Opinion: UC puts ‘customers’ above black lives

Troy Jackson is the executive director of The AMOS Project and co-author of “Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith.” Alexander Shelton is a father, student, yogi, activist, community organizer and radio host of @thetalkUC.

We have no doubt that “all lives matter” to the University of Cincinnati. The trouble is that it seems that some lives matter more than others.

When University of Cincinnati Police Officer Ray Tensing shot and killed Samuel DuBose on July 19, the university and the county tried to do all the right things. The university quickly pulled its officers from the streets surrounding the campus. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters led an effort for a quick and strong indictment. University officials reached out to clergy, community leaders, and students to seek a better relationship moving forward.

All was going as well as could be expected until new students began to descend on Uptown Cincinnati. The university announced (without the council of the vested partners it claimed to be utilizing) that it would be returning its police to the streets around the campus immediately, without any new training or tangible reform, with the caveat that they would no longer initiate traffic stops.

Perhaps the University of Cincinnati radically changed its policing culture, equipped officers to overcome their implicit racial biases, and became fully prepared to protect and serve all in the Uptown community in less than four weeks. Or, perhaps they made the decision because the people who matter most to them – the white, concerned, tuition-paying parents – are by and large not neighborhood residents. What the university told its black neighbors, its black students, its black faculty and staff, and the DuBose family is that the loss of Samuel DuBose is, in the end, an acceptable loss in the pursuit of making UC’s white customers feel safe.

We are pleased that clergy, community leaders, and university students are calling on UC to launch an independent external review of the entire UC Police Department and to fully compensate the DuBose family by Sept. 30. We also call on the university to proactively seek the training, oversight, and problem-solving approach that has served our Cincinnati Police Department well for over a decade.

We encourage President Santa Ono and the UC Board of Trustees to spend more than a token 8 minutes on Samuel DuBose and the dysfunctional policing culture at the university in their next board meeting. We encourage the school to start behaving like the black lives on the campus and in the surrounding neighborhoods matter to the university, to not let concern about appearing to be the #hottestcollegeinAmerica make leaders deaf to the concerns of the students who have called themselves #theirate8. Only when this happens can we chart a common course together that is best for all.