Last year, the city of Lakewood, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland, paid $507,500 to settle a lawsuit filed by the owners of an apartment complex that hosted a church-operated re-entry program for formerly incarcerated youth. Young African-American program residents living in the Hidden Village apartment complex complained that local police officers were routinely harassing them. Some incidents were captured on video by the apartment complex’s owners. Here’s some of the law enforcement behavior listed in the legal complaint:
In one incident, two participants “were given tickets for jaywalking and astronomical fines for it.” In another, police stopped a participant for failure to attach a license plate to his bicycle. In yet another, police falsely accused a program official of helping clients deal drugs. Police also repeatedly cited (and eventually threatened to arrest) participants for walking on railroad tracks near Hidden Village. … In May 2007, a team of Lakewood officials—police, an officer in SWAT attire, a canine unit, fire department workers, health department workers—visited Hidden Village, unannounced and without a search warrant, for the purpose of conducting what the defendants term a “joint inspection.” The visit left residents “intimidated” and “afraid.”
Roughly 87 percent of Lakewood residents are white, while just over seven percent are African Americans. The Hidden Village apartments are less than two miles from the Cudden Recreation Center in Cleveland proper, the area where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by police in November of last year. Lakewood is a mostly middle-class suburb known for its quaint houses: Homeowners compete for best design during the city’s annual “Keep Lakewood Beautiful” contest. Black youth looking to improve their lives after juvenile detention didn’t seem to fit into the city’s overall aesthetic ambitions.
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/design/...ice-violence/393845/]
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