Press conference blasts ‘aggressive policing’

In 2006 Cleveland police killed three Black men and one Black youth, 15-year-old Brandon McCloud. Not surprisingly, the issue of police brutality was a factor last year in the election of Mayor Frank Jackson and the defeat of incumbent Jane Campbell.

In the second week of May 2007, however, three Black men were killed by police in three days. One was shot with 16 bullets, 13 of them in the back. The other two were killed in high-speed chases with one of those two being a bystander.

The very next day, Mayor Jackson announced an initiative for “aggressive policing.”

“Three men are dead. How aggressive do you want to get?” asked Ernie Harris, president of Black On Black Crime, Inc., at a news conference his group held on May 20. “Do you want to kill eight or nine?”

The media, with the exception of one TV station who sent a cameraman without a reporter, boycotted the press conference. Yet the week before the Cleveland Plain Dealer made a news story out of the fact that there were no protests. This daily paper has tried to portray a community universally backing the police.

The groups that spoke alongside Black On Black testified to the public outrage at police murders and the complicity of City Hall. Groups present included Mothers Against Youth Violence, Survivors and Victims of Tragedy, the Hip Hop Workshop, Cleveland Lucasville Five Defense Committee, Peoples Fightback Center and the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Harris blasted the supposedly independent Police Review Board. “There have been 4,300 complaints and they have all been ruled justifiable,” he pointed out. The rough figure of 4,300 represents 100 percent of the complaints filed against Cleveland police.

Speaking for “we of the hip hop generation,” Al Porter of the Hip Hop Workshop stated that “Mayor Jackson was not elected for us to talk to his assistants or write him or jump through hoops to meet with him.”

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