CLEVELAND — Ohio State Highway Patrol says the Cleveland Division of Police recently asked for help in criminal patrol and interdiction operations. This comes as the general manager of Collision Bend Brewery in the Flats is calling for more officers on the streets.
Police say three people were shot late at night earlier this week on Old River Road just down from Collision Bend.
There was a man shot and killed near Progressive Field.
Two weeks earlier, there was a mass shooting that wounded nine people in the Warehouse District.
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Collision Bend survived the pandemic and is now expanding beyond the Flats.
Since 2017, the East Bank has been its home.
“Yeah, it’s been a fun ride. We’ve been really lucky,” Collision Bend GM Michael Grano said.
Shootings wounding three people roughly three hours apart just down the road were unsettling.
“I don’t really worry about safety of our guests as much I worry about safety of our staff,” Grano said.
His staff walks out together for safety, and they have security cameras.
Collision Bend wasn’t open at the time of the gunfire outside Frozen Daiquiri Bar.
Grano points out that recent violence downtown, including the mass shooting in the Warehouse District earlier this month, is late at night.
“We do worry about it maybe slowing down traffic for us a little bit, maybe people being concerned coming downtown, but for the most part, I know they’ve all been kind of grouped up together. I tend to think they’re random occurrences; they’re very different,” Grano said.
News 5 Investigators asked Grano if he planned to change anything.
“So we’ve had discussions specifically about bringing in an off-duty police officer and specific times possibly from like 10 until like 2 in the morning to make sure that when those incidents do pop up, that we’re protected from that,” Grano said.
Grano said he knows Cleveland Police staffing is down. Twelve new recruits are set to graduate Friday, and another nine in the fall.
But Grano says he’d love to see the city do its part and add more patrols as a deterrent and to help people feel comfortable visiting downtown.
“We’re making calls to the city to increase security on the street. I think that’s really the focus that needs to happen. We need to have a presence a very strong police presence, especially in our entertainment districts,” Grano said.
Grano said being a good neighbor is also part of the equation.
He said they make sure the street and building are clean and that their guests aren’t overserved and are behaving.
“If we need to send somebody home in a cab or we need to call the police because a situation is getting escalated, we make those calls, and we make those calls every day, right, and I think that’s what our neighbors need to do also,” Grano said.
OSHP says there has been a partnership between patrol and Cleveland Police.
But OSHP started sending troopers to work with traffic officers in May and said that will continue through next month.
Collision Bend is expanding to Euclid with a 24,000-square-foot taproom and production facility. They’ve been talking about outfitting it with alarms and security, just like at Collision Bend in the Flats.
