Ohio's Supreme Court Just Made Police Accountability Illegal

And my car is covered in the names of people who deserved better

I am so freaking mad. The Ohio Supreme Court didn’t just rule against a newspaper. It performed a surgical strike on the public’s right to know why the police can kill us and face no consequences.

In a decision that reads like a parody of a police state memo, the court sided with the Ohio State Highway Patrol to seal, forever, the key records from an investigation into a police shooting. The most devastating part? The court ruled that the officer’s own statement (his official justification for using lethal force) is a “confidential law enforcement investigatory record” and is specifically exempt from public disclosure.

Read that again.

The one document that explains why an officer chose to take a life is now a state secret. We, the public, are told to simply trust the process, even as the process systematically fails to deliver justice. We are told to have faith in a system whose inner workings are now legally hidden from view.

This is the architecture of impunity, and they are building it right in front of us.

Photo credit: Vix Prunty

I look at the names on my car (each one meticulously cut and placed by my own hands, a mobile memorial to Ohioans killed by police) and I see the human cost of this secrecy. Every one of those names represents a story where the full truth was fought for, often unsuccessfully. This ruling ensures that the next name, and the one after that, will be added under an even thicker veil of official silence.

The court’s decision creates a perfect, cynical loop for police violence:

1. An officer, armed and trained, shoots someone.

2. His own department investigates and clears him, citing his own "fear for his life."

3. And now, the Ohio Supreme Court says his account of that fear is none of our business.

They get to be judge, jury, and sole witness, all in the dark. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is corruption.

As a European American who founded an organization dedicated to deconstructing white supremacy, I see this as legal reinforcement of a racist system. Police violence disproportionately devastates Black and Brown communities, and this ruling protects that disparity from scrutiny. It tells those terrified communities, "Your demand for answers is less important than an officer's right to secrecy." It is a direct message to European Americans that the system is not broken; it is functioning exactly as designed to protect itself.

This isn't an abstract legal debate. People have been shot for holding cell phones, subway sandwiches, or toy guns. It’s about the fact that the power to call the police in this country can be a death sentence. And now, the highest court in our state has declared that the "why" behind that death sentence is a classified document.

They want us to be mad because someone said something "factually accurate" to us. No. We should be mad because our institutions are actively, legally conspiring to hide the facts.

So, what do we do when the courts abandon us?

We get louder. We get more relentless.

This ruling means our work at EAGER (and the work of every anti-racist, every community activist, every journalist) just became more critical. If they shut down official channels of transparency, we must create our own. We must fund anti-racism education more fiercely, organize more powerfully, and demand accountability with a voice that cannot be ignored by a legal technicality.

The names on my car are a testament to the failures of the past. This Ohio Supreme Court decision is a blueprint for future failures. We must not let them build it. Our right to know, and our demand for a world where police don't get to kill in secret, is non-negotiable.

The gavel has fallen. Our protest must rise.