NOT A CASE FOR THE DISHONOR ROLL

The coroner says he called it homicide only because he had no
choice.

Under Ohio law, he explained, his only other options were to
categorize the death as accidental, natural or suicide. None of those,
he felt, adequately accounted for how Nathaniel Jones died -- i.e.,
after being beaten with nightsticks wielded by Cincinnati police officers.

The officers say they were seeking only to subdue the 41-year-old
black man after he began acting strangely -- dancing and barking out
numbers -- and then became combative during an encounter outside a
fast-food restaurant.

Video of the Nov. 30 beating, captured by a camera in a police
cruiser, has been played on television non-stop, heightening racial
tension in a city where tension doesn't need the help -- a city that,
two years ago, endured days of street violence after police shot to
death an unarmed black man. Last week's ruling by Coroner Carl Parrott
appears to have splashed gasoline on this latest fire.

This, even though the doctor took pains to stress that the term
"homicide" was not meant to suggest "hostile or malign intent."
Jones, he pointed out, bore only superficial bruises on his lower body
from the beating.

Far more important in determining a cause of death were the facts that
he weighed 350 pounds, had heart disease and high blood pressure, and
was on cocaine and PCP. The coroner ruled that Jones died, in essence,
because his heart couldn't take the exertion.

Those caveats aside, Cincinnati police are infuriated by the word
"homicide." Local activists, on the other hand, say it bolsters
their contention that Jones was just the latest black man brutalized
by police.

I understand their anger. My problem is that I also understand PCP,
having lived in Los Angeles during the years that city became the
epicenter of its illicit production and use.

PCP is phencyclidine hydrochloride, an animal tranquilizer we knew as
angel dust. We also knew that people who were "dusted" might dance
naked in the middle of busy intersections or hurl themselves from
skyscrapers believing they could fly. PCP users sometimes seemed to
possess a freakish strength, an impression created by the fact that
the drug leaves some people in a violent, agitated state while
simultaneously desensitizing them to pain.

That would be a dangerous combination in a man who weighed 120 pounds.
Consider it in a man Jones' size and it offers a certain context for
the images captured on that video. Might even induce a fair observer
to give police the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, where police and black people are concerned, many would say
there can be no benefit because there is no doubt: the police are
racist, the police are unjust, the police do not value black life as
highly as white. End of story.

Except that it's not. For all the many valid reasons black people have
to distrust the police, it's a mistake to automatically presume
malfeasance on the part of every officer in every encounter. To do
that is to put the good cop on the defensive and give the bad cop no
incentive to change. Worse, it undercuts black moral authority,
undermines the argument it purports to advance, makes anger seem not
righteous, but reflexive.

The facts as they stand simply do not justify adding this case to the
dishonor roll of police misconduct. Jones did not have his head broken
like Rodney King. He was not sodomized with a stick like Abner Louima.
He was not executed in a doorway like Amadou Diallo. He was, in the
final analysis, a morbidly obese man with a diseased heart and high
blood pressure who chose to use cocaine and PCP and then, under their
influence, chose to slug it out with cops.

Which is why, from where I sit, there is no choice but to reach a
very different conclusion than that of the coroner: Nathaniel Jones
committed suicide.