Thursday, June 18, 2015
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The president of the Trumbull County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is calling last month’s Operation Warren Shield anti-drug effort part of an “escalation in the war on drugs” that used racial profiling.
McCoy alleged that “only minority communities” were affected by the two-day effort headed by the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
McCoy said she and other NAACP members stationed themselves along West Market Street near Tod Avenue and Main Avenue Southwest during the operation and observed a large number of people being pulled over by police. That neighborhood has the highest percentage of minorities in the city, she said.
“Our office took over 50 complaints of people being pulled over for no reason. People were searched and handcuffed,” McCoy said. “If it’s going to be a sweep of the city, it should be a sweep of the whole city,” she said.
Lt. Brian Holt, commander of the Southington Post of the patrol, who was at the head of the operation, said the operation was carried out evenly across the four quadrants of the city, not just the southwest area.
“You could ask any citizen of Warren who was by their house in those two days. They could probably tell you how they also saw an inordinate amount of law enforcement in the community,” Holt said.
The highway patrol’s computer-assisted dispatching system tracks the race and age of every person the patrol comes into contact with. A statistical analysis from those two days showed that 404 black people were the subject of traffic stops and 607 white people.
The tracking system is there “to ensure we are not racially profiling,” Holt said.
The operation, which resulted in 48 criminal arrests, 43 of them drug-related, came about because Gov. John Kasich asked the patrol to take action after the Trumbull County Coroner’s Office released statistics indicating that Trumbull County is headed for a record number of drug-overdose deaths in 2015, Holt said.
McCoy, meanwhile, said this is the time to address “officially sanctioned, racial profiling and racially motivated violence against and humiliation of black men and boys.”
“We believe the time is right to leverage the heightened national attention created by the Trayvon Martin shooting to raise awareness and create dialogue about the problem of facial profiling nationwide,” she said.
The press release says it was submitted by McCoy and Dr. Jerome Reide, NAACP Midwest regional director.