“No matter how much money you have, no matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you — being black in America is tough”. These were the words of popular African-American athlete and basketball player for the Cleveland Cavaliers, LeBron James, after his home in Los Angeles was vandalised prior to a National Basketball Association finals game in Oakland in early June. James is considered an icon in his home State of Ohio — he was born in the city Akron, not far from Cleveland, where he plays for the Cavaliers as their lynchpin. Cleveland, and the state of Ohio in general, is also “Ground Zero” for acts of police violence against African-Americans, Professor Ronnie Dunn of the Department of Urban Studies at Cleveland State University, told the The Hindu.

The most prominent killing in Cleveland was that of 12 year-old-Tamir Rice, who was shot dead by a police officer while carrying a toy gun in a city park in November 2014. The officer, Timothy Loehmann, and his partner, were left off the hook by a grand jury which ruled that the evidence did not indicate any criminal conduct by them. The killings of Rice and several other African-Americans triggered the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which began as a hashtag on social media, before developing legs as a social movement.

Protests and unrest in Cleveland finally forced the State of Ohio to come up with an institutional response. Governor John Kasich set up the Ohio Collaborative Community-Police Advisory Board in April 2015, after activists and academicians came up with recommendations on public safety. Prof. Dunn was one of the members, who were to oversee the implementation of those recommendations on setting standards for State police agencies. The Collaborative recently published a report on the implementation of two recommendations relating to proper use of force and recruitment of officers. It is yet to submit on other recommendations such as bias-free policing.

More to be done

Prof. Dunn said the Collaborative was a good start, but much more needed to be done, especially on the issue of racial bias. Cleveland is ethnically segregated and his research found that African-American residents were subject to disproportionately higher racial profiling and bias by law enforcement agencies. Beyond piecemeal reform measures to address policing, he asserted that the real issues were to do with the politics in Cleveland and its inability to overcome institutionalised racism in the city, despite having a historically vibrant African-American political leadership and being a Democratic party citadel.

Following the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President, the federal government has sought to overturn several measures put forth by the Obama administration to bring scrutiny on police violence. Here’s where the role of movements such as the BLM that seek to channel anger against police violence into changing the political culture has become prominent. Cleveland’s BLM chapter is still in its infancy, said Angela Woodson, a long time activist belonging to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Activists who protested police violence have now sought to bring this issue to the political agenda, by encouraging black residents in the city to elect representatives committed to addressing racial biases. Basheer Jones, a candidate for the city council, told The Hindu that today’s new social movements such as the BLM were seeking to revive the activism visible in the civil rights movement of the 1960s in their own ways. “The bold public positions taken by athletes such as LeBron James was helpful in promoting the cause.”