CONNEAUT, Ohio — Wednesday morning, detective Taylor Cleveland called to say crime in his Ashtabula County hometown bottomed out in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. By Thursday morning, on my drive to the northeastern Lake Erie city, he called and said 75% of the force is home in quarantine and that he has gone from detective to acting chief of police.
Life comes at you fast in the age of the coronavirus.
“We had an emergency plan in place for if this happened,” he told me, standing a respectable 10 feet away in front of the barricaded police station on Main Street. “We’ve been working hard to try and make sure that it didn’t happen, but you never plan for an emergency.”
“We sent 16 people home to quarantine,” he said. The force only has 25 people.
“We had a sergeant that was a presumptive positive,” Cleveland explained. “He came and worked, and then he went home, and he started developing some symptoms. Checked with his primary care physician, and the primary care physician said, ‘Hey, listen. You’re exhibiting the symptoms of COVID. We want you to quarantine at home, and we’re going to arrange to have you tested this morning. Since there’s not enough testing for everybody, they then treat this as a positive case because of the testing lag times.”
The city’s Health Department then helped the Police Department determine all of the immediate contacts of the supervisor, going back 14 days prior to the onset of symptoms.
“We then came up with a list of people he was in close contact with since then, civilians included, with people that he had arrested that needed to be notified. We notified those people. They’re in quarantine until at least Monday, depending on the final results of his test,” he explained. “Thankfully, our call volume is next to nothing. Everybody in town has been, I hate to use the word ‘behaving themselves,’ but just really, really coming through, and there’s been no problems.”
Conneaut is the furthest northeastern point in Ohio. It is many things to many people: a port town along Lake Erie, a fisherman’s paradise along Conneaut Creek (known for its superior walleye and steelhead catches), a beach vacation for blue-collar Ohio and Pennsylvania residents, the home of the alabaster beacon that is the Conneaut Breakwater Lighthouse, and a boomtown for America’s meth and fentanyl epidemic.
“We have a significant drug problem that we’ve been working several years to try and bring under control,” Cleveland said. “It’s just one continuous strategy about how do we deal with overdoses? Drug use and the associated crimes are our normal call volume here in town. It’s typically pretty busy.”
But now, Cleveland said they have very few calls for service. “Not that we’ve had no serious crimes since the quarantine orders or since the recommendations to stay in place. … But, just from my own experience and the experience of other county agencies, we expected to have a huge uptick in call volume and crimes, but people are really coming together to act responsibly in the face of crisis, and that’s pretty amazing.”
Despite only having one year on the job in his hometown, Cleveland is more than qualified for the temporary police chief job. He began his public safety career right out of high school as a part-time firefighter and paramedic for the city while he worked his way through college and the police academy.
On Sept. 11, after a decade on the police force, he joined the Navy Reserves as a medic. He was assigned to a Marine Corps Reserve infantry company, 1st Battalion 25th Marines, and deployed to Iraq in 2005.
From 2006 through 2019, he worked in the Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Office as a detective, with four of those years in the sheriff’s office, including an assignment as a task force officer to the Cleveland District Office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
“In May of 2019, I got an offer to come back home and work for my hometown Police Department, and I thought that was a pretty darn good opportunity to come back,” Cleveland said. “Instead of working in downtown Cleveland and serving people that I wasn’t familiar with, it’s a lot nicer to come home and serve people that I’ve known my entire life and am friends with.”
He happened to have been a police officer longer than anybody that was left standing in the department, so he went from detective to acting police chief. But, according to City Manager Jim Hockaday, by September he may well be out of a job.
“Hockaday thought it was an important point to recognize that state and local governments are spending money that they don’t have and obviously don’t have the ability to go into debt. But we’re just throwing all of our resources at this right now, and that is depleting our budget,” Cleveland explained.
So, when the coronavirus pandemic finally passes, some of the very people who have been fighting it on the front lines may lose their jobs.
“Hockaday told me this is a little bit of an odd situation. We could be looking at sending police officers and firefighters home because we just don’t have money to pay them. And, since I’m on the bottom of the barrel here, I go from being acting chief during the emergency to getting laid off after the emergency to unemployed,” Cleveland said.
Because, between the delayed income tax collections and the anticipated reduced income tax collections, cities of 12,000 such as Conneaut, which have already been struggling for years in the new automated economy, will be out of emergency funds.
“We’re just throwing all of our resources at being prepared for this crisis without regard for who’s going to pay for this afterwards. As we see it, there’s no plan for making states and local governments whole,” he said.
It is a story no one is telling that is very real for rural America and a significant issue for small municipalities that have provided these services during the crisis. When the pandemic passes, they’ll likely have to cut services.
Located 66 miles east of the city of Cleveland and 33 miles west of the city of Erie in Pennsylvania is the local city hospital. Cleveland said the hospital, Conneaut Medical Center, has only 25 beds, with an additional 25 mothballed for use in crises such as this.
They have only five ICU beds and five ventilators.
“We have four presumed positive cases pending test results,” explained Cleveland’s wife, Louise Cleveland, who is the nursing supervisor for the city’s Health Department.
“I’ve been pretty blessed through this whole thing to be able to sit in on the Ohio Department of Health calls and the CDC calls to be able to understand what was coming to them,” Cleveland said. He said that helped put the city in a much better position to anticipate and prepare for the outbreak of COVID-19 than a lot of other places.
Cleveland is standing in front of the majestic red brick town hall. Built in 1876, it is where the city police force is headquartered. But now, the entrance has a barricade in front of it.
Across the street in the Rainbow Cafe, an Italian restaurant, owners Vince and Shelley Vendetti were busy giving out 100 free lunches to children. Down the road, at the corner of the normally busy U.S. 20 and Main Street intersection, a forlorn Eagles Aerie sign reads, “CLOSED UNTIL ?”
