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Campus Cops Harass Cincinnati Residents [Picture, Video]

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CINCINNATI — Fikko wasn’t too surprised when he heard that a University of Cincinnati police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man. He’d grown up in Cincinnati and had always lived close to the school. He’d been stopped by UCPD officers many times — “harassed,” as he put it. His four friends with him on Thursday afternoon — the day after the county prosecutor announced Officer Ray Tensing had been indicted on murder charges for killing Samuel Dubose during a traffic stop — weren’t surprised either.

“I knew it was only a matter of time,” said Fikko, who is 30 and requested that BuzzFeed News only use his nickname. “You gotta understand, we more shook by college campus police officers than the Cincinnati police.”

The young men were gathered, some of them shirtless in the summer heat, at a park a few blocks from where Dubose, 43, was killed, less than half a mile south of the university’s main campus. And yet, they said, it felt so much further away. Here, most people were black and many were poor. There, most people were white and many came from rich families.

“And so it’s like they want to keep us away, make sure we stay where they want us to stay,” Fikko said.

While Fikko and his friends recalled stories of UCPD harassment that stretched back at least a decade, they agreed that things had become heated in recent years. Both these young men and four current UC students told BuzzFeed News that UCPD’s relationship with the surrounding community further deteriorated in October 2013, when University of Cincinnati President Santa Ono, along with Cincinnati Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell, wrote a letter calling on local judges to “send a clear, forceful, and reverberating message to criminals and the broader community that the predatory targeting of UC students will have severe consequences.”

“What it did was tell students, your lives are more valuable than theirs,” said Cierra Carter, a junior at the university. “The purpose was, ‘We’re gonna scare the shit out of the community, and anybody that commits a crime we want punished really, really, really bad.’”

The letter had come in response to a spate of robberies of students in the blocks surrounding the campus. One local television news station noted that “some students are actually arming themselves to be safe.”

In a separate message to students that same month, Ono noted that he was increasing the frequency of UCPD off-campus patrols from four days a week to seven, and increasing the number of UCPD officers assigned to off-campus detail from eight to thirteen. A multi-jurisdictional agreement among the county, the university, and local municipalities grants UCPD authority to stop, question, or arrest people off campus. (The university did not respond to a request for comment as of press time.)

“This effort to enhance and expand a visible police presence,” Ono said in the letter, “will continue for the foreseeable future.”

A few weeks later, a judge handed down the maximum 11-year sentence to two men convicted of robbing somebody near the campus. “It appears as though the criminal element in Cincinnati is preying on the students and working people near and on the campus of UC,” Common Pleas Court Judge Ralph Winkler said at the sentencing hearing.

To some students, the administration’s campaign had widened the already thick line between the campus, which is 7% black, and the community surrounding it in a city that is 45% black. SOURCE



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