By Dan Horn
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Cincinnati's racial problems returned to the national spotlight Friday night with a network television documentary that linked the city's police to racial profiling.

Dateline NBC broadcast a report that found police in Cincinnati were three times more likely to stop African-Americans for minor traffic violations than they were to stop whites.

Although the report found similar results in other cities, including Boston and Denver, the show focused on racial tensions in Cincinnati and described the city as a "mirror" of race relations in America's cities.

The broadcast was aired almost three years to the day after the start of Cincinnati's 2001 riots, which began after police fatally shot Timothy Thomas on April 7 in Over-the-Rhine.

Thomas had been wanted for a series of minor traffic violations, such as those examined in the Dateline report.

City officials and civil rights activists greeted the broadcast with a mix of resignation and outrage. They agreed, however, that the findings are not surprising because some of the same police data have been used in the past two years in academic studies and in a racial profiling lawsuit.

"The findings are no different than what we found out for ourselves," the Rev. Damon Lynch III, pastor of New Prospect Missionary Baptist Church, said Friday. "What we want to be is a community of strong police-community relations, but we're not there yet."

But Mayor Charlie Luken said the Dateline special relies too heavily on old data and film footage and does not reflect changes the city has made in the past few years. He said a U.S. Department of Justice investigation and a collaborative agreement that resolved a federal racial profiling lawsuit have changed the way Cincinnati police do their jobs.

"We've done more than any other city in America to improve our police department," Luken said. "This is just another national media outlet trying to make Cincinnati look bad, and I don't think it's fair at all."

Dateline reporters said they spent 14 months on the story and examined more than 4 million traffic stops and tickets, including about 100,000 from Cincinnati.

Most of those tickets were for non-moving violations such as expired licenses and failure to use seat belts. The report concluded that the nature of those stops - and the higher rate of stops for African-Americans - suggested police may use minor infractions as a pretense to stop blacks.

A city-sponsored study on traffic stops released last year found black motorists were 36 percent more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers. But the researchers who produced the study were more cautious in their analysis than Dateline, noting that the findings are only "circumstantial evidence" of a problem.

The broadcast included video and interviews from 2002 with police Officer Ronald Dammert, who is shown searching an African-American man after the officer concluded he looked suspicious.

Later, when the man tries to file a complaint at the police station, Dammert warns him he could be charged with filing a false report.

"You want me to take drugs off the street, this is how I'm going to do it," Dammert told Dateline.