By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The city's police oversight agency has investigated 13 complaints of racial profiling by Cincinnati police officers since January, but has not sustained a single allegation.

Racial profiling allegations have been included in 10 percent of the complaints filed with the Citizen Complaint Authority since it was established at the beginning of the year. The agency was one of the key reforms in a 2002 police-community relations agreement that settled a class-action racial profiling lawsuit.

Police say the few complaints are further evidence that racial profiling - the targeting of minority motorists based on their race or ethnicity - is largely a myth.

A University of Cincinnati analysis of 2001 traffic stop data released last week found that black drivers are 36 percent more likely to be stopped, but said racial bias was only one of several possible explanations for the disparity. Other measures - like the length of stops and the percentage of successful searches - found no difference between black and white drivers.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which is the plaintiff in the racial profiling settlement, said they haven't thoroughly researched the Citizen Complaint Authority cases.

"If the process is working the way it's supposed to, the absence of findings is a positive sign," said ACLU lawyer Scott T. Greenwood.

Nancy J. Minson, the chairwoman of the seven-member panel that reviews the agency's investigations, isn't so quick to draw conclusions from either the statistical or anecdotal evidence.

"We need to look at these things on a case-by-case basis. What district did the incident take place in? Is there a difference in the race of officer versus the complainant? There are so many things to look at, and compiling statistics is just the beginning of it," she said.

This year, 19 of the 196 complaints have contained an allegation of racial bias by police officers. Six investigations are still pending.

Of the 13 completed cases, six were unfounded - meaning there was no basis for the complaint. Two complaints were dismissed because of a lack of jurisdiction. In two cases, the officers were exonerated, and in three, the allegation was not sustained, meaning there was insufficient evidence to prove or disprove the allegation.

A lack of objective evidence is a key issue for many racial profiling complaints, Minson said.

"I think that one of the things we have a problem with is the 'he said, she said' kind of thing. It's very hard to determine the truth," she said.

Another problem: An officer's behavior is easier to determine than his motivations.

The racial profiling allegations investigated by the agency often came with other complaints ranging from discourtesy to excessive force. While none of the racial profiling allegations was sustained, some of the others were.

In one case, the agency recommended a reprimand for Eric Vogelpohl, a plainclothes officer who repeatedly used profanity at a city firefighter in front of his fiancee and 3-year-old son. The firefighter had thrown a plastic bottle at the unmarked car after it turned a corner and barely missed him. In that case, three witnesses corroborated the firefighter's story.

Racial profiling was alleged in the very first complaint made to the new agency on Jan. 3. Clifford Lindsay Jr., a 37-year-old Over-the-Rhine man, was stopped and searched at the corner of Liberty and Race streets "for no apparent reason" during a sweep of the neighborhood after the stabbing of an undercover officer. Officers later gave him a ticket for spitting on the sidewalk.

Nathanael L. Ford, then the agency's director, determined that the specific complaint of racial profiling was unfounded. But in looking at the 31 spitting citations issued in 2002, Ford found most were in African-American neighborhoods. He questioned whether the ordinance was being used as a "punishment tool."

Statistics have also been used to disprove allegations of profiling.

Vista Benton, a Springfield Township woman, complained that an officer was giving parking tickets only to black drivers at the Western Hills Plaza, and letting white drivers off with a warning. But Ford found that more than half of the 11 parking tickets written by Officer Douglas Lindle that day were given to white motorists. "There is no apparent pattern of discrimination in the issuance of tickets on this day. Officer discretion is permissible in issuance of parking tickets."

In two cases, white motorists complained of racial bias on the part of African-American police officers. Joan Daugherty, 53, of Milford, complained in February that white and black drivers illegally passed a road-closed sign on Evans Street, but the black officers stopped only white drivers.

But Milton Cole, an 82-year-old white Delhi Township man acquitted on the same charge, told investigators: "It didn't matter if anyone was black or white. It just looked like they wanted to catch someone."

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com