POLICE DIDN'T KILL SUSPECT

The Facts Do Not Justify Attributing This Death To Officers' Misconduct

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 only seeking 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. 30th beating, captured by a camera in a police cruiser,
has been played on television nonstop, 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 only 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 only 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, chose to use 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 the coroner: Nathaniel Jones committed suicide.