Over the past five years, nearly 1,000 Cincinnatians have complained that police officers have treated them improperly, in actions that ranged from rude behavior to searches at gunpoint. More than three-fourths — 76 percent — of 983 complaints filed with the Office of Municipal Investigation were made by African-Americans. Yet they make up just 43 percent of the population.

        Records show that OMI and police supervisors found problems with officers in 128 cases, about 13 percent overall. But records also show that police were disciplined in only about half of those cases.

        Until now, citizen complaints have largely been treated on a case-by-case basis, with little effort made to track trends or problems.

        But under a landmark settlement to improve police-community relations, the city is eliminating OMI and creating a new board to find patterns of complaints.

        “We haven't studied this enough,” says Mark Gissner, OMI acting director. “We need to study it. We need to find a remedy” for the racial disparity in complaints.

        An Enquirer review of OMI records shows a disparity not only in the number of complaints, but in the type.

        Blacks complained about being stopped and searched 16 times as often than whites — 172 black complaints to 11 white.

        African-Americans filed 67 of 72 complaints about police encounters involving guns. In 39 of the complaints, police did not dispute having drawn weapons.

        Forty African-Americans alleged they were searched and handcuffed during traffic stops. Only two whites made those complaints.

        “This is damning evidence,” says Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska who consults nationally on police oversight.

        “This seems to lend empirical support to allegations of discriminatory policing,” he says. “It's astonishing.”

        Cincinnati police officials couldn't disagree more.

        Chief Tom Streicher says the numbers merely back up what officers see on the street. He says that most crime — and police contact with citizens — occurs in the city's poorest neighborhoods, which are mostly African-American.

        “On the surface, if you look at it, you say, "Oh My God, it is discriminatory,' ” he says. “But the greatest number of contacts is occurring between police officers and people of color.”

        He cites a six-year study that examined all homicides in Cincinnati between 1994 and 1999. It showed that 85 percent of victims and perpetrators were African-Americans.

        To look simply at the numbers and not at who is committing crime, he says, “is to ignore the underlying conditions that are there.”

        Mayor Charlie Luken refused to comment on the racial breakdown or disparate nature of citizen complaints.

        In a two-sentence faxed statement, Mr. Luken said:

        “I understand there are problems with the citizen-complaint process relative to the allegations of misconduct by Cincinnati police. That is why I have proposed that the current system be scrapped and replaced by a new Citizens Complaint Authority.”

        College Hill resident Charles Wiley says he has no doubt that police searched his car outside a bar in 1998 because he is black.

        “When it first happened, I was highly mad at the whole department — all of them,” he says. “I couldn't believe it was happening to me.”

        Mr. Wiley, who in the early 1990s established a youth group called Black Positive Brothers to help inner-city kids stay away from drugs and gangs, says he has always been a strong supporter of police.

        But at 11 p.m. that August night, he was ordered out of his car by officers who said they had reports that someone was smoking crack.

        “I told them I don't allow anyone to smoke cigarettes in my car, let alone crack,” Mr. Wiley says.

        He says he agreed to a search of his vehicle after officers threatened to bring in dogs. Officers ran his name multiple times on the computer, he says.

        “They were looking for anything they could find on me.”

        As police began their search, Mr. Wiley told them he had a handgun locked in the trunk and the clip locked in the glove box. Though the gun is registered to him and he was transporting it properly, officers put him in cuffs.

        “He said, "I have a gun,' so we took action immediately,” says Officer Jeffrey Shari, who provided backup to officers in the case. “What he didn't know was that it was an undercover officer, who was black, who reported (the crack).”

        Officer Shari disputes Mr. Wiley's claims that this was a case of racial profiling. OMI found that officers improperly searched Mr. Wiley's car and were discourteous by threatening to arrest him for speaking out. But police records show that officers weren't disciplined.

        By the time police released Mr. Wiley 30 minutes after they had stopped him, he says he was frustrated and in tears.

        “I told the officers that these tears aren't because I'm scared,” Mr. Wiley says. “They are because I am a black man in Cincinnati and because I have to go through this.”
       

        John Byczkowski designed the database for this project.
       

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