The panel drafting new Columbus City Council residential districts will convene a series of eight virtual public meetings starting this week and carrying on into late June to educate the public and gain input from residents, the city announced Monday. This process needs to be as open and transparent as possible, Council member Emmanuel Remy, who helped oversee the panel s creation for council, said in the written statement. I m eager to advocate that residents across Columbus participate and engage with this exciting process, as the future of our City Council will be determined through these maps.
The meetings, all of which will take place on Wednesday evenings, will engage residents in this map-drawing process, the announcement said.
Area political and civil-rights leaders said they would welcome an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into racial bias by Columbus police that has been formally requested by Mayor Andrew J. Ginther and City Attorney Zach Klein
But the head of the local Fraternal Order of Police said the request for a DOJ probe is just another example of officers being relentlessly demonized by politicians.
Ginther and Klein cosigned a letter sent Tuesday requesting the DOJ conduct a review of Columbus police operations identifying any and all racial biases in policing efforts and offering findings and coordinated solutions for reform.
The hearse that circled the streets surrounding Columbus City Hall Monday evening had no dead to transport.
The Cadillac, in fact, was nowhere near large enough to accommodate all the people those in the procession had come to mourn all of them killed by Columbus police.
As an estimated 50 cars drove in a loop blaring their horns, a group of faith leaders assembled outside City Hall to call for an end to the fatal shootings that they say were the result of aggressive if not racist policing practices. We re standing against policing without compassion. We re standing against policing without mercy. We re standing against policing without grace, said the Rev. Edward Lewis, pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church on the Near East Side. We re standing against policing that is bereft of humanity.
I wish to hell it hadn t happened.
Ma Khia Bryant s death after being shot by a Columbus police officer on Tuesday afternoon has become the latest in a series of high-profile shootings by police across the country.
Activists and city leaders alike called for reform, both with police policy and in efforts to curb the rising violence in Columbus.
As more information was being released about the shooting, which occurred around 4:45 p.m. Tuesday on the 3100 block of Legion Lane, Ohio State University students were staging a sit-in on campus about about 500 students marched down High Street.
Bryant died at a nearby hospital on Tuesday after she was shot by an officer who was responding to a call about an attempted stabbing.