He Was Targeted by Police for His Political Speech. Now, He’s Suing.

In August of 2021, approximately eight East Cleveland Police Department officers descended on the home of William Fambrough. His alleged infraction: a parking violation.

Or so they said. But Fambrough’s story is much more insidious than that. It involves some serious alleged First Amendment transgressions—carried out by the government, not Fambrough.

The 74-year-old East Cleveland man had the audacity last year to promote a challenger to Brandon L. King, East Cleveland’s mayor. Fambrough used his step van—something he’d employed many times during the course of his long-running political advocacy—to instead campaign for Juanita Gowdy, an East Cleveland city councilor who had a reputation for criticizing both King and law enforcement. Fambrough’s media company produced advertisements for Gowdy, and he displayed Gowdy’s likeness on his van while driving around playing recorded endorsements from East Clevelanders.

That didn’t sit well with police, who began leveraging obscure municipal ordinances to criminalize Fambrough’s behavior and paralyze Gowdy’s campaign. Their visit to his home in August of last year was not their first, as they repeatedly harassed him for the crime of parking his van on the street. They ultimately towed the vehicle and caused thousands of dollars in damage in the process, kneecapping his ability to promote Gowdy’s candidacy in the final stretch of the primary.

That ordinance—which prohibits parking “a truck, commercial tractor, trailer, semi-trailer, a motor home or recreational vehicle” in a driveway or on a residential road—is almost never used, if ever. Between January 2016 and May 2022, the city hadn’t enforced it once, according to a records request detailed in a civil rights lawsuit filed this week by Fambrough in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

Yet no one could have made that more clear than the cops who initiated the tow and subsequent property destruction, as they turned a blind eye to a van violating the same ordinance about one or two houses down. They also cited Fambrough for “noise pollution,” despite that he’d obtained a permit from East Clev