Rap sheet of unarmed black driver killed in Ohio tells tale

Amber Hunt | The Cincinnati Enquirer

Show Caption Hide Caption DuBose fiancée on killer cop: 'Feel sorry for him' The fiancée of Sam DuBose, a black man killed by a white police officer, speaks out about her partner's death. She has choice words for the policeman involved.

CINCINNATI — DaShonda Reid lost track of how many times her boyfriend called her from jail through the years.

"I'm in a situation," Sam DuBose would say. Reid wouldn't ask for details.

Instead, she would put her training as a paralegal to work, make some phone calls, figure out where he was being held and how much money it would cost to bring him home.

The Enquirer analyzed DuBose's lengthy Hamilton County record and found a pattern: He would be pulled over for a minor traffic offense — say, not wearing a seat belt or speeding. That would lead to facing citations or misdemeanor charges, for which he would be ordered to pay a fine before being sent on his way.

The stops added up: DuBose, who was shot and killed by a University of Cincinnati police officer during a July 19 traffic stop, previously had been cited or arrested 90 times. Since the late 1980s, when he began racking up arrests as a teenager, he paid fines totaling nearly $12,000.

But another pattern emerged as well: DuBose never had a weapon during any of his police encounters. He never was accused of fleeing when pulled over for a traffic violation.

The only violent charges leveled against him — two in more than 20 years — ended in an acquittal and a dismissal.

For the average Cincinnatian, having so many run-ins with law enforcement in a lifetime seems unfathomable. But black motorists in America are about 31% more likely to be pulled over than white drivers, and 23% more likely than Hispanic drivers, according to the most recent Police-Public Contact Survey from the Justice Department.

In DuBose's case, more than 50 of his 90 police run-ins began with traffic stops, including the one that ended with Officer Ray Tensing, 25, firing a bullet into his head. The fatal encounter began because DuBose didn't have a front license plate on the car he was driving.

"These traffic stops for minor offenses accomplish nothing," said John Roman, a senior fellow with the Urban Institute who studies policing and hopes that, if nothing else, DuBose's death might lead to some policy changes.

Court records show that DuBose's vice was marijuana. Since his teenage years, his record is spotted with some 25 marijuana-related arrests, usually resulting from police finding a baggie in his pocket during a traffic stop.

One trafficking charge in 2005 was hefty enough to land DuBose in the state prison system, but the other offenses were for having fewer than 100 grams on him for personal use.

Reid acknowledged that DuBose years ago sold marijuana, but she said those days were behind him.

His prison stint had set him straight, she said. These days, he made his money in his recording studio.

DuBose once ran from an officer and eventually was found in the crawl space of a basement, according to his records in 2004.

That arrest cost him $78 in fines.

But Reid said her 43-year-old boyfriend finally was maturing and wanted to set a better example for his children, so he tried to stay out of trouble.

Court records show his efforts were working: After a peak year of nine police encounters in 1998, he had slowed down to three apiece in 2011 and 2012 — mostly for driving with a suspended license.

None of the citations in 2012 stuck, court records show. Nor did the charge in his last police interaction from August 2013, when Reid said an argument in their Springdale, Ohio, home was blown out of proportion. The assault charge in that incident was dismissed.

For the next 23 months, DuBose's record was cleaner than it had been his entire adult life.

Then came July 19.

Whether DuBose's arrests through the years were a worthwhile use of police resources is up for debate. In a guest column for The Enquirer, former Cincinnati police officer John Burke said, "Many of these so-called 'chicken-crap' stops result in seizures of contraband and felony arrests."

Burke, who heads the Warren County Drug Task Force, points to the license-plate violation that led to the arrest of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

"Trust me. Law-abiding citizens do not want officers to cease making stops based on minor violations," Burke said.

But Roman of the Urban Institute said these types of stops should be to find violent criminals, not just to hit non-violent offenders with thousands of dollars in fines.

"It's a lot of money spent perpetuating a cycle," Roman said. "There are fines associated with these low-level offenses, which can cause someone to commit another low-level offense to get the revenue to pay the fine.

"It makes you question is that really how we want to spend our money and our time?" he said. "Do we just want to harass non-violent offenders?"

Cincinnati Police already asked and answered that question with a resounding "no" in the years since the city's 2001 riots.

The Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement, which tackled police protocols here that helped fuel the racial unrest, has been hailed nationwide as a success. Pundits pointed to it as a model to emulate in Ferguson, Mo., where a year ago Sunday a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man, sparking riots.

In Cincinnati, annual reports indicate that race isn't a factor in traffic stops anymore. Incidents of police use of force dropped nearly 70% between 1999 and 2014, and resident complaints dropped 42%.

But that's Cincinnati. Tensing worked for the University of Cincinnati.

There, use of force skyrocketed just this year. The department reported 16 use-of-force incidents so far this year – a 700% increase from the two incidents reported in all of 2014.

The university has hired 32 new police officers in the past year, nearly doubling its ranks. It has shifted its focus from campus patrols to more aggressive traffic enforcement in city neighborhoods bordering the campus.

University of Cincinnati cops have issued more traffic tickets so far this year than in all of 2014, and more than three times as many tickets as in 2012, according to an Enquirer analysis of data from UC researchers.

The traffic emphasis has hit black motorists especially hard because they received more tickets than white drivers and were arrested more often as a result of traffic stops. Tensing gave 81% of the tickets he wrote this year to blacks.

As university officers spread out more onto city streets, they were without the benefit of the collaborative agreement, training and institutional knowledge that Cincinnati officers had after the riots.

That could change: The university is considering joining the agreement, and President Santa Ono of the University of Cincinnati told reporters that officers from the two departments are working in tandem as their patrolling issues are sorted.

To criminologist and former police officer David Klinger, what happened between DuBose and Tensing is counter to both police training and common sense. He has watched the video captured by Tensing's body camera, which shows that after talking for about 2 minutes, DuBose turned the ignition key and started his car after Tensing told him to step out.

"I didn't even do nothing," DuBose said. Tensing reached into the car with his left hand and pointed the gun at DuBose's head with his right, firing a fatal shot seconds after the car started.

Tensing's family said in a letter to The Enquirer that the since-fired officer "needed to protect himself."

"Why in the world would he pull his gun out at that point?" said Klinger, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "It literally defies logic."

The response comes down to training, Klinger said.

"Why do some police officers do foolish things?" he said. "They're either not following their training, or they're not being trained properly. That's what we need answered."