momentum to conduct a much-needed overhaul of a police department that it said had failed to live up to the university’s values — and, in the process, to become a model for how campus police forces and urban communities interact.
A series of deadly police shootings of black men has plunged law-enforcement agencies around the country into controversy. This collection of Chronicle articles offers insights on campus and local police departments and the scrutiny they face.
Over the last year university officials have been learning just how much work that will take. Cincinnati commissioned a series of reports that painted an ugly picture of the university’s recent approach to policing the neighborhoods around its campus.
The most sweeping investigation, conducted by Exiger, a consulting company, found that Jason Goodrich, who became the university’s police chief in late 2014, had presided over a regime in which poorly trained officers, operating with scant oversight, had been pushed to make as many traffic stops and issue as many citations as possible in those neighborhoods.
It was, according to the report, a “recipe for disaster.”
After Mr. Tensing killed Mr. DuBose, Mr. Goodrich said he did not know that his officers were pulling over people off campus. Noting the steep increase of traffic stops under his leadership, investigators concluded that the police chief was either lying or incompetent. He resigned in February at the request of university leaders. Mr. Tensing awaits trial on a murder charge.
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The Exiger consultants found deeper problems, too. All but one of the campus police’s 74 sworn employees is white, and all but eight are men. (Nearly 45 percent of Cincinnati residents are black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.) Despite being located on a campus with state-of-the-art classrooms, the university’s police officers trained off campus, in a dilapidated warehouse.
The department’s internal-education program was also in disrepair. Exiger concluded it was not adequately preparing its officers for the kind of police work the job required, such as “building partnerships with communities both on and off campus, interacting with persons with mental illness, substance abuse, date rape, leadership, critical thinking, and problem solving.”
What we have created over this year is a model of voluntary police reform.
Making things worse, the department’s tools for supervising those underprepared officers were “seriously inadequate,” according to the consultants. They found no clear way for citizens in the neighborhoods around the campus to complain about how they had been treated by the university police, and there was no civilian review board to check their behavior.
Some of those problems can be solved quickly; others could take longer. The goal is to create a diverse, well-supervised campus police force that keeps students safe without relying on overly aggressive, racially biased tactics. That could take three to five years, according to Robin S. Engel, the university’s vice president for safety and reform.
“What we have created over this year,” says Ms. Engel, “is a model of voluntary police reform.”
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The university has a clear interest in maintaining law and order beyond its outer perimeter: Around 15,000 Cincinnati students live within a half-mile of this campus. They may go to classes and basketball games and concerts in the placid confines of Cincinnati’s handsome brick buildings and well-groomed lawns, but for most students the geography of college life extends at least a few blocks into the city.
Mr. Goodrich, the former police chief, adapted to the porous university border by waging a pre-emptive war against anyone engaged in criminal activity near the campus, whether or not they posed an obvious threat to students.
The idea was for the campus police to “use traffic enforcement to ‘stop’ and root out anyone carrying drugs or guns, and individuals with warrants, in those zones,” wrote the Exiger investigators. “They were, according to the chief, to be effectively ‘no-fly zones’ through which, via excessive traffic enforcement, criminals would not want to drive.”
The results of the policy were immediate and striking. In the year before Mr. Goodrich took over the department, the campus police had stopped 87 people and wrote 65 tickets each month. Under his watch, those numbers jumped to 272 and 256.
The chief’s proactive approach might have been superficially reassuring to Cincinnati students and their parents. But those tactics may have disproportionately punished black people and poor people around the campus without making students any safer as a result.
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Researchers, including Ms. Engel herself, have observed that black men in general are more likely to be stopped, searched, or arrested, or to have force used against them, a trend that has broadly undermined their trust in the police.
The idea that black men are regularly harassed by the police for “driving while black” resurfaced recently in the story of Philando Castile, a Minnesota cafeteria worker who was pulled over some 50 times over 13 years, leading to $6,000 in fines for a cascading stream of violations such as driving with a suspended license and lacking proof of insurance.
They were ... to be effectively ‘no-fly zones’ through which, via excessive traffic enforcement, criminals would not want to drive.
“Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car,” noted National Public Radio in an investigation, “things like speeding or having a broken muffler.”
As a result, Mr. Castile “spent most of his driving life fighting tickets,” according to NPR. He was gunned down this month by a police officer after being stopped for a cracked tail light. His girlfriend, who broadcast the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook, said the officer had shot him while he was reaching for his license.
In their report the Exiger consultants also crunched the performance data on individual officers. The consultants found one who had been responsible for the most traffic stops and tickets in the department, and who also tended to stop black people at an unusually high rate.
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It was Mr. Tensing.
University of Cincinnati police officers have mostly ceased making traffic stops since last August, when the city enacted an ordinance revoking much of their authority beyond the campus borders. The university’s police cars still patrol the areas once known as the “no-fly zones.” But except for a few times when officers have decided there was an immediate risk to public safety, they do not pull anyone over.
In that time something strange has happened: Crime in those areas has gone down.
The continuing decline in crime has made Cincinnati’s push for a more progressive police department an easier sell to one of its core constituencies: nervous parents.
Are my kids now going to be at risk because the police are restricted in their activity?
“I’ll tell you, when the announcement of no voluntary stops came out, where we did get some feedback was from parents,” says James L. Whalen, director of public safety. They wanted to know: “Are my kids now going to be at risk because the police are restricted in their activity?”
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At the time Mr. Whalen and other university officials “answered those questions as best we could.” One year removed from the peak of Mr. Goodrich’s traffic-stop regime, they are able to back up those answers with hard data.
Mr. Whalen, a Cincinnati alumnus and former commander in the city police, now speaks with confidence of the department’s light touch.
We will never again feel the need to be restrictive or burdensome as it relates to policing tactics on campus or off campus. It’s just Stone Age thinking.
“As long as I’m in my position as the director of public safety, we will never again feel the need to be restrictive or burdensome as it relates to policing tactics on campus or off campus,” he says. “It’s just Stone Age thinking.”
Nobody has suggested that Samuel DuBose posed a threat to the university. But he was exactly the kind of person Mr. Goodrich’s dragnet was designed to catch.
When Mr. Tensing spotted the 43-year-old driving a green Honda Accord with no front license plate, he decided to follow Mr. DuBose even though he was headed away from the campus. Sure enough, the police later learned that his license had been suspended, and they discovered four bags and a jar of marijuana in the car.
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By the time they learned of those violations, of course, Mr. DuBose was already dead.
The university’s reform effort is, like its memorial to Mr. DuBose, a work in progress. Cincinnati spent considerable time and money on damage control in the aftermath of the shooting, including paying Exiger about $400,000 to produce its report.
The departure of Santa J. Ono, the president who opened the review of the police force, has raised the question of whether the university’s interest in building a model law-enforcement agency might wane.
Cincinnati recently started the process of finding a permanent replacement for Mr. Ono. Beverly J. Davenport, the interim president, said last week that she supports the proposed reforms but does not yet know how much they will cost.
“President Ono was solidly behind this — this was his initiative, he’s no longer here,” said John A. West, a retired judge whom the university tapped last year to lead a new advisory committee on policing reform. “The new president, whoever that might be, may or may not take a real interest in it.”
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At a committee meeting last week, Mr. West sought assurances from Robert E. Richardson Jr., the recently elected chair of the Board of Trustees, that the board would support the overhaul.
A public commitment from top leaders is important in this case, Mr. West told The Chronicle. Police departments that agree to sweeping changes in the wake of a scandal — such as the department in Ferguson, Mo., which had been using excessive ticketing as a revenue-raising method before an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice — usually do so to comply with a court order.
Not so in this case. Town-gown relations might be at stake, but there will be no legal penalties if the university fails to follow through.
“The big question in the community is, since it’s voluntary, what is the stick?” said Mr. West. “How do we know we’re not going through all this time, effort, and expense, and at the very end, when things quiet down and the dust settles, UC says, ‘Well, we’re no longer interested’?”
In response, Mr. Richardson, who is black, shared memories of having been racially profiled when he was a teenager. “I do understand what it’s like to be targeted,” he said. The board chair said that it would be premature to make any specific pledge of financial support, but he promised to push for board action in favor of the proposed reforms.
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“We’re going to be the example for the nation,” said Mr. Richardson. “And to do that will require an investment, and it will require us to have proper systems in place.”
Mr. West clapped. “We’ve been waiting to hear that,” he said.
In a quiet suburb 16 miles north of the university, DaShonda Reid sits on a wraparound leather couch in a darkened living room watching several of Mr. DuBose’s children play Call of Duty on a big-screen television.
Ms. Reid’s relationship with Mr. DuBose was not always perfect. He was a jerk early on, she says. “He got on my nerves a lot because he was in the streets.” But she was happy with the man he became. Which is why, last summer, when he asked her to marry him, she said yes.
Two days later he was killed.
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Money and memorials cannot bring her fiancé back. But Ms. Reid says the university has done right by the family.
“They saw there was a grave mistake made on behalf of one of their ex-employees, and they have done everything that they can within their powers to rectify that and to show that they’re remorseful about that,” she says.
The shooting, she adds, has “brought a lot of darkness to the light.”
Mr. DuBose’s legacy at the university will not be confined to the bench on the campus’s northeast corner and the changes in its policing philosophy. Jordan Thompson, one of his children, plans to attend the university this fall.
Mr. Thompson, who is 18, did not know his father well when he was alive. He was planning to enroll at Cincinnati even before the university agreed to waive his tuition fee as part of the settlement with Mr. DuBose’s family. He calls the windfall “a blessing.”
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He does not hold Mr. DuBose’s death against the university. “I don’t think of it as the whole UC did it,” says Mr. Thompson. “I just think of it as one person” — Mr. Tensing.
He is anxious about starting college, but for common reasons. His father didn’t go to college. His mother didn’t finish her degree. He wants to study sports medicine, but is nervous about the workload.
Ms. Reid is optimistic about the future of Mr. Thompson, whom she considers her stepson.
“Those 23 chromosomes he inherited from his daddy? He’s going to keep that legacy going strong,” she says. “The rest of his children will, too. He will not be forgotten.”
Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.
Steve Kolowich was a senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He wrote about extraordinary people in ordinary times, and ordinary people in extraordinary times.