Community Police

Hundreds of us turned out Sunday night for a candlelight vigil in Sandusky, Ohio  in tribute to slain Sandusky police Officer Andy Dunn and his family, but Chanel Harper was one of the few in the crowd who could really understand what the Dunn family was feeling. Like Dunn, Harper, brother, Calvin Harper Jr., was murdered.
While the circumstances were different, Harper's death was drug related, while Dunn's was in the line of duty, all lives have value and nobody deserves to be murdered, something Chanel Harper understands.

"I feel so bad for them," Harper said about Dunn's family, which includes Officer Matt Dunn who spoke to the crowd.

Like most of us in the crowd, Chanel Harper saw a family hurting over their son being fatally shot in the line of duty, not race. But because Dunn was white and shooting suspect Kevin Randleman was black there been some racial animosity over the shooting in Sandusky, a mostly white city northwestern Ohio city of about 25,000 by Lake Erie. Harper, one of dozens of black people who attended the vigil,  said she got some dirty looks.

Officer Matt Dunn also picked up on it. In emotional and eloquent comments, Dunn told the crowd his son's killing wasn't about race and that it should make the community come together, not divide it.

But the circumstances help fuel misperceptions and distory reality. While have been a lot more shootings in the last couple years than when I covered crime for the Sandusky Register in 2005-06, Sandusky is not a violent community.

Dunn was the first police officer killed in the line of duty in a century in Sandusky and while there have been a series of high profile killings of police officers nationwide of late, overall they are rare. Any homicide is one too many, but in a nation of 310 million, just 48 police officers were murdered in 2009 http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2009/feloniouslykilled.html

And while you would never guess it from watching T.V. where every other show is about glamorous cops tracking serial killers and solving homicides, violent crime in America has been at record lows in recent years. http://romenewswire.com/2010/05/25/fbi-violent-crime-rate-in-the-u-s-drops-for-third-year-in-a-row/

Randleman, 50, was a career criminal who fatally shot a man in a 1990 bar fight, but was found not guilty of murder and involuntary manslaughter. Obviously, if he's found guilty of killing Dunn, he should face a minimum of life imprisonment. But there's no reason to rush to judgement.

While circumstantial evidence indicates Randleman's guilt, the Register wrongly convicted him in print in a news story and editorial by saying that Randleman fatally shot Dunn rather than attributing the statements to police, which is standard journalistic practice. The Register editorial by Managing Editor Matt Westerhold (full disclosure: Westerhold was briefly my boss before I left the Register to take another job) wrote that the criminal justice has a "revolving door" that contributed to the circumstances that led to the shooting.

That implies that our justice system is lenient. The reality is that the US, with some 2.3 million people imprisoned, leads the world in incarcerating it's own citizens despite recent declines in state prison populations. http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/Prison_Count_2010.pdf?n=880

Prison overcrowding, due to stiffer sentencing and increased drug laws ballooned the prison population from about 450,000 in 1980 to the current 2.3 million. If we legalized drugs, there would be more room in prison for violent criminals like Randleman. And more money for mental health treatment that might have helped Randleman who reportedly is borderline mentally retarded.

But don't count on the Register, or law enforcement officials, who rely on money from drug seizures for a percentage of their budgets, to call for an end to the drug prohibition which fuels the violence in our communities. It's also a political third rail for politicians who can't even agree on legalizing marijuana for adults which would help decrease budget deficits by taxing sales of it.

With tension over the Dunn killing what we need is full disclosure. As Supreme Court justice William Brandeis said, "Sunlight is always the best disinfectant."

However, police are refusing to provide the Register with the video of the shooting from Dunn's police cruiser in an apparent violation of Ohio Freedom of Information laws. The Register has a right to the video, but it is being hypocritical by saying if it obtains the video it will not post the video online for the public because it's too gruesome. So the Register has a right to see the video, but the public doesn't? If people find it too gruesome, they shouldn't view it, but the video is public property and people should have the right to view it.

Sad, when a newspaper, which is supposed to fight government censorship engages in self-censorship because it fears losing advertising and reader subscriptions. This will also contribute to conspiracy theories that Dunn acted improperly when he attempted to question Randleman who was riding his bicycle at 3 a.m.

Unlike some police officers who don't live in the communities they serve and act more like occupiers than partners with residents, Dunn, a 30-year-old husband and father of two sons, lived in Sandusky and grew up there.

Dunn had a good record in his three years as a Sandusky police officer and friends and family say he cared about his community and wanted to protect it. We should try to live up to those same ideals not tarnish them with censorship and racism. As Matt Dunn said, let's use this tragedy to come together as a community.