The Akron Organizing Collaborative is right to demand answers about the actions of two Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers. Watch the video from the dashboard camera in their cruiser, and the impression is plain: On Monday night, they turned something routine into a violent episode, setting a police dog on one of the men they eventually arrested.
This kind of behavior on the part of law enforcement officers, including instances resulting in the deaths of unarmed individuals, spurred Gov. John Kasich, Mike DeWine, the state attorney general, John Born, the director of the state Department of Public Safety, and others to form teams, task forces and committees to promote best practices in policing across the state. Of late, local police departments have been hustling to meet a March deadline for adopting new statewide standards covering deadly force, body cameras and other actions.
The actions of the troopers at Bye Street and Bacon Avenue in Akron reinforce the need, and the required vigilance in ensuring that better policing takes hold even when and where it may be most resisted.
The troopers spotted Samuel Tolbert driving without a rear license plate on his car. The video hardly suggests that Tolbert was fleeing. He pulled into the driveway of his cousin, Dannie Oliver. Yet, as Tolbert gets out of the car, appearing confused, a trooper starts shouting, as if determined to escalate the situation.
The trooper shouts conflicting demands, don’t move and “get the dog,” a family dog wandering into the scene. The arrest comes after a trooper draws a stun gun.
Meanwhile, Oliver, who has been capturing the episode via his phone and Facebook Live, goes to the car to retrieve Tolbert’s identification. A trooper shouts for Oliver to get out of the car. If Oliver has been mouthy, his behavior far from dictated that 20 seconds later he face an attacking police dog, biting his leg, the injuries landing him at the hospital.
Is all of this reflective of the training state troopers receive? It was dismaying to read in the reporting of Nick Glunt, a Beacon Journal staff writer, that a spokesman for the Highway Patrol was confident the actions of the troopers would be found justified.
No surprise that Tolbert and Oliver are black, the incident fitting into a well-established and disturbing national pattern of police misbehavior toward people of color. That isn’t to deny the obvious difficulty, tension and risk in police work, or that officers encounter bad actors. Put another way, officers and their commanders have a big interest in building trust, part of which derives from handling things as the actual circumstances deem fit, tapping skills for de-escalation.
The State Highway Patrol has pledged to investigate the episode. That effort should be full, transparent and as swift as reasonably allowed. This should have the governor’s attention, not to mention John Born at Public Safety, the videos revealing actions so at odds with the policies they rightly have been advocating.
For Mayor Dan Horrigan, there is good reason to demand that the Highway Patrol perform at a higher standard if it is going to make routine traffic stops in the city of Akron.