If a dozen cops mistake you for a drug dealer, point guns at you and tell you to show your hands, do you: 1. Argue. 2. Act disruptive. 3. Speed-dial a lawyer to start a lawsuit.

        Terry Horton and Vincent Clark chose all of the above. And now they're hoping to win a “racial profiling” lawsuit jackpot.

        They have accused Cincinnati Police of racial profiling, illegal search, excessive force and illegally detaining them. They claimed that on Feb. 23, 2001, cops shoved a shotgun into Mr. Clark's face, searched and “ransacked” his green Yukon SUV and held them for 30 minutes.

        The Office of Municipal Investigations tells a very different story.

Bogus complaints

        • There was no profiling. The green SUV was stopped because a bounty hunter told police it contained a wanted drug dealer. The SUV plates showed a warrant, and the man who left a downtown nightclub in the Yukon matched the bail-skipper. Profiling is a policy of stopping minorities at random, without cause. This case was not profiling.

        • The SUV was not “ransacked.” The report said it was searched — for weapons. That's smart police work in “high-risk” stops of dangerous suspects.

        • The stop took about 20 minutes, and could have been shorter if Mr. Horton had not been “disruptive.”

        • The cops insisted that the nearest shotgun was 30 feet away. Officer Daniel Kreider was closest to Mr. Clark. “Officer Kreider was adamant that no shotguns were placed in the face of either the driver or Mr. Horton,” the report said. “If anyone would have placed a shotgun in the face of either of these individuals, Officer Kreider would have been directly in the line-of-fire and he would have remembered the incident.”

        That makes sense. The behavior of Mr. Clark and Mr. Horton does not.

        Mr. Clark alarmed the cops by putting his hands back in the SUV after he was ordered to hold them out the window. Mr. Horton argued and was “loudly talking on a cell phone while the police officers were giving orders to see his hands.”

        He was calling his lawyer, Ken Lawson.

O for 2

        Mr. Lawson has added Mr. Clark and Mr. Horton to 28 cases that were part of the city's collaborative agreement to prevent a class-action lawsuit over alleged racial profiling. The lead plaintiff in that class-action lawsuit was a driver who refused to stop when police tried to pull him over for a traffic violation. That's not profiling, either.

        Police apologized and explained the mistake. Mr. Clark and Mr. Horton were checked out and released.

        The cops said Mr. Clark seemed most upset to discover his license plate had an arrest warrant. The OMI report says he is co-owner of the SUV with another man.

        Last week, Mr. Clark told City Council the OMI report was “full of lies and coverups.”

        Sgt. Brian Ibold, the supervisor on the scene, said, “This has been blown out of proportion to such an extent it's amazing. It had absolutely nothing to do with skin color.”

        True or false: 10 cops — or two men who hope to hit the lawsuit lottery with a bogus claim of racial profiling?

       E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.

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