One reason the 33-year-old District 1 street cop sought the office, he says, is that the FOP was doing "a horrendous job of getting our message out."
No more.
He's addressing Cincinnati City Council. He's speaking to community groups. He's tapping into local media with frequent radio talk show appearances, TV sound bites and quotes in newspapers. He's decrying the February shooting that seriously wounded Officer Kathleen Conway: "We are not going to sit back and allow ourselves to be the human punching bags of the city."
He's denouncing a judge's decision to acquit the woman who fled the apartment where Officer Daniel Pope and Spc. Ronald Jeter were killed in December as "a slap in the face to the entire Cincinnati community."
He's criticizing a proposed civilian review board that would oversee police misconduct investigations and have disciplinary power as "nothing more than an opportunity to try to control the outcome and inject politically motivated thinking into these investigations."
He recognizes more than some of his predecessors that the FOP needs the media -- and vice-versa.
"One promise I'll make you," he says to a reporter, "you'll never get a "no comment' from me. In return, I have to ask that I not be misquoted."
Not since former FOP president Elmer Dunaway's 1972-87 reign has the police union had such a vocal advocate. But he's no Elmer Dunaway, who was known as much for his confrontational, antagonistic style as his cowboy hat and snakeskin boots.
Though firm and direct, Officer Fangman presents a professional demeanor. He's a husky 6-foot-2, with short brown hair, neatly combed. His boyish face often flushes when he speaks publicly. He wears suits and loafers to the FOP office on Central Parkway. Words sometimes hurry from his mouth. Or, if he wants to be particularly precise about a point he's making -- he'll shift to a slower speed. But whenever he speaks, "He's unzipping his chest and saying, "Here's my heart,' " says Sgt. Mike Gardner, one of his trainers at the police academy.
"Keith likes a little more of the rhetoric, but that's what the guys like," says Sgt. Pete Ridder, the previous FOP president whom Officer Fangman defeated handily (along with two other candidates, all longtime police veterans). "And if that's what they like, he's serving the membership."
Officer Fangman grew up in a police family. His father is a retired Cincinnati cop, and two of his three brothers joined the division before him.
But much of his outspoken advocacy for the police division -- on topics from the use of force to dealing with the mentally ill -- was borne out of his own experience in uniform.
He began his career in 1994 in police District 4, which includes Avondale. But a transfer a year later to District 1 was reason to rejoice.
"My goal was to be a beat cop in Over-the-Rhine," he says. "I always looked at working as an inner-city beat cop as the ultimate."
On a warm Saturday evening recently, Officer Fangman, in uniform, is patrolling his old beat in the West End and Over-the-Rhine with Officer Jeff Ray.
Though his FOP job is full time, Officer Fangman says he intends to hit the streets once or twice a month, rotating among the five police districts. He wants to keep his skills sharp. And, "if I'm going to be (police officers') vocal advocate, I need to continue to experience the same things they are."
This is what he and his partner and other officers in District 1 experienced in the weeks after the shootings of officers Pope and Jeter:
Teens on street corners, spotting a police cruiser, then pointing their forefingers to their heads as if holding imaginary guns. "Bang, bang," they'd say.
"Here we'd just buried two of our friends," he says, "and they're laughing about it."
Lack of respect for police comes from youths and middle-aged people, whites and blacks, men and women, he says.
He has never been shot at, but like many officers, he has been cut, scraped and bruised when arresting people who resisted violently.
The officers park their cruiser on Derrick Turnbow Avenue and walk into a courtyard at Laurel Homes, a West End housing project. Five grade school-age boys are using four discarded mattresses as trampolines.
"Show me your stuff," Officer Fangman says, and the boys oblige. "Your parents know you're out here?" he asks.
Yeah, they say.
The officers enter a nearby building and walk up a staircase. The steps are covered with dirt, candy wrappers, trash. The block walls have been marked up. Gang graffiti, the officers say.
Within the space of a few hours, they investigate an assault, respond to a domestic violence call, arrest a drunk with outstanding warrants, cite several men outside a market for having open beer containers and escort home a woman who is fearful of her crack-addict mother.
At 9 p.m., the officers stop in the Drop Inn Center Shelterhouse. About 20 homeless people are watching television. The scene reminds Officer Fangman of Nov. 15, 1996, the day he came closest to shooting someone.
First at murder scene
That morning, a man pounded furiously on his police cruiser's window, yelling, "There's been a shooting at the Drop Inn Center! I think it's the director!"
Officer Fangman entered the shelter, gun in hand. People were watching The Price Is Right on TV. He smelled gun smoke.
"My heart is in my throat," he says, "because I know there's just been a shooting here and somebody's got a gun, and I don't know where the hell they are."
He saw an old woman sobbing into a phone, and demanded: "Who's got that gun?"
"He does," she said, and she pointed to an office around the corner.
Officer Fangman saw Buddy Gray, the shelter director, on the floor on his back, bullet wounds in his chest. Someone else was in the room sitting on a chair, but only the person's legs were visible. "I'm thinking, this is it. I'm gonna have to shoot this guy, 'cause I know he's got a gun."
The officer reached around the corner. Slowly. He saw a man sitting with his hands on his knees. He shouted again, "Where's that gun?" "The (expletive) gun's right here," the man said, eyeing a .357 magnum on a table, within arm's reach.
"You move one inch," Officer Fangman said, "and I am gonna blow your head off."
"That's right, I shot the (expletive)," Wilbur Worthen said, "because he was pumping nerve gas into my apartment." (A judge later found Mr. Worthen not guilty by reason of insanity for the murder of Mr. Gray.)
"In those kind of situations," Officer Fangman says, "if a police officer tells you he's not scared, he's either lying or he's too stupid to have this job."
Mr. Worthen was one example -- Lorenzo Collins, who police shot and killed in February 1997, and Daniel T. Williams, who shot Officer Conway, were others -- of the "hundreds of mentally ill people running around unmedicated," Officer Fangman says.
"It's wrong that police officers are always expected to clean up the mess. And then if we make the slightest mistake, we're the ones that get blamed. The Ohio General Assembly ought to take a field trip down to Over-the-Rhine to see what we're talking about."
Rank-and-file appeal
During the FOP campaign, Officer Fangman's outspoken nature appealed to the rank-and-file, police officers say. He also turned his youthfulness to his advantage by noting that he was representative of a police division in which 70 percent of officers have less than 10 years experience.
And he had something else going for him: experience in city hall. When Mike Allen ran unsuccessfully for Cincinnati City Council nine years ago, his campaign manager was a recent college grad with an interest in politics: Keith Fangman. Mr. Allen is now the Hamilton County Republican Party chairman.
After the 1989 election, young Mr. Fangman's education in politics and media relations continued when Jim Cissel hired him to work in his city council office. He stayed until Mr. Cissel left council for the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts office in 1992. He then worked in public relations at Provident Bank until a police recruit class opened up.
Sharon Fangman says she knew her husband was the right person to be FOP president, based on his education (a bachelor's in industrial relations and personnel from the University of Cincinnati) and work experience.
"I tell him, "I think it's why God put you here.' "
But with their children ages 1, 4 and 9, she wasn't sure the timing was right. Everyone has had to adjust.
"My expectations were, this is 9 to 5, weekends off, holidays off, isn't this great?" Mrs. Fangman says.
"After a couple months, I stopped calling and asking if he was going to come home for dinner. I stopped asking if he would be home before the kids went to bed."
If not at meetings, he typically stays late in the office on weekdays to return FOP members' phone calls. So the family has come to appreciate quiet weekends watching a rented movie and making popcorn.
Sharon Fangman is a stay-at-home mom who, like her husband, has strong opinions about police issues. She spoke to city council last summer in support of Officer Douglas Depodesta, who shot Lorenzo Collins. In February, she joined other police wives in urging the firing of two 911 workers who mishandled calls the night officers Pope and Jeter were killed.
They've been married 10 years. Keith's affinity for police work goes back much further.
His father, Jerry, a 25-year Cincinnati police veteran, retired in 1986 after spending much of his career as a burglary investigator. Two of Keith's three brothers joined the division before him: Paul 11 years ago, and Gary, seven.
Keith says he always knew he wanted to be a police officer. A Cincinnati police officer. Growing up on the west side in Miami Heights, Keith, the second-youngest of the Fangman boys, often listened in awe as his father talked with cop buddies about investigations and arrests.
Jerry and Paula Fangman (they're now divorced) encouraged conversation at evening meals. All four boys talked, but "Keith was the discussion leader," Jerry says.
Even in junior high, he showed a knack for persuasion. Jerry recalls Keith wanting a non-lethal trap so he could capture and study animals. His father said no. "Keith sat down with a legal pad and wrote down all his arguments," Jerry says, then presented his case.
He got the trap.
"He's always been driven," says brother Paul, who works in the division's Street Corner drug unit. "He wasn't one to just sit back and take what was given to him. He went out and got things."
He wanted two things before he became a cop: a college degree and experience working in government. To earn his UC tuition money he tried various jobs; one, the articulate young man was particularly good at.
"I made a lot of money as a car salesman, but I'm telling you right now, I am not proud of that in any way, shape or form," he says. When a manager gave him a training video that encouraged questionable sales tactics, he quit.
He began teaching Discovery Center adult-education classes on buying a car. In 1989, he packed his insider knowledge into an instructional video, How to Negotiate a Car Deal . . . Without Being Eaten by Wolves. The Main Public Library still has a copy.
"Car dealers hated me," he says. But he emphasizes that today, "many car dealerships go out of their way to give fair treatment."
Community outreach
As FOP president, Keith Fangman goes out of his way to get his message out. On a recent weekday, he stands at a lectern addressing 50 Shriners who have gathered for a luncheon meeting at Syrian Temple in Mount Auburn.
The talk, which he's given before, includes a plea for law-abiding citizens of all races to form a partnership with police and take a stand against violent crime. With that, he says, comes an obligation on the part of the community to vocally support police officers when they are physically attacked.
He's not a hand-waver or lectern-pounder. The voice remains steady, but spiked with passion. His face flushes as he spells out what Cincinnati police have endured the last six years: shot at 45 times, assaulted 1,500 times.
"I'm not complaining. We knew damn well what we were getting into when we took this job. What we're saying is, the numbers are unconscionably high."
He says it's important that people understand why police sometimes use force. Case in point: Lorenzo Collins.
He describes how the escaped mental patient -- a 6-foot-5 "giant of a man" -- was sprayed with chemical irritant five times, with no effect. And how Mr. Collins raised a "3 1/2-pound, four-cornered brick" overhead, then advanced to within six feet of Officer Douglas Depodesta and University of Cincinnati Officer John Engel, repeatedly shouting, "You're going to have to kill me!"
The officers fired on Mr. Collins simultaneously. A series of investigations and reviews cleared them of criminal misconduct. Officer Fangman recounts how people protesting Mr. Collins' death called Officer Depodesta a racist and murderer.
"Would it have been better," he says, his face aglow, "if (Officer Depodesta) had taken a brick to the head, and ended up in Drake Hospital sucking baby food through a straw?"
The talk turns to Officer Conway, who killed her attacker after being shot four times. When people violently resist arrest, "We're going to revert back to our training. We're going to use the necessary amount of reasonable force to get that person under control." And he repeats a familiar refrain:
"We're sick and tired of being the human punching bags of this city."
Rhetoric questioned
Police Chief Michael Snowden says he agrees "in theory" with such statements.
"The problem is," he says, "if you start throwing this kind of rhetoric out, down the road when you have a controversial use of force, such as a Pharon Crosby (the black teen whose televised arrest in 1995 ignited racism and brutality charges against police), these quotes will come back to haunt you. People are gonna say the cops overreacted."
Others also are troubled by Officer Fangman's words, and say they may do more harm than good in police-community relations. "We would expect and hope that our police would defend themselves and not be human punching bags," says Milton Hinton, president of the local NAACP. "But neither would we in the community expect to be human punching bags. What's the big deal?"
Responds Officer Fangman: "When police officers in this city are shot at 45 times in six years, that's the big deal, because the community didn't know about it. When police officers are violently assaulted 1,500 times in six years, that's a big deal, and the community didn't know about it."
Comparing such numbers from other cities, he says, is irrelevant. "I think it's very dangerous for anyone to look at that and say, this city had 100 cops shot at, Cincinnati had only 45 officers shot at. What we as a community should be saying is 45 officers is far too many, because one officer being shot at is too many.
"I look at this as a public-education campaign, so the next time some violent criminal decides he's going to punch a cop in the face or kick a cop in the groin and violently resist arrest, (people know) we are going to revert to our training."
Mr. Hinton credits Officer Fangman for his willingness to meet and get acquainted. "I'd never sat and talked with an FOP leader before," he says. "It was always in terms of conflict."
Chief Snowden says the FOP president is doing a "good job," but adds: "I just think he's going to have to be responsible for the statements he makes. They carry a lot of weight. You need to think carefully before you speak."
Officer Fangman insists he does.
"I feel very fortunate that as president I have the opportunity to say publicly what each and every other member of this division would like to say, but can't. . . . I pride myself on giving careful thought to what I'm going to say."
Won't seek public office
Often, he still sounds like a candidate. For something.
"I've had a lot of officers and a lot of residents tell me that I should run for public office," he says. During the FOP campaign, someone started a rumor that he had designs on a city council seat in 1999.
"I have absolutely no interest in running for public office. I'm a police officer first and foremost. If I were to leave the FOP president's office in a few years and go back to running a beat, I'd be the happiest guy in the world."
For the time being, though, he knows his role.
"I think a lot of people in this city were just so used to the police department being the ugly stepchild of this city, and being criticized at every turn, and there was never anybody vocally defending them." Now somebody is. Says Keith Fangman: "I bleed blue for the Cincinnati Police Division."
