The City of Akron attorneys fighting the civil rights lawsuit over the 2024 killing of Jazmir Tucker by an Akron police officer argue the killing was justified and deny that the Akron Police Department has systemic issues with race and use of force. They also claim the Tucker family attorneys’ portrayal of an overtly racist newsletter created by Akron police officers in the late 1990s is an attempt to “create a false narrative of racially biased policing on those long since passed events.”
The city’s lawyers, responding to the family’s lawsuit, wrote that “the loss of a young life is always tragic,” but “the shooting death of Jazmir Tucker was a reasonable use of force.”
The Cleveland law firm representing the city, city officials, Officer Davon Fields and others in the Akron Police Department connected to the shooting filed a response two months after lawyers for Tucker’s mother, Ashley Green, began the litigation.
The complaint, filed days before the Thanksgiving Day anniversary of Tucker’s death, alleged that Tucker’s killing was unconstitutional and made possible by the city’s and police department’s acceptance of systemic misconduct and racial bias within the department, lax oversight and the “warrior-style training” of Fields and other officers.
The city’s answer to the complaint denied all allegations of wrongdoing, as is typical in initial responses to civil lawsuits, and stated the suit should be barred by qualified immunity. That is a legal doctrine protecting public employees from liability for most actions on the job, and civil rights advocates argue it creates an unfairly high barrier to accountability and justice for victims of misconduct.
The killing of Jazmir Tucker
Officer Davon Fields shot Tucker twice in the back and once in the arm with his personally owned rifle after Tucker attempted to run away from him in front of Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts on East Avenue.
Fields, in an interview with state criminal investigators that a city attorney had unprecedented access to, said he shot Tucker because a bend in Tucker’s elbow indicated he was reaching for a gun to shoot other officers who were arriving at the scene in their cruiser. But Tucker’s gun was zipped away in a jacket pocket, a revelation discovered only after officers waited more than seven minutes to approach the dying teenager.
Prosecutors from Mahoning County presented evidence gathered by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation to a local grand jury in October, which declined to indict Fields for murder, the only charge prosecutors put up for consideration.
Akron’s body camera policy
The lawsuit highlighted that neither Fields nor his rookie partner turned on their body cameras, which were only activated automatically when responding officers reached the scene, too late to meaningfully capture the moments before Fields opened fire.
The department’s body camera policy requires officers to manually activate them when taking action unless taking the time to do so would be unsafe. Fields, in his interview with BCI, detailed how he unracked his rifle from a center console, got out of his cruiser and attempted to sneak up on Tucker as he was walking away. Fields said he did not activate his camera and was vague about whether he attempted to actually do so, and he complained about how dirt can get on the unit and buttons can fall off.
The Cleveland law firm representing the city — Mazanec, Raskin & Ryder Co. — claims in the lawsuit response that Fields and his rookie partner didn’t violate the APD’s body camera policy.
After the grand jury process, Fields is currently under internal investigation to determine if he violated APD policies, such as body camera procedures and use of force. The city’s spokesperson confirmed Fields remains under investigation, and the attorney who filed the city’s response declined to comment about how he determined Fields didn’t violate department policy.
Signal 44 newsletter irrelevant to this case, city’s attorney states
The November complaint filed by Tucker family attorneys — Robert Gresham and Michelle Wright from the Dayton law firm Wright & Schulte LLC and Stanley Jackson, a Beachwood attorney for the Cochran Firm — highlighted what the lawsuit states are 40 police killings by Akron police officers since 2000. More than half of the people killed were Black, the lawsuit says, despite Black people making up only one-third of Akron’s population.
The complaint also emphasized, and attached a copy of, an overtly racist newsletter called Signal 44, created and shared by Akron police officers in the late 1990s. The newsletter was filled with racial tropes against Akron’s Black residents and what were claimed to be jokes about police violence against them.
According to the complaint, nobody involved in creating Signal 44 was fired and an internal affairs investigation at the time detailed that a current lieutenant and current Police Chief Brian Harding thought it was funny. (Harding said in a 2024 town hall when he was Mayor Shammas Malik’s lone candidate for police chief that the newsletter was “divisive and wrong” and the only thing he found funny in it was a dig at his haircut.)
The newsletter and the lack of repercussions for it contributes to an ongoing “culture of violence and racism” within the police department, stated Tucker family attorneys.
The city’s response to the Tucker lawsuit decries the mention of the Signal 44 newsletter in the lawsuit, stating that the “defendants deny any biased policing.”
The city’s response also urges the judge to dismiss the case.