What I saw as a Cincinnati Police Officer by Councilmember Wendell Young

In my time as a Cincinnati police officer, I saw a lot. One particular experience that still haunts me, years later, is walking into the home of a family that had awoken to find that their infant was no longer alive. Panicked and in disbelief, the family begged us to call in paramedics to try to revive the child. We of course made the call, but the baby had died before we had arrived. Autopsy reports confirmed that the baby was lost due to crib death, the result of unsafe sleep conditions.

Seeing firsthand what it is like for a family to lose a child, and how terribly devastating this loss is, has never left me. It is this experience, and others like it, that narrate the statistics about infant mortality to me. It is a travesty that we lose these young people before their first birthday, to deaths that are absolutely preventable.No number can accurately explain the pain that a family feels, or what we suffer as a city and a society, with each of these deaths. Infant mortality cuts across racial lines, socioeconomic lines, and neighborhood boundary lines. Preventing this kind of loss and pain in our community is imperative. It is an issue that affects us all, collectively, even if indirectly.Councilmember Young has served on Cincinnati City Council since 2010.  During Wendell’s 25-year police career, he experienced a variety of assignments including working as a uniformed beat officer, plain-clothes detective, old clothes semi-undercover police officer, out of the city undercover (loaned to another city), school resource officer (Withrow High School), and commander of the Police Recruiting Unit. Wendell has also been active in several community organizations, including serving as President of the Sentinel Police Association and President of the Cincinnati Branch NAACP. Twice, he was asked to serve as the President of the Cincinnati Chapter of the National Forum for Black Public Administrators (NFBPA) and is a former board member of the National Black Police Association and Cincinnati’s Retired Senior Volunteer Program.