COLUMBUS, Ohio — Gov. Mike DeWine is taking another swing at police reform. This time, he’s championing a bill authored by former Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer.
The bill would establish a discipline database that would track each incident involving an officer for transparency, a formal review after every serious incident involving an officer and more training on things like de-escalation techniques.
“We’ve taken several executive actions here in Ohio related to police reform,” DeWine said during a press conference last Wednesday. “Last year, I ordered all cabinet agencies with sworn law enforcement officers to ban the use of chokeholds unless deadly force would otherwise be authorized.”
DeWine said the bill has been in the works for some time and will be introduced soon, but the preview of the bill comes after two major events: The guity verdict of officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, and the killing of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, who died at the hands of a Columbus police officer last Tuesday.
According to the organization Mapping Police Violence, Bryant was the fifth Black child killed by the Columbus Division of Police in the last five years.
For community activist Jordyn Close, it’s not enough.
“We’ve seen time and time again that police reforms do not work,” said Close. “In this city, we have civilian review boards, we’ve had reforms, we’ve had more funding (and) we’ve had funding taken away. None of that works”
Back in June following the death of George Floyd, Columbus Police banned choke holds and the use of pepper spray on non-violent crowds.
Close said these small solutions ignore a much larger problem. She said a solution would be to use money allocated to police to fund the neighborhoods they serve.
“We could be taking some of the millions of dollars that CPD gets over the years and putting that into housing, for the east side, south side and west side, where that is a huge problem,” said Close. “We could be funding health care, especially now when we are still in a pandemic”
She also said race is a contributing factor to the tension. According to city statistics, 30% of Columbus residents are Black, while 85% of the police force is white.
She said over-policing could be solved by cutting funding.
“Defunding the police looks a lot like the other things that have been defunded over the years — education, arts programs, and those programs expected to operate at the same level, if not higher. So, when we look at those, and when we look at things that have already happened, it draws a clear direction to de-funding.”
On Wednesday, Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginter sent a request to Department of Justice asking for an investigation of CPD. Ginther said that while the city is committed to reform and has already established a number of “significant” changes in the past few years, it is not enough.
“The city of Columbus is committed to reform,” Ginther wrote in the letter. “We must align with the reality of how we are policing with community expectations of how we should be policing.”
