Once again, we have a police shooting that ended in the death of a suspect.
And once again, we have local authorities who believe they can choose how, when and where to release videos that could show the public what happened and what led up to it.
That’s unacceptable.
Those videos should have been released as soon as possible after Cincinnati police received them. Instead, Mayor John Cranley and Chief Eliot Isaac said they received a subpoena from Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters for the videos, preventing their release.
So for more than 30 hours after the fatal shooting, the public had to accept the word of the Cincinnati police and mayor that an officer was attacked by a knife-wielding robbery suspect while the officer was still in his patrol car. And that the shooting was justified.
We don’t have any reason, at this point, to doubt their statements. But neither should we need to rely solely on those statements when the incident was captured on multiple surveillance videos.
Isaac or Cranley could have released the videos that were in the city’s possession. A subpoena would not have prevented that.
And Deters did not have the authority to order the city not to release the videos, says Cincinnati First Amendment attorney Jack Greiner. Deters could have requested it, but not ordered it, Greiner says.
Deters, by jumping into the fray, gave us a disturbing reminder of how he views these videos. He apparently sees them not as public records, but as tools to use as he sees fit for his purposes.
In the Samuel Dubose fatal shooting, Deters refused to release a police bodycam video for nine days, until he arranged a news conference to release it, a news conference that he led and narrated.
In full disclosure, WCPO and other local news organizations have sued Deters over the release of bodycam videos. That case is waiting for the Ohio Supreme Court to make a decision.
We believe bodycam videos are vitally important pieces of public information that can prove exactly what happened in these types of incidents. If law enforcement only releases them when they want to, it taints the transparency that body cameras were, in part, created to improve.
But the videos from the weekend shooting were not bodycam videos. They were surveillance videos that are usually routinely released to the public. The delay on the part of city officials and the intervention by the county prosecutor were both unacceptable.
Thankfully, that delay did not lead to other problems in our community. But their quick release is essential to public trust.
