Cincinnati's Long History of Police Brutality

It took six weeks for George Zimmerman to get arrested for killing Trayvon Martin. The police officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was never indicted; neither were the cops who killed Eric Garner in New York City. In Baltimore, police have been charged for killing Freddie Gray, hastened no doubt by the violent uprising following Gray’s funeral. At the Black Lives Matter conference in Cleveland this past weekend, a possible worst-case scenario between police and a young, black man was averted when conference participants intervened.

Shortly before that conference, on July 19, 43-year-old Sam DuBose, an African American, was shot dead by a University of Cincinnati police officer who pulled him over for a missing front license plate. It took less than two weeks for a local prosecutor to charge officer Raymond Tensing with murder, and it was done without a riot-scale demonstration prompting it. The University of Cincinnati cancelled classes hours before Tensing’s charges were announced in anticipation of riots, though, and even DuBose’s mother asked that the publicly respond peacefully, if at all.