He joined Mayor Frank Jackson and other city leaders tonight at Cudell Rec Center — some 50 yards from where 12-year-old Tamir was shot by a police officer last weekend — to answer dozens of questions from community members about public safety and the police department’s work in Cleveland.
The mood was mostly peaceful, and many questions decidedly cut to the core of the matter: identifying a fundamental racial disparity among the police department’s use of force and the prosecutor’s record of convictions.
“This is a shame and a disgrace!” one woman said toward the end of the meeting, summing up a great deal of the night’s emotions and garnering waves of applause. City leaders offered their condolences to the family, some of whom were in attendance, and attempted to answers questions about deadly force protocol, community policing techniques, patrolman training programs, internal psychological evaluations, and more issues connected to the shooting death of Tamir Rice.
But following that incident and the Ferguson grand jury response to Darren Wilson, much of the public outcry revolves around a near-total lack of trust in law enforcement. “The whole system is broken!” another woman told the police chief. Amid cries of “No justice! No peace!” and “Black lives matter,” such was the tone of many public commenters tonight.
Check my timeline — @ericsandy — for some more specific and in-the-moment quotes, context, etc.
The community forum followed a massive protest downtown, which involved hundreds of people marching from Public Square to the Shoreway and ultimately shutting down State Route 2 near East 9th Street. Many of those protesters eventually made their way to Cudell, bringing the crowd size to some 400 or so as the meeting went on.
Among the more concrete answers provided by Williams was his reminder that the department’s body camera program will be coming “online” at the end of January — a timeframe that some, including City Councilman Zack Reed, have decried as too late. Earlier this year, a city committee studied the impact of body cameras in several cities across the U.S. finding an 80-percent drop in citizen complaints and a 50-percent decreased in use of force incidents after the implementation of the cameras.
Williams also said that the department is intent on revamping its community policing program — a reform which will focus on youth, in particular. When pressed again and again for specific plans moving forward, Williams repeatedly returned to this point and his desire to be a more community-oriented and engaging force in the city. “I am committed to having a better police department for you,” he said. What remains to be seen is just everything.
More information — including video footage and dispatch audio — is expected at tomorrow’s afternoon press conference.
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2014.
How many innocent children and innocent police must die before the American public wises up and realizes that all of this is just part of the price that goes hand-in-hand with any society that permits guns. Thanks NRA for all you have done to promote the type of society that puts more value on guns than it does the lives of it children.
I bet Chris Quinn has his cock out over at the PD and is lubing it up waiting for all the web clicks he’s going to get tomorrow afternoon when the cops release that video. I’m sure he’ll shut his door and dial up the realtime stats. Oh….baby….oh…pleeeease….look at all those clicks….splat!
I would like to know how the 12 year old acquired the gun? And, who knew that he had it? Where was the adult supervision? This is a terrible accident.
It is not an accident, it is a blessing of liberty that innocent home and business owners have the 2nd amendment right to defend themselves.
Every single cop should be wearing a body camera at all times. Unfortunately, even when faced with video evidence, people still find a way to skew it so that it benefits whatever viewpoint they want it to. Still, the vast majority of people are smart enough to watch a video and actually see what’s going on for what it is. I really hate to say it since it shows a child receiving wounds that ultimately lead to death, but this video absolutely has to be released. There is no way for the public to truly verify what happened until we see things for ourselves.
Oh yeah, completely forgot to mention this, how is shutting down the shoreway not a crime? I mean, I never knew you could shut down rush hour traffic to make any kind of statement and not get in any kind of trouble for it. Between us getting $20 for shutting it down for Captain America 2 and this, looks like you can shut down the shoreway any time you want.