Set Afire, Homeless Man Feels Burned by Police

By Gregory Flannery

You can’t blame people who live on the streets for being less than comfortable with law enforcement; some of their experiences with police officers have been less than pleasant.

Thus when George Smock was set on fire during the night of Dec. 27, 2009, he didn’t call police.

“I didn’t fill out a police report that night, which I should have done, but I’ve got to live down here,” he says. “I don’t want to be made out as a snitch.”

The next day, when Smock saw the Rev. Fred Cook, the minister called police. Smock told the officer that he didn’t want to pursue the matter. When Smock lived in a camp along the Ohio River a few years ago, his camp mate was killed. Because the perpetrator has never been caught, Smock says, he had little hope that his assault would be treated as important.

“My friend – they called him Stringbean – got beat to death,” Smock says. “Nothing ever came of that. They’re going to make me a priority?”

When Josh Spring, executive director of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, heard about the attack on Smock, he urged Smock to cooperate with police.

“I told him that the people who set him on fire might try to do it to one of his friends,” Spring says.

That argument convinced Smock.

But now he’s having second thoughts.

Homeless Man Set on Fire

During the night hours of Sunday, Dec. 27, George Smock, a man who is homeless, was set on fire in downtown Cincinnati.

Smock said that at the corner of Main and Court streets, near the Hamilton County Courthouse, four African-American teenagers doused him with charcoal lighter fluid and threw a match on him. His coat lit on fire. Smock was able to put out the fire and fend off the attackers, thus saving his own life.

Palestine? Over-the-Rhine? What’s the Difference?

Oppression of poor people in one part of the world often bears a remarkable similarity to oppression of poor people in other parts of the world. That’s the insightful conclusion that Nancy Paraskevopoulos reached after touring Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Viewing the settlements, she thought something seemed familiar: Why, yes, the settlements reminded her of 3CDC, the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. Paraskevopoulos wrote her account for the University of Cincinnati’s News Record, an article headlined, “Expansion Abroad Similar to 3CDC.”

Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine are a complex issue, but even its ally, the United States, agrees that they are an impediment to the peace process. Less complicated is 3CDC’s plan to throw out more low-income residents to make room for upscale developments. Here is what Paraskevopoulos had to say:

“The first (settlement) we saw was Nof Zion, which reminded me of gentrified townhouses in my city’s neighborhood, Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine. The settlement, built by and advertised to wealthy Jewish internationals, illustrates a clear view of Jerusalem, the City of David and Mount Zion. Similarly, prefabricated communities in Over-the- Rhine are built by and advertised to wealthy, white suburbanites. Cincinnati Center City Development Corp.’s projects here, the ones with 3CDC signs out front, like Nof Zion, boast of development, historical significance and security.

“More importantly, they both lack even simple recognition of the communities they are overtaking and ousting. A block away from the aforementioned Over-the-Rhine complex is a predominantly black ghetto. The valley across which residents of Nof Zion might view important cultural and religious sites houses a Palestinian community, which Nof Zion cuts off from other Palestinian communities in the West Bank. As my ICAHD representative put it, these development industries “manipulate the view to create this myopia.” You see what you want to.”

Tenants to 3CDC: Hell No, We Won’t Go

Metropole Residents Vow to Fight Eviction

By Gregory Flannery

Tenants at the Metropole Apartments downtown took over a Nov. 5 meeting called by the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC), which has bought the building and plans to force them out.

The takeover, organized by the staff of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless and the Metropole Tenants Association, came one day after Cincinnati Police officers prevented the Homeless Coalition from attending a 3CDC meeting with tenants.

Because the Metropole houses low-income people under a contract with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), tenants have a right to have advocates present at meetings with landlords, according to Josh Spring, executive director of the Homeless Coalition.

“Yesterday the police department kept the advocates and the lawyers out,” Spring told the tenants. “The tenants have taken over the meeting now. The truth is you have a legal right to have advocates here, so we are the ones upholding the law. Today it’s a different story. How does it feel to have the power?”

Dead Men Walking in Ohio

By Paul Kopp

Most debates about capital punishment are narrowed to a choice between an approach from either the Old Testament or the New Testament: Do we take an eye for an eye or turn the other cheek?

Last month Sister Helen Prejean, a notable advocate for the abolition of the death penalty spoke at Xavier University. Prejean is best known for her book, Dead Man Walking, which inspired the Oscar-winning film of the same name. The book was an account of her experience in Louisiana as spiritual advisor to Death Row inmate Elmo Patrick Sonnier, whom she accompanied to his execution in the electric chair in 1984.

Prejean, 70, is a Roman Catholic sister of the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille. She began her work with Death Row inmates in 1981. She is now working for the Death Penalty Discourse Network in New Orleans, and travels the world meeting with prisoners and speaking out against capital punishment. She talks about her intimate experiences dealing with Death Row inmates and their families, as well as the families of murder victims, in the hope of furthering the public’s knowledge of the process of capital punishment.

“The journey that I try to help people with is first to stand with others in outrage when innocents have been ripped out of our lives by these very violent crimes,” Prejean says.

A link to slavery

Most people haven’t thought deeply about the issue because it’s something that doesn’t concern most people, she says. She also finds that, in general, once people have a more profound understanding of how the death penalty actually works, they are more perceptive to its shortcomings.

When Prejean talks about the death penalty in the United States, she is quick to note that understanding the context of the society which it came from is very important.

“You have to connect it directly with homelessness in America, people without health care,” she says. “You have to connect it with all the systemic things that are wrong, that don’t allow so many people to participate fully in American life.”

No One Could Wake Adam; No One Ever Will

By Marilyn Schirmer

Drug addiction and its devastating consequences can occur anywhere, even in the pastoral setting and safety of my country home. I’ve changed some names and omitted others to protect privacy.

The next to last time I saw Adam was on my living room floor. A team of paramedics was working over him. I watched helplessly as they repeatedly injected his heart while alternately trying to shock him back to life.

My daughter had known Adam since high school. And while their life paths often led them apart, when they reconnected, it was absolute. They were kindred spirits.

Adam had a keen sense of humor, was adorably cute, musically talented and had an unshakeable addiction to heroin. I knew of all his attributes except the last.

Suicide Donuts and TV Stereotypes

Stigma about mental illness is killing people

By C.A. MacConnell

(C.A. MacConnell is a Cincinnati freelance journalist.)

Each time I tell my story, here’s what happens: I lose friends, jobs and acquaintances. Throw dating out the window, too. After I lose a job, some others won’t want to hire me. Not because of my job performance, stability, personality or education, but because of my diagnosis alone – the two words – bipolar disorder. As if, through writing and speaking about brain disorders, I have committed a crime. Which I haven’t. My record is clean. And I am clean. I’ve been sober for almost 12 years. People have doubted that, too.

As I write this, I know that I face the possibility of overwhelming judgment. Soon. Anxiety sets in, then insomnia, then exhaustion. Not symptoms from my illness, but from the effects of stigma. I know the reality – that being open about my diagnosis and my honest experience with societal stigma will soon dramatically affect my life. It has happened in the past. And I know it could happen again.

Is 3CDC About to Strike Again?

Hotel Plan Could Force out Hundreds of Poor People

By Mark Payne

More than 200 residents of the Metropole Apartments, many of them reliant on federal housing assistance, could soon be forced out to make way for a new hotel in downtown Cincinnati’s entertainment block.

The apartment building at 609 Walnut St. has been put up for a transfer of physical assets by Showe Management.

“All that means is the building would have a new owner,” says James Cunningham, Cincinnati field office director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

But it means more than that. The building sits between the Contemporary Arts Center and Bootsy’s, Jeff Ruby’s new restaurant, making it attractive real estate for developers. The group interested in buying the building is Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC), according to Rob Goeller, civil rights outreach coordinator for the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless.

Goeller says he spoke with Adam Gelter, development manager for 3CDC, who said he was leading the Metropole project. Gelter said 3CDC wants to buy the Metropole, turn it into a commercial hotel, then hand it over to a company called Model Management, according to Goeller.

Fired Up Again, Ready to Go

By Jeni Jenkins

I have to admit that in recent months I have been feeling a bit politically jaded. People are talking, and frankly the conversation is quite sour, particularly when it comes to President Barack Obama. Name calling; back-stabbing; political snowballing. Obama has been referred to as a Nazi, a socialist, and a communist czar. Among other criticism he is accused of deceiving the public with his health-care plan. This persistent negative dialogue has had me feeling disillusioned, and I’ve been losing hope.

Last weekend I attended the largest Labor Day Picnic in the country. I’d never been to a Labor Day Picnic put on by the AFL-CIO or any event organized by a labor union, so I didn’t know what to expect. But more than anything I was surprised during the days prior that more people weren’t talking about the fact that Obama was going to be speaking.

Slavery Exists in Cincinnati Today

Ignorance about human trafficking leaves victims in bondage

By Margo Pierce
Contributing Writer

Media and law enforcement can miss human trafficking when they see prostitution. Photo by Kay Chernush.

A critical stop on the Underground Railroad during the time of plantation slavery, Cincinnati boasts a storied past as a gateway to freedom for thousands of Africans held in bondage. But today Cincinnati – the home of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, an institution designed to teach the lessons from the past about slavery and other violations of individual freedom – is “relatively unprepared to deal effectively with human trafficking in the Midwest.”

This assessment comes from the center’s Greater Cincinnati Human Trafficking Report.

“Based on the findings from this report, it is evident that human trafficking is an issue that needs to be further addressed in Greater Cincinnati through public awareness and technical training for first responders, through the organization and advancement of efforts to criminalize human trafficking in Ohio and by learning from the programs that other cities and states have effectively implemented to address human trafficking,” the report says.

Volunteers interviewed 137 people from Southwest Ohio, Northern Kentucky and Southeast Indiana between July 2007 and February 2008. Attorneys, government officials, health-care providers, interpreters, judges, law enforcement, pastors, reporters, social workers and victims’ advocates responded to a series of questions about slavery in Cincinnati, and 41 percent said they or their organizations have encountered victims of trafficking in the past five years.

“Law enforcement officers, judges, attorneys and social-service providers all acknowledge that human trafficking exists, but there is little specific law they can draw upon to stop the crime locally, and even less public knowledge of the issue,” the report says.

Cops don’t know

The report breaks down the penalties and elements of anti-trafficking laws in the Tri-State and summarizes the federal Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act (TVPA). The report then considers how only 40 percent of the professional respondents could be aware of anti-trafficking laws at the federal level and only 20 percent could identify the existence of state laws against modern day slavery, given that 91 percent said that they or their organizations have heard of human-trafficking cases.

“The survey results showed a surprising lack of awareness and knowledge of the issue of human trafficking, even among those most likely to encounter it,” the report says. “The general population in Cincinnati, therefore, is very likely to be even less aware. Although many survey respondents stated that they did not know the level of public awareness, a vast majority (77 percent) said that the general public’s knowledge of trafficking is only poor or fair. This comports with other studies that have shown that the general public lacks awareness of the issue.”

The ignorance of “first responders,” the people in professions most likely to respond to an incident involving a victim of human trafficking, underscores why, according to the U.S. government, less than 1 percent of trafficking cases are solved, compared to a 70 percent success rate in solving murder cases.

“While training on the law is important for all groups, it is particularly important for those groups most likely to encounter trafficking victims first,” the report says. “A majority of respondents (57 percent) said they believed that law enforcement is most likely to be the first to encounter trafficking victims. If law enforcement is indeed a first-responder, they must be knowledgeable and well-trained on the issue.

“Yet 48 percent of law-enforcement respondents said that local law enforcement in the Greater Cincinnati area has only a poor or fair knowledge of human trafficking. …In fact, 68 percent of law enforcement survey participants rated their own knowledge of trafficking as poor or fair.”

Despite this data, the report appears to capitulate to the social norm of not criticizing cops.

“In Cincinnati, law enforcement has a unique difficulty when it comes to fighting human trafficking due to the city’s geographic location,” the report says. “Cincinnati abuts Kentucky and Indiana, allowing traffickers to easily move across state and city borders where the laws and regulations on human trafficking differ.”

The report’s authors missed an opportunity to encourage strong leadership on this issue and build collaborative relationships that can lead to ending slavery in Ohio. The report instead gives local cops an excuse for not doing more to utilize local and federal resources.

The authors go on to wring their hands over the state of awareness in the medical community.

“The group just behind law enforcement considered to encounter trafficking first is medical professionals. … This is troubling because 77 percent of medical professionals surveyed said they had only a poor or fair knowledge of trafficking,” the report says. “Clearly, training on human trafficking is necessary for all groups surveyed and acutely necessary for potential first-responders such as law enforcement and medical professionals.”

Prosecutors get a pass

The study makes two recommendations encouraging community leaders to “support necessary training for law enforcement and medical professionals” and urges “state, city and community officials to enact comprehensive laws so that local law enforcement officials can prosecute, prevent and protect victims of human trafficking.” But the authors fail to make the strong argument necessary to back up these recommendations. A case in point is their assessment of the Ohio human-trafficking legislation enacted earlier this year.

The original legislation proposed in Ohio was based on the “model law” drafted for states to use in support of the TPVA – per the report’s recommendation – but the report fails to make the point that this would be a second attempt at passage because “the executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association (OPAA), when asked about the previously proposed anti-trafficking laws, commented that, ‘We have all the laws we need.’ The Department of Justice has reported, however, that since 2000, ‘prosecutions under the TVPA have increased six-fold.’ ”

What the report doesn’t include is the fact that the OPAA proposed the new law because it opposed the more comprehensive legislation that the report says is needed.

“Due to its recent passage, Ohio’s new anti-trafficking law has yet to be applied,” the report says. “However, its convoluted definition of human trafficking, requirement of a pattern of corrupt activity and lack of labor trafficking provisions suggest the Ohio law will be somewhat more limited than the TVPA or laws passed by other states. Just as importantly, the new law does not provide for law-enforcement training, agency reporting or services for victims.”

Glossing over the fact that the prosecutors who claim to need effective legislation are the same people who effectively killed that same legislation is a disservice to the report’s own stated goals.

The report includes a resource list, a thoughtful analysis of news reports on incidents of human trafficking that aren’t identified as modern day slavery and a rather comprehensive summary of legislation at the national and state level. The report proves what many in the field have been saying for years: People don’t know that slavery is alive and well in the United States. But this important data can’t be allowed to override the facts that this is a complicated issue that calls into question the effectiveness of the institutions supposedly designed to help the most vulnerable in our society.

Slavery – the buying, selling and owning of human beings – is a despicable act, according to our history and our laws. Unfortunately, the Freedom Center’s report lacks the fortitude required to acknowledge that humanity has failed to eradicate this practice and the sense of urgency required to change that fact. The Greater Cincinnati Human Trafficking Report is an important step forward that can be seen as a springboard for further action, or its meaning can be lost to the complacency of “better than nothing” before turning our attention elsewhere.