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Upfront
LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM: CLEVELAND EDITION
EARLIER THIS MONTH, meant to be sarcastic?) contradictory statements by That the paper devoted marquee Cleveland Police Chief Calvin print space to this issue is good. Williams and Cuyahoga County One can surmise that editor Chris Sheriff Dave Schilling were frontQuinn and co. felt responsible for page news in The Plain Dealer. correcting the record, as they were
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At issue were details from the ones who ran with Williams’ the Cleveland demonstrations false assertions in the first place. for George Floyd on May 30, Williams not only fed his malarkey demonstrations which devolved to reporters at press conferences into widespread vandalism and but to the PD/cleveland.com looting after police fired pepper editorial board at a private meeting spray, tear gas, flash grenades and in the week following the protests. rubber and wooden bullets into an Quinn was initially skeptical overwhelmingly peaceful crowd of some of Williams’ more at the Cuyahoga County Justice transparent lies, for example that Center downtown. the looting and vandalism had been
Schilling’s testimony before instigated by outside agitators. Cuyahoga County Council revealed These agitators were not from that many of the assertions Cleveland, Williams stated in a Chief Williams had made about press conference; indeed, were not the protests, several of which from the state . They had traveled Mayor Frank Jackson cosigned from parts unknown to Northeast in statements from City Hall, Ohio in order to wreak havoc on were either partially or fully small businesses and to inflict embellished. bodily harm upon the region’s first
One of Williams’ wilder responders. assertions was that protesters had The ensuing arrest of two breached the Justice Center the Pennsylvanians, who could hardly afternoon of May 30. The protesters be construed as instigators — they intended, he claimed — though traveled to Cleveland to “protest how he could possibly have known watch” after things were well this is unclear — to start fires and underway — scanned to discerning release the 1,100 prisoners in the viewers like the police’s attempts to attached county jail. justify Williams’ thin geographic
Schilling clarified that no claims. protesters ever breached the Justice On cleveland.com’s news podcast Center. He also confirmed the This Week in the CLE, Chris Quinn accounts of legal observers who’d correctly noted that the “outside said that protesters threw plastic agitators” line had been used by water bottles and food at police police chiefs all across the country. officers; not, as Calvin Williams In fact, he recognized, this was had earlier claimed, rocks and a standard line that authority bricks and glass bottles and urine. figures always seem to trot out
To their credit, reporters at after incidents of unrest, generally cleveland.com have reviewed hours without evidence. As in historic of surveillance footage to confirm cases, the current claims about that Williams lied. But the paper outside agitators should have been did not call the police chief’s lies dismissed as nonsense out of hand. lies. They presented the story as And yet, in follow-up episodes, one of contradictory interpretations Quinn bought into the narrative of events, with Schilling and of crafty instigators who managed Williams representing two to provoke local opportunists into ostensibly valid sides. It’s hard to property destruction and then fled imagine a gentler headline than the in the dead of night. one that appeared on the front page On that point and on others, it’s July 2. It soft-pedaled Williams’ important to be clear that Williams blatant lies by describing a mere has lied from the start. Cleveland. appearance of confusion. (Was this com’s Cory Shaffer has done some 6 | clevescene.com | July 15-21, 2020 of the most important work in the aftermath of the protests because he has demonstrated clearly that the police narrative was false. Williams and Jackson issued a joint statement on May 31, for example, alleging that “police took enforcement actions including the deployment of munitions after multiple orders given by law enforcement to disperse were ignored .” (Italics added.)
According to multiple eyewitness accounts, including my own, this was not the case. Far from “ignoring” orders to disperse, no one had any idea that the orders were being given at all. Shaffer’s reporting documented the feeble (in fact, illegal) police efforts to broadcast these dispersal orders before officers unleashed their weapons upon the crowd.
Williams was lying about the dispersal orders and the use of munitions. He was lying about out-of-state agitators. He was lying about the breach of the Justice Center. And he was lying about the degree of provocation by protesters on armed and shielded officers.
The local story, then, should not be that there are two competing versions of events from Saturday, May 30: one from Calvin Williams and one from the County Sheriff. Cory Shaffer and others have produced a fairly airtight account of the May 30 demonstrations. It should be a no brainer to conclude, based on that solid reporting, that Williams’ account is wrong. It takes a bit more intellectual chutzpah, (though it’s equally obvious, in my view), to conclude that Williams’ account is intentionally wrong. That is to say, his lies serve a purpose.
It’s not like the honorable police chief is flubbing the odd fact this way and the odd fact that way from a messy day with lots of conflicting information. To the contrary, all of his lies have sought to achieve the same goal: to paint the Justice Center protesters as more dangerous, more violent, and more contemptuous of police authority than they actually were.
Why would he do this?
Well, one recalls that the atmosphere on the night of May 30 and the days that followed was charged with anxiety. Clevelanders were glued to their phone screens watching videos of riots across the country and were eager to believe a composed and trustworthy leader like Williams.
Insulated both by the chaos and by his reputation, Williams must have felt safe to embellish events. He must have known — and Frank Jackson might have, too — these lies would convince many Clevelanders that 1) police officers had been justified in their extravagant use
of force at the Justice Center, and 2) that a militarized curfew was necessary to stem the tide of extremism.
In a call with reporters last week, Jackson and Williams swore up and down the police chief was “not a liar.” Williams said he “had no need to lie” and claimed that anything he said was based on information he had at the time.
These strenuous denials did not rise to the level of refutation, which would have required some evidence. Neither Jackson nor Williams provided any examples to show that the Chief had not lied – an email or audio recording, say,
which would show that Williams had reason to believe protesters breached the Justice Center. If the so-called “information [Williams] had at the time” showed a breach, where is that information? How did Williams come by it? And when it was shown to be incorrect, why didn’t he immediately change his story?
It is no longer a question that Williams’ account was wrong, multiple times over. A legitimate defense would now have to include evidence of how and why he believed his erroneous assertions and was confident enough in their veracity to communicate them to the public and the press. -Sam
Allard
Alarming White Opt-Out Rates Have Left Eastside Suburban Schools Segregated at Levels Not Seen Since the 1960s
Levels of segregation in some Cleveland-area public school districts are now as high as they were before Mayor Carl Stokes was elected, according to a report from South Euclid native and academic Beth Fry.
In several inner-ring suburbs,
Photo by Emanuel Wallace
they are even worse.
But unlike the 1960s, this racial segregation is not perpetuated by a system that demands that educational buildings and services are inherently separated. Black families are not barred from attending white schools. The white students are simply leaving the local public system entirely, and at an alarming rate that’s inextricably linked with race.
Cleveland and its inner-ring suburbs have long suffered from the detrimental impacts of “white flight” to outer suburban and rural areas. Systemic and individuallevel racism and classism have cast | clevescene.com | July 15-21, 2020 7
UPFRONT “As I was growing up,” the Brush alumna said, “you could see in real time this shift of white people moving out of the community or sending their kids to private areas that are predominantly Black schools as more Black students as less valued and less deserving enrolled in the school.” of investments in high-quality Fry began to really dig into the economic, housing, and educational shifts in public school attendance opportunities. through her work several years
Still, the report, which comes ago with South Euclid’s Housing from Fry’s master’s thesis at Director, Sally Martin. As they Cornell University, indicates that dug into the lived experiences of while poor, minority public school residents, Fry and Martin heard a districts already face disinvestment common narrative that highlighted due to an unconstitutional funding the value of diversity. But only for formula that relies too heavily some. on property taxes, they also see As they dug deeper, Fry found a incredibly high levels of attrition common theme was also apparent: from the white student body. In the Many, many, many white families city of Cleveland, this white opt-out were not sending their children rate averaged around 70% between to the district schools. Indeed, 2009-2017. In the East Side suburbs, when Fry set out to research this that rate average was closer to 75%. opt-out issue further as a graduate
Fry told Scene she observed this student, she found the clear and segregation effect first-hand. obvious relationship between the loss of white students and the growing number of Black families
DIGIT WIDGET in the district. The resulting shifts, according to Fry, can clearly be understood as re-segregation. The rapid rate of resegregation suggests that many white families 114 are choosing to bypass the local public education systems in
Cleveland’s single day record for the inner-ring suburbs entirely. number of new confirmed cases They’re sending their kids of COVD-19, set Friday, July 10, to private schools, moving to after two consecutive days of 100 other suburbs, or sending their new cases. kids to schools in other, whiter communities. The data is damning: Besides 1,830 Shaker Heights, which has a white
Complaints made since March opt-out rate of 47%, all other inner20 to Cleveland’s Department of Public Health regarding social distancing, mass gatherings, ring east side suburbs have rates higher than 50%. South EuclidLyndhurst: 71%. Cleveland HeightsUniversity Heights: 85%. and mask usage. The Steelyard That’s left east side inner-ring
WalMart and TownHall were suburbs with an average 78% Black the two locations with the most enrollment, compared to 4% for complaints. west side inner ring suburbs, 67% for the city of Cleveland, and 47% for outer ring east side suburbs. 5 What mechanisms, besides a
Approximate number of suicides fear of racial threat, drives white, per day in the State of Ohio. wealthier families to spend tens
Rates of suicide have increased of thousands of dollars in private dramatically since 2010. They are education? State-wide policy highest among men and among efforts that further fuel existing those 60 and older. inequities. The EdChoice voucher program is exactly as helpful as its name 38 suggests. It is guided by a belief that systemic inequities can be
Number of homicide detectives resolved through better decision that the U.S. Dept of Justice making (a claim that has been believes Cleveland needs to fully debunked by scholars, properly investigate murders in activists, and minority groups) and the city. (Cleveland currently has offers a flawed resolution for racist 19.) policy making. The program was adopted in 8 | clevescene.com | July 15-21, 2020
2005 and intended to provide assistance, in the form of funding, for students in low-rated public districts who wanted to attend private schools. In 2013, it was expanded to include an incomebased element allowing even those in high-rated districts to access these funds, should their personal finances make them eligible. But according to a 2016 Fordham Institute report, the students who actually use the vouchers are among the less disadvantaged kids in the eligible school districts.
“This finding may be, in part, an artifact of the program’s basic design,” the report notes, “It allows private schools to retain control over admissions, and a child must gain admission into a private school before he or she can apply for a voucher. This multi-step process might be more easily navigated by relatively more advantaged families; their children might also be more likely to meet the private schools’ admissions requirements.”
Though the program has been controversial since it was established, predominantly Black and poor school districts continue to lose significant amounts of money as vouchers go to students who already exist in a network likely to set them up for middleclass success. Some of these students, like many of those in the East Side suburbs, already planned to attend non-public schools. Others are the already high-achieving, high-capacity students who do currently attend the local public school, but who have the wherewithal and the “acceptability” to be able to transition to a private school education. Many of these students use their vouchers to attend parochial schools, giving credence to those who think the program is a questionable crossing of the line between church and state. And, according to the Fordham report, “the students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”
Though predominantly Black and brown districts have been up in arms over the EdChoice program for years, last year’s reassessment of school eligibility for vouchers brought new players into the game. When schools in Solon, Avon, Avon Lake, and North Olmsted were added to the list due to a new performance metric, State Senator Matt Dolan (R- Solon) expressed his deep dislike of program’s expansion. Earlier this year, Dolan and other Republicans in Columbus proposed revisions to the EdChoice program, not because of its negative impact on poor and minority districts, but because of their concern that it would negatively impact “successful” districts. In March 2020, one year after the Cleveland Heights local newspaper reported that the local district had lost over 30% of its funding to vouchers, the state cut back the list of eligible schools to protect Dolan’s constituents.
That Solon’s predominantly white school district faced little disinvestment threat, despite its performance concerns, isn’t a surprise considering Fry’s findings. Though Fry’s work didn’t focus on vouchers, “it becomes very clear that the racial diversity is the predictor of what causes the school segregation,” she notes.
Still, the issue goes beyond public-private funding to include public funding mechanisms as well. Ohio’s open enrollment system enables students to attend a district school outside of the one they are zoned for, should both districts agree to allow it. When students attend a public school in a different district, the school they join receives funding in exchange for that attendance.
According to 2018 data from the state department of education, only twelve schools in Cuyahoga County have open enrollment, half of which are in the inner-ring suburbs, including Brooklyn, CH-UH, East Cleveland, Euclid, Garfield Heights and Shaker Heights. Students in these districts who utilize the open enrollment system attend schools in various areas around the county and state, taking much-needed dollars with them. Indeed, state reports highlight deep cuts in funding to these districts in open enrollment adjustments. And these existing concerns related to individual and intra-school funding have only been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. In May, Governor Mike DeWine announced a series of funding shifts to school districts across the state. Unsurprisingly, areas that were already struggling will see some of the most significant cuts.
Though Fry’s work focuses on the individual family’s decision to opt-out, the systemic nature of this resegregation effort is clear. White, middle and upper-income families in areas that have seen rapid demographic shifts are
incentivized to leave their local districts and the racialized fear that the school district will not provide a high-quality education, a talking point that Fry herself had to push back against as a public school attendee.
“It’s about pushing forward the idea that the education is great, the people are great, and you’re in an environment where not everyone is like you, and that in and of itself is an education,” Fry says.
As Fry noted in an interview with a South Euclid publication, “For the past 55 years, research has told us that the greatest predictor of educational achievement is socioeconomic status and parental education level. Only about a third of the achievement gap between white and Black students is explained by school quality and classroom characteristics.”
But as local schools struggle to actually address the social and economic concerns of the remaining students while hemorrhaging funds, systemic racism and disinvestment threaten that greatness, and the calendar is turned back 60 years.
“Cuyahoga County has the fifth highest black-white segregation in the nation,” Fry’s report says. “73% of Greater Cleveland’s black residents would need to move in order for the metropolitan area to achieve integration with whites.”
-Hannah Lebovits
Consent Decree Monitor Says McGrath Was Too Lenient With Officer Discipline
In a report filed with U.S. District Court Judge Solomon Oliver Monday, the Cleveland Consent Decree Monitor said former Safety Director Michael McGrath had been too lenient in doling out punishment for police misconduct.
Having reviewed 39 cases of officer discipline from March, 2018, through May, 2020, Monitor Hassan Aden said that not only did McGrath consistently impose punishments on the low end of the s0-called “disciplinary matrix,” he failed to sufficiently document his rationale for these decisions, even after being instructed to do by the monitoring team.
The report found that McGrath’s failure to consistently impose proper discipline, and to do so in a timely manner, was preventing the reestablishment of trust between the police and the community, one of the central goals of the Consent Decree.
The report was the first review of officer discipline as meted out by the Safety Director. It focused on McGrath, as opposed to Chief Calvin Williams, because in Cleveland, serious discipline (anything more than a 10-day suspension), must be authorized by the Safety Director.
The findings, in aggregate, were serious indictments of McGrath’s judgement and performance. These included McGrath’s abiding preference for suspensions over terminations, even when terminations were advised in the court-approved disciplinary matrix. McGrath also routinely chose not to impose serious discipline for integrity-related offenses.
Fully 50 percent of the cases reviewed involved deception, the report stated, yet in only three of them was an officer terminated. In all 23 of these cases, officers “either knowingly and intentionally lied to or withheld information from” Internal Affairs, the Office of Professional Standards, police command staff or a judge. In the Consent Decree’s revised disciplinary matrix, untruthfulness now carries a presumption of termination.
“Going forward,” the memo stated, “the issues raised by these cases suggest that substantial progress must still be made by the City to achieve compliance with the Settlement Agreement with respect to accountability, transparency and officer discipline.”
Accountability has long been an issue for the police department Michael McGrath oversaw as Chief and then as Safety Director. Mayor Frank Jackson, however, recently defended his promotion of McGrath in 2014, insisting that without McGrath, in the aftermath of the police killings of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, (#137shots), there would have been no police accountability at all.
McGrath resigned abruptly last month due to what he called “personal and unavoidable circumstances.” He has been replaced, in an interim capacity, by Karrie Howard, formerly a city prosecutor who retains close ties to Mayor Frank Jackson. -Sam Allard
scene@clevescene.com @clevelandscene
Mail-in Voting is Bad for Democracy. And More Importantly, Me.
I ONCE CONSIDERED joining the Marines, then realized I could better serve my country as a Civil War reenactor. If you saw me in my Stonewall Jackson outfit, you’d know why the Daughters of the Confederacy email blast once cited my “stirring performance” as “the finest of the day, marred only by repeated falls from his horse.”
I mention this to establish my patriotic bona fides. For I come to you with a grave warning: We’re about to witness the greatest voting fraud since “Brokeback Mountain” won three Oscars.
Agents of the radical left – like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine – are conspiring to steal the coming election. Their weapon of mass destruction: expanding mail-in voting, a scourge rising in socialist hotbeds from Kansas to Nebraska, Montana to South Dakota.
Their cover story is so-called “safety.” They argue that the coronavirus makes in-person voting lethal, that no one should have to die to pick the next Geauga County auditor. But their real plan is clear: Mail allows more people to vote. Which favors candidates I don’t like. Which can only mean massive fraud.
Yes, I know what the so-called “facts” say: That voter fraud is as common as getting impregnated by a wolverine. That even President Trump’s own Commission on Election Integrity could find no evidence of fraud.
But that’s not the point. The point is that if you just keep saying something over and over, it becomes true without needing facts. And the mail – while perfectly fine for such non-essential matters as tax returns, paychecks, driver’s licenses, bank statements, passports, and Social Security cards – is no place to hold an election.
First off, nobody even knows how to use the mail anymore. What if my buddy Jim thinks he’s redeeming an oil change coupon, only to find out he voted a straight Green Party ticket?
Second off, it makes the election a “safe space,” putting the fate of the republic in the hands of the weak.
My 90-year-old grandpa votes by mail. He claims he fought in Korea, even though he uses a walker. Are we supposed to believe he joined the charge at Inchon when he can only move 30-feet an hour? Liar.
Then there’s the diabetics and cancer survivors who complain about their so-called “compromised immune systems.” I have seasonal allergies, and you don’t hear me whining about it.
If single moms can’t get off work or find a babysitter, they shouldn’t get knocked up or have a job in the first place.
As I’m sure we can all agree, government should be run like a business. And businesses know how to deal with malcontents. Have you ever called AT&T customer service? You wait on hold for 30 minutes before being disconnected. That’s how you weed out the snowflakes who aren’t serious about matters of state or getting their internet fixed.
I could see why mail voting might be useful, like if I broke my legs, which is what the guys at work have threatened to do if I don’t stop talking about Fortnite. But what good is it when it only helps other people?
It’s not fair that I diligently participate in democracy, only to get out-voted. If people who don’t matter can cast ballots, what will become of our great leaders like Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, and that guy from Tennessee who thinks abortion is murder except when it involves his mistresses?
If Mike DeWine and the radical left want to rig an election, they should at least have the self-respect to do it the right way. Like wiping out voter registrations. Or closing polling sites. Or making the lines three hours long in black neighborhoods. Or gerrymandering districts so they look like a sea dragon. On November 3, you’ll find me at the polls in my Stonewall Jackson dress grays, sword glimmering under the fluorescent lights, the old ladies trembling with reverence. A patriot doesn’t vote by mail. A patriot stands to be counted. -Pete Kotz
