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By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor in chief. Coleman trained for 17 years as a reporter with the Call and Post Newspaper and is an investigative and political reporter with a background in legal and scientific reporting. She is also a former 15-year public school biology teacher.
CLEVELAND, Ohio-Ward 6 Councilman Blaine Griffin, a former executive director of the community relations board under current mayor Frank Jackson tapped by Cleveland City Council President Keven Kelley to lead city council's safety committee in place of former councilman Matt Zone, held his first safety committee meeting Wednesday over Zoom.
Chief of Police Calvin Williams and Safety Director Karrie Howard also participated, Jackson, Williams, Howard and Griffin all of whom are Black.
A former west side councilman, Zone resigned from city council last month to take a job with Western Reserve Land Conservancy.
The safety committee chair, who oversees the city's safety forces for city council but has no direct authority over them, is a highly sought after committee assignment.
Griffin's new committee assignment comes as the city remains a party to a consent decree for police reforms with the U.S. Department of Justice, which came about in 2015 following questionable Cleveland police killings of unarmed Blacks, including Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell in 2012, and Tanisha Anderson and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in November of 2014, all of them shot and killed by police but Anderson, 38.
Anderson was slammed to the concrete and killed by police at her east side family home after the family called for mental heath assistance.
Cleveland is a largely Black major American city of some 385,000 people.
Griffin said at this week's zoom meeting that the safety committee will push for more transparency from Mayor Frank Jackson's administration, a response that follows demands by east side council persons like Basheer Jones and Joe Jones, both Black and both new to council since the election in 2017 for a decrease in inner city crime, for more detectives on the streets and more diversity in the rank and file of Cleveland police.
Council members also complain that they cannot get accurate information from Chief Williams and the mayor's law enforcement leadership team in general, including how many detectives there really are, or facts on homicides and increased violence in the impoverished city.
“One thing that I will not do as a chairman is allow the administration to come to the table and not have answers for what you want.” Griffin said.
With a crime rate of 59 per one thousand residents, Cleveland has one of the highest crime rates in America and is up more than 55 percent in 2020 during a pandemic in comparison to 2019.
Just last month, an 83-year-old Black woman was found dead of a gunshot wound after someone fired shots into her east side apartment.
A 15-year-old Cleveland teen was gunned down Wednesday on the city's largely Black east side after leaving a community meeting held at the Boys & Girls Club in the King Kennedy public housing complex about the shooting of Arthur Keith, a 19-year-old man killed on Nov 13 by a Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority officer.
The tragic shooting death last Wednesday of Anthony Hughes Jr., a popular member of King Kennedy’s Boys & Girls Club of Northeast Ohio and student at James F. Rhodes High School, has upset Cleveland's Black community, and it raises questions about safety in a city that has, in recent years, been repeatedly deemed the most dangerous major city in the country to live in.
No arrests have been made as police search for Hughes' killer, or killers.
Activists and Black leaders want answers behind Hughes' killing, and that of Keith.
Mayor Jackson has said that the shooting of Keith occurred after a CMHA officer allegedly ordered Keith out of a van with Illinois license plates and that investigators suspected his involvement in a recent shooting. A handgun was reportedly recovered by police.
But community activists and Keith's family members, including his father, Scott Hawkins Sr., say the mayor's findings on the shooting death of Keith are suspect and want a more detailed investigation of the incident.
“He’s a nice guy, everybody loved him," Keith's father has said.
Meanwhile, a 13-year-old boy was riding in a car with two older teenagers when he was shot and killed Monday evening during a suspected drug deal, police said, the 11th fatal shooting death this year of a child under 18.
Currently there are more than 135 homicides in Cleveland so far this year, up from 133 this time last year, and Cleveland has, in recent years, been repeatedly deemed one of the most dangerous major American city's in which to live.
A four-term mayor, Jackson says the stats and reports on violence in the city that the media are highlighting are mostly hype and that the city is less dangerous than it was decades ago.
Jackson is up for reelection in 2021 and all of the 17 city council are up for grabs next year.
The mayor has said that he will announce early next year whether he will seek a historic fifth term.
