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City Hall vs. the FOP
A decades-old drama boils over as Columbus Mayor Andy Ginther and the powerful union fight over the future of police reform in Columbus.
Columbus Monthly
No Columbus mayor has more experience working with the local police union than Mike Coleman. Every three years during his 16-year tenure, Coleman and his team bargained over a new labor contract with the Fraternal Order of Police Capital City Lodge No. 9, which represents 28 law enforcement agencies in Central Ohio, including the Columbus Division of Police.
In the early years, the former mayor says he got along fairly well with FOP leadership. The negotiations were tough but respectful. But as the years went on, and FOP leadership turned over, things changed. “There was a big part of my time as mayor where everything was a fight. I
The nonprofit helps single moms bring their children to better neighborhoods.
Steve Wartenberg
The phone call from Move to Prosper couldn’t have come at a better time for Bessie Jackson and her two sons, Braylon, 12, and Derius, 8. “We were technically homeless,” Jackson says. Her grandmother’s old, drafty, money pit of a home on the East Side where she and her boys were living had caught fire four days earlier and was uninhabitable. Jackson, a home health care worker, had lost her job.
“We were living in a hotel,” she says.
It was 2018, and Jackson had been accepted into the three-year pilot of Move to Prosper, a collaboration between Ohio State University’s city and regional planning program and community organizations. The guiding principle is that single mothers and their children do better in higher-opportunity, safer neighborhoods with better school systems. The problem: These neighborhoods are expensive and beyond the means of most low-wage earners.
Meet the Columbus Activists Converting Outrage to Action
The emerging voices forcing Central Ohio to reckon with the racism in its midst
It was not the Columbus Way.
For a city that values civility and collegiality above all, the protest at the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast was an uncomfortable experience. Two activists disrupted the January 2020 gathering a massive affair packed with Columbus movers and shakers to draw attention to the December 2018 killing of 16-year-old Julius Tate Jr. by Columbus police. Interrupting a speech by Columbus Mayor Andy Ginther, they shouted “Justice for Julius” and “he deserved to dream.”