UCPD mission changed before fatal shooting
The letter to Hamilton County’s judges in 2013 carried an urgent message: Criminals were preying on University of Cincinnati students and something had to be done.
“Our students continue to be victimized at a troubling rate that is simply unacceptable,” said the letter, signed by UC President Santa Ono and Cincinnati Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell. “We need your help.”
The plea to judges was part of an aggressive anti-crime campaign that included hiring more cops, adding street lights and security cameras, beefing up campus patrols, and signing an agreement with the city to expand the presence of UC police in neighborhoods around the Corryville campus.
The approach is increasingly common, particularly on urban campuses, and it may have helped reduce crime. UC students last year reported fewer assaults, robberies and burglaries.
But the extension of patrols into the city fundamentally changed the mission of UC police, turning them into something more than a campus-oriented police force that dealt mostly with students. They began stopping, questioning and ticketing motorists and pedestrians by the hundreds, often in urban neighborhoods where they’d rarely ventured before.
Now, the mission of UC police may be changing again.
The shooting death of a black motorist by a UC officer on July 19 has stirred outrage in the community and prompted a re-examination of the relationship between UC cops and the neighborhoods they patrol. Much of the anger is focused on the way UC police went about tackling the crime problem that Ono and Blackwell wrote about in their 2013 letter.
UC cops handed out 932 traffic citations through July of this year, more than in all of last year and three times as many as in 2012. They gave 62 percent of those tickets to black motorists and pedestrians, up from 43 percent in 2012.
UC doesn’t make money from traffic citations written off campus, but aggressive enforcement is one way for police to make their presence felt. The question is whether it’s the best way.
“Policing a university is different than policing an urban community, and that’s what they’re doing,” said Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters. “Obviously, they’re being a lot more aggressive.”
Too aggressive, according to some. City Council took the first steps Monday toward banning off-campus traffic stops by UC police and promised to review the agreement, or memorandum of understanding, that was signed in 2009 and became the basis for much of the cooperation between city and campus police.
Without the agreement, UC police could not have handed out all those tickets and the fatal encounter on July 19 between UC Officer Ray Tensing and Samuel DuBose would likely not have happened. Tensing shot DuBose after pulling him over for driving without a front license plate, claiming he was being dragged as DuBose attempted to drive away.
“We need to be involved with them,” Chief Blackwell said Monday of UC police. “But to do traffic enforcement of residents – and it largely appears to be minority residents – we certainly don’t want that to continue. We don’t need that to continue.”
Deters went even further after a grand jury indicted Tensing on a murder charge last week. He said UC should disband its 73-member police department and let Cincinnati police do the job.
“They’re not cops,” he said. “Being police officers shouldn’t be the role of this university.”
Parents want security, schools add cops
Yet UC’s approach to campus security is typical, especially for big public universities. Most maintain their own departments, arm their officers with guns and allow them to patrol city streets beyond campus boundaries.
While some share Deters’ concerns and question the training and experience of campus police, many colleges and universities are doubling down on do-it-yourself security. In the past decade, they have hired and armed thousands more officers. UC has hired 32 new officers in the past year alone.
More than 90 percent of public universities in the United States now have their own police force, according to the Department of Justice, and 75 percent allow their campus cops to carry guns.
About 70 percent have signed memorandums of understanding like the one that allowed UC police to patrol in the city.
“What’s important here is the trend, and the trend is having more campuses with sworn police officers,” said John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies policing. “Virtually any campus of any scale has its own law enforcement.”
Although UC ramped up security in response to rising crime, much of the growth of campus police departments here and elsewhere in recent decades has occurred as crime rates have fallen.
Roman and others say that growth is less about security threats than about the demands of parents who want to know their kids are safe.
They spend tens of thousands of dollars to educate their children and believe campus cops are part of the deal.
“I am relinquishing my daughter’s safety to the university, and I’m paying a pretty penny to do it,” said Philip McDermott, the Chicago father of UC sophomore Erin McDermott. “I still need to have my daughter protected.”
Deters, though, said UC police aren’t ready to handle all the challenges that come with policing a big city. He said the DuBose incident is a good argument why students, the university and the community would be better off with city police.
“If you want to break up a fraternity beer party, fine,” Deters said. “But if you’re dealing with traffic stops that can get ugly like this one did, I’d prefer the city do it.”
That’s not likely to happen anytime soon. Ono has promised a top-down review, but no one at UC is talking about doing away with their department. “We are fully committed to doing anything, even retraining officers, so that we can be really a model of public safety,” Ono said.
Although Ohio law requires the same basic training for police officers, regardless of where they work, hiring practices and continuing education are less regulated.
Roman said his research suggests training is better in city departments and the pool of job candidates is stronger. He said allowing campus officers to carry guns and make traffic stops is asking for trouble the university doesn’t need.
DuBose’s death is a case in point. If the goal is to keep violent criminals from creeping closer to the university, Roman said, why pull over a non-student for a missing front license plate a half-mile from campus?
“I can’t think of a good reason to engage in an armed traffic stop,” he said.
Cincinnati Police, including Blackwell, say they’re worried about all the off-campus stops, too. But they say the agreement with UC police shouldn’t be scrapped altogether, because cooperation makes sense.
The idea is to let university cops deal with misbehaving students while city police focus on more serious crimes.
“It’s a good partnership,” said Assistant Cincinnati Police Chief Dave Bailey, who was a captain responsible for neighborhoods near UC when the agreement was signed.
“They help with the parties. They show up, they know the kids and they talk about the (student) code of conduct,” he said. “The collaboration works.”
Off-campus patrols ‘irritate’ some residents
Cincinnati lawyer Alphonse Gerhardstein said traffic stops aren’t the only problem with UC police. He’s sued the department twice in the past five years in wrongful death cases involving men who died after UC police used a Taser on them.
None of the officers involved in those cases faced criminal charges, but the university settled the lawsuits out of court and suspended use of Tasers. Gerhardstein welcomed Ono’s pledge to conduct an independent investigation.
“I suspect that a truly independent investigation will find a huge number of problems,” he said.
Gerhardstein said many of the problems revolve around the desire to rein in crime near campus. He said the effort has led to what’s known as proactive policing, a practice that zeroes in on minor offenses, such as panhandling or traffic violations, in hopes of deterring more serious crime.
The trouble with that approach, Gerhardstein said, is that it often targets low-income people and minorities.
“That irritates law-abiding citizens and makes people feel they’re being treated unfairly – because they are,” he said. “The burden of that kind of policing is that it always lands on people of color.”
Whatever their faults, some say, campus police provide a valuable service. And as a practical matter, most big-city police departments can’t afford to hire the dozens or hundreds more officers they’d need to take over policing on college campuses.
As Ono and Blackwell said in their 2013 letter to the judges, city and campus police need to cooperate to best serve UC’s students.
“Do you think for a minute that Cincinnati Police Department officers ... want to go onto campus and take care of drunken frat boys in Daniels Hall?” said former Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen, who worked briefly as a UC cop in the 1970s. “If some college professor locks his keys in his car, do they want to come out and help him?”
Allen said Tensing’s traffic stop of DuBose was unnecessary, but he said talk of disbanding UC’s department is absurd. They do work city cops don’t want or need to do, he said, and the university is a valuable training ground for officers who might one day go on to work in Cincinnati’s or another city’s police department.
“To say that they’re not real cops is insulting and inaccurate,” Allen said.
Mark O’Mara, the lawyer for DuBose’s family, said arguing about whether colleges and universities should have their own police departments is a waste of time.
They aren’t going away, he said. Parents expect them and schools already are heavily invested in them.
O’Mara said the police department’s mission, for now at least, should simply be self improvement. More training and more accountability for all police would be a good start, he said.
“I don’t care if it’s a university or small towns. It doesn’t make a difference to me,” he said. “We have to have more training. We can’t tell them to strap a gun on their hip and go out there and be perfect.”
Enquirer reporters Sharon Coolidge and Chris Graves contributed.