Cincinnati: Killings at 26-year high

As you read this article, we recommend you keep these words at the front of your mind: "Ohio's gun control laws are a colossal failure."

Former police officer's son 75th victim in city

By Jane Prendergast
The Cincinnati Enquirer

(edited for space- click here to read the entire story in the Cincinnati Enquirer)

BOND HILL - A day after a bullet made his stepson Cincinnati's 75th homicide victim of 2003, former assistant police chief Ron Twitty was making plans for two things: A funeral and a new community effort to stop the city's escalating violence.

Cincinnati has seen its most murderous year in 26 years. And for the fifth straight year has recorded more killings than in the year before.

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On Tuesday, Twitty joined Mayor Charlie Luken and Cincinnati City Council member David Pepper in their increasing concern for the city's killing pace and in their calls to mobilize community members to fight the trend.

Shannon, 30, was shot a little after 8 p.m. Monday in an SUV outside the Carolina Avenue house where his children live. His parents spoke to him two hours before, when he told them he was going to get a haircut. They called him then, Twitty said, to find out if he knew the victim in a homicide that occurred just five hours earlier and three blocks away. Daniel White, 21, of Winton Terrace, was found shot to death in an alley across the street from Bond Hill Elementary School Monday afternoon.

Twitty said Shannon had made some unfortunate choices in his life. He pleaded no contest in August to drug possession and was fined $100. He was put on probation in 2001 for possession of marijuana.

In the last two months, Shannon had attended the funerals of two friends, both of whom were also shot to death in Bond Hill.

No easy fix

Luken called the rise in killings a "call to action."

"I don't think we can accept the explanation that sometimes the number goes up and sometimes it goes down," he said Tuesday. "But there's no quick and easy fix here."

Luken said he would meet in the next few days with Streicher and City Manager Valerie Lemmie to discuss ways to curb homicides in 2004. He also said he is working to gather community leaders, clergy and others through the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission to talk about how residents can help decrease killings.

"I'd certainly love to see us do something new,'' said Capt. Vince Demasi, commander of the police department's criminal investigations section. "But I don't know what that would be.''

Pepper, chairman of council's Law and Public Safety Committee, will announce Tuesday a schedule of neighborhood "safety summits" he hopes will help mobilize residents into working more with police. He'll start in Over-the-Rhine, the West End, Avondale, Northside and Price Hill.

Based on Cincinnati's population of 331,285 in the 2000 census, the city's homicide rate jumped more in the last three years than the rate of killings in larger and historically more dangerous cities.

Just over 40 percent of Cincinnati's 75 killings remain unsolved.

Commentary:
According to the FBI, clearance rates for homicides -- through an arrest or other resolution -- across the nation was 64% in 2002. In Wichita, Kansas (a city with 13,000 more people than Cincinnati), that city's finest hit an a record this year - a 100% clearance rate. The number of homicides was less than 1/3 that of Cincinnati's.

While Kansas, like Ohio, currently has no method of allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed firearms, Kansas state law allows carry of a loaded handgun in a car without any license whatsoever! A total of 20 states allow a loaded handgun in a car without any license whatsoever.

Were this type of law proposed here in Ohio, the gun abolition lobby would most certainly claim Ohioans would be more prone to drive-by shootings, road rage incidents, etc. Yet, again, Wichita has experienced less than 1/3 the number of homicides as Cincinnati, and the police managed to catch ALL of the bad guys in 2003, while only 40% have been found in Cincinnati.

Along with recent news from Michigan which confirmed that state's crime rate dropped 10.5% in the wake of passage of a condealed carry law (while Ohio's rose 5%), Kansas' experience with allowing citizens unrestricted access to a firearm in their personal vehicle proves yet again that arming law-abiding citizens poses no danger to society, and that Ohio's gun control laws are, indeed, a colossal failure.