The long-awaited release of the report by the Minority Relations Panel addressed some obvious concerns about how local police from both the Athens Police Department and the Ohio University Police Department deal with minorities. The narrow focus of the panel, however, might not have been enough to fully consider all aspects of Athens' relationship with minorities.
The recommendations of the panel should be implemented, but until local authorities recognize the roots of why June 4 sparked such a response from local students and citizens -namely, the specific instance of the Terris Ross case and the general realities of homogenous Athens -the city cannot truly address what it will take to fix the perceptual problems between it and its minority residents.
The creation of the panel, which includes Athens Police Lt. David Williams, OU Professor of African-American Studies Francine Childs, OU Police Department Assistant Chief Mark Mathews and Leon Forte from Grace Christian Center, was a direct response to the events of June 4, when a fight broke out in front of the Evolution bar, 19 S. Court St., at about 2:15 a.m.
Six current and former OU students were arrested for not obeying orders to disperse. Five of the six were minorities -two were found not guilty of disorderly conduct, two were fined and the other two are awaiting trials. Some 200 students, residents and local state officials, disgruntled by the overall handling of the night's events, crowded the City Council chambers during the body's June 7 meeting and voiced concerns about law enforcement in Athens. Julio Cumba, shot with a taser that night, said at the end of June that APD officers caused and perpetuated a violent situation.
The details of APD's possible misconduct are sketchy, at least as addressed in the report. While the panel said racism was not a factor in the incident, it makes some far-reaching suggestions as to how local police can prevent future conflicts
which implicitly indicates that, while not necessarily in this incident, the relationship between minorities and police is not a positive one.
And this is where the panel, although effectively investigating the night of June 4, missed a golden opportunity to more broadly explore minority relations. Nowhere in the report is the name Terris Ross mentioned, whose murder more than a year and a half ago remains unsolved
Perception is often the key to understanding tension between groups. And, with Athens Prosecutor C. David Warren saying almost six months ago police know who the killer is but cannot build a case against him and with zero indications as to when, if ever, someone will be brought to justice in the case, it would not be difficult to understand how local minorities, who live in a homogenous town and attend an overwhelmingly white university, would feel police might not be giving them a fair shake.
Perhaps, despite the conclusion that race did not play a role in the Evolution break-up, this is why the panel makes so many suggestions, such as hiring minority officers -APD has none and OUPD has two -and providing tuition credits for officers to attend cultural studies classes. The report seems to downplay the incident, which apparently did not represent any gross misconduct, and instead focuses on the larger issues alluded to in its recommendations to improve police/student/community relations. It gives solutions, but does not explicitly state the problems, and so long as race relations are not fully explained and discussed, attempts to truly address them will be hampered. 17
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