COLUMBUS, Ohio — A bullet hole in a garage near her sister’s
house marks the place where Adrienne Hood’s son, who was Black, was shot and
killed by police officers in Columbus in 2016.
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Hood said her son’s death opened her eyes to a city and a Police
Department that have been enveloped in controversy for years. The more she
learns, she said, the more she feels disappointed.
Since the death of her 23-year-old son — killed after exchanging
gunfire with two plainclothes police officers who, she said, did not identify
themselves as officers — 26 people have been shot to death by law enforcement
in Columbus, according to Mapping Gun Violence. Four of the deaths occurred in
the past four months.
“It’s becoming more and more clear that there is no respect for
Black bodies and Black communities,” Hood said.
Police killings in Ohio’s capital city have not attracted the
same attention as higher-profile cases in places like Louisville, Kentucky,
Minneapolis and Ferguson, Missouri. But the death this week of
Ma’Khia Bryant,
a 16-year-old Black girl who was shot at four times by a white police officer
after she lunged at someone with a knife, was only one of the several that have
led to vigorous protests in Columbus over the past year.
Last week, eight days before Bryant’s death, police shot and
killed a Black man at a Columbus hospital during a struggle as officers
attempted to arrest him. Body camera footage showed officers in a standoff with
the man, Miles Jackson, before a shot could be heard, possibly from Jackson’s weapon,
and they opened fire.
In a year that has seen protests over police shootings unfold in
Columbus with regularity and intensity, the death of Jackson on April 12
unleashed a particularly furious demonstration. Protesters broke through a door
at Police Headquarters, according to the Columbus Department of Public Safety,
and one of them assaulted an officer with a club.
Although almost 30% of residents are Black, 85% of the police
force is white. Yet slightly more than half of all use-of-force cases in 2017,
the most recent year surveyed, were directed at Black residents, according to
an operational review.
Columbus has boomed in recent years, its population of 898,500
now larger than that of Seattle, Denver and Boston. Wealthy tech companies have
helped fuel the city’s growth, pumping up trendy bars and restaurants to
support their young and well-paid employees.
But much of that growth has been on the perimeter of the city
and near the bustling campus of Ohio State University. In neighborhoods like
Bryant’s, many of them east of Interstate 71, parents who grew up in the city
often fear for their children’s safety every time they walk out the door —
sometimes worrying about the police.
“People across the country think Columbus is a great place to
live, but if you go to these other neighborhoods, they’ll tell you that they’re
suffering, that they’re being terrorized,” said Sean Walton, a lawyer who has
represented the families of people killed by police officers in Columbus,
including Hood. “There are these two tiers, and one is thriving while the other
is suffering in ways that are a matter of life and death.”
That dichotomy has played out several times over the past year.
In December,
Andre Hill, a Black man, was standing in his garage when two
officers approached. Earlier in the evening, a neighbor had called and
complained about a suspicious vehicle. When two officers pulled up to the
scene, they walked toward the garage and shined their flashlights inside.
Hill turned and walked slowly toward them, but an officer, Adam
Coy, opened fire within seconds, killing him.
No weapon was recovered at the scene, and Coy was fired and
charged with felony murder.
Several weeks before that, about 7 miles north of downtown,
Casey Goodson Jr. had stopped for sandwiches for his family on the way home
from the dentist. Goodson, a 23-year-old Black man, parked and walked to the
house. He had just slipped his key in the door when he was shot six times.
Deputy Jason Meade of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office said
that he and other deputies had seen Goodson waving a gun at them from his car
and that he had not responded to verbal commands at his front door. His family
said Goodson was listening to music on his earphones and might not have heard
the warnings or recognized the plainclothes officers as deputies. The coroner
later confirmed that Goodson had been shot in the back.
Goodson held a concealed weapon license, and a gun was recovered
from the scene. The authorities have declined to say if the gun was in his
hand, his pocket or his car.
Hood, whose son, Henry Green V, took on a fatherly role in the
family after his parents divorced, said she saw the latest police shootings as
a continuation of a disturbing legacy in her home city. She pointed to a
Justice Department investigation in 1999 that found that Columbus police
officers had a history of excessive force and false arrests and that the
victims of more than 300 misconduct complaints examined were “frequently”
Black, or else young, female or low-income white people.
More than 20 years later, Hood said, Black residents still worry
about unfair treatment. Hearing about the most recent deaths, of Goodson, Hill
and Bryant, she said, “has been heart-wrenching.”
The city's 176 homicides in 2020 were the most of any year on
record. So far, 2021 is outpacing last year, according to The Columbus
Dispatch.
Many of them have happened in neighborhoods like Bryant’s, where
residents say the spike in shootings has been met with aggression from police
officers struggling to contain the violence.
At Brother’s Finest Barbershop near the North Linden
neighborhood, one that has been particularly hard-hit by gun violence,
suspicion of the police runs deep. The barbershop is less than a mile from
where Goodson was killed last year.
One of the barbers working on Thursday, Javontae Robinson, 27,
said the police have done little to build the personal relationships that were
key to winning the trust of residents.
“They need better training and better education,” Robinson said.
“They need to be around the Black community more, come to our block parties and
barbecues and get familiar with the community.”
“Things won’t get better until they do that,” he said.
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