Akron religious leaders have issued a list of policy demands after a grand jury decided not to indict the Akron police officer that fatally shot 15 year old Jazmir Tucker.
Two officers initially approached Tucker the night of Nov. 28, 2024, after hearing gunshots in the area, according to an initial police report. Body cam footage from the incident starts with officers running toward Tucker with weapons drawn. One officer, Davon Fields, fired at him with a rifle. Tucker is not seen in the video until he is being handcuffed, several minutes after the shooting. Police found a handgun in Tucker's zipped coat pocket. The autopsy report showed Tucker was fatally shot twice in the back and was also shot in the arm.
Members of the Greater Akron Fellowship of Clergy urged accountability after the announcement that Fields will face no charges, including his termination.
"In life, we make choices. Our choices have consequences," House of Prayer for All People Church Pastor R. Stacey Jenkins said, "but it seems like when it comes to the men in blue, there's no consequences."
The Akron Police Department will now conduct an internal investigation to determine if any department policies or procedures were violated. Once complete, the investigation will be turned over to the city's police auditor for review.
Akron NAACP President Judi Hill doesn’t expect any accountability to come from that investigation, she said.
“Well unfortunately, the use of force policy is so loose, so deficient in guidance for officers that we know what to expect from that review," she said. "We’ve seen this movie before.”
Tucker’s aunt, Connie Sutton, questioned why Fields shot Tucker twice in the back.
“He said that he thought Jazmir shot and killed someone, so does that still give you the justice to shoot somebody in the back, and you don’t know?," she said. "If that’s the case and according to him that’s their training, so if that’s their training, God help us all.”
The clergy group sent their demands to the mayor's office and are waiting for a response.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office declined to comment on the clergy’s demands.
"We don't need a de-escalation process, because we already have one," Macedonia Baptist Church Pastor Lorenzo Glenn said. "Exercise the same de-escalation you use with our white counterparts. They go home. We end up in the morgue."
Community organizing group The Freedom BLOC's Executive Director Rev. Ray Greene Jr. wants city council to give the Citizens' Police Oversight Board more power, he said. The CPOB was created after the fatal police shooting of Jayland Walker in 2022 and has the ability to review police policies and make recommendations.
"The city council has the ability to enact legislation to give the oversight board more responsibility, more duty, more teeth to terminate this officer," he said.
Currently, the CPOB can only make recommendations to the city, which the city can choose to implement or not. The CPOB would need to put legislation before council for their vote, but council previously voted down rules that would give the board more investigative power.
If city council does not make any changes, the community is ready to place the change in the hands of citizens through another charter amendment, which is how the CPOB was created, Greene said.
"We are ready and willing to go through this process again," he said, "and we are waiting for the meeting with the mayor to see if we're gonna have to go through that process or if they're just going to do the right thing for the 200,000 people that live in this city."
Other demands from the group include ending the practice of allowing officers to use personal long range gun rifles in an official capacity. The rifle Fields used was not department issued but had to meet requirements and training standards, Harding said in a press conference after the shooting.
The group is also demanding the department mandate that officers investigated for more than three use of force incidents in a calendar year be suspended for 90 days without pay and undergo psychological reassessment and retraining. Records obtained by Ideastream Public Media show Fields shot an armed man in 2022. Since 2020, Fields has been involved in 33 use of force cases. Fields joined the department in 2019.
The group also wants officers involved in a fatal use of force incidents to be placed on unpaid leave. Fields was placed on paid administrative leave after the shooting. Another demand mandates that if an officer fails to activate their body worn camera in a fatal incident, they will also be placed on unpaid leave. Fields' and his partner's cameras were not activated by the officers and were only turned on by the presence of a nearby police cruiser with activated lights.
The group's final demand is that if an investigation finds that emergency medical aid was not rendered in a timely fashion, the officers will be placed on a 30-day unpaid suspension. It took officers several minutes to render aid to Tucker, body cam footage shows. Worried that Tucker could attack officers after being shot, officers waited for ballistic shields to arrive before approaching him, Fields told BCI agents.
