John Crawford

Death next neighborhood: Dayton mass shooting

Before they built US 35 in the sixties, my neighborhood, South Park, was connected to the next neighborhood north of us, The Oregon District. Now there is a slash, like a DMZ, called a highway that separates us. It was Dayton’s first “Historic District” and got about a 5 year head start on my neighborhood Read More

Redefine police.

My Facebook feed is full of videos of police acting badly. The news is full of stories of police brutality, aggression, militarization, racial bias. Our prisons are full of people with mental illness, addiction, poverty and the worst pox in America- being black. The system is broken, expensive, and fundamentally flawed. In Ohio, you don’t Read More

Retraining America, not just the police

If you and I have similar friends on Facebook, hardly a day goes by without seeing an example of a cop behaving badly caught on film. Yet, despite film of the choke-hold killing of  Eric Garner, for what couldn’t amount to more than a misdemeanor crime, the cop walks. https://youtu.be/_OxM9pWGsaQ There is the video of Read More