Cincinnati in Chaos After Cop Kills Unarmed Man
Curfew Imposed After Four Days of Unrest Ravage City

BY BILL LASCHER

Racial tension and allegations of police brutality that have been festering in Cincinnati erupted as riots ravaged the city this week following the shooting by police of an unarmed black man last Saturday.
Nineteen-year-old Timothy Thomas died in the alley where he was shot in the chest by 26-year-old Steve Roach, a white police officer. Roach chased Thomas when he fled from police officers trying to arrest him on 14 misdemeanor warrants. Roach claimed that he fired when Thomas reached in his pocket and he assumed Thomas was looking for a gun. Thomas was not armed.
Thomas is the fourth black man to be killed by Cincinnati police since November and the 15th since 1995. In the same time period, the police have not killed one white person.
While government officials and community leaders have been calling for calm and denouncing the violence of the past few days, some have also been demanding an investigation into Thomas’s shooting. On Wednesday, the Review received a press release from Ohio state senators Mark Mallory and Catherine Barrett, and state representative Samuel Britton expressing the legislators’ concern about the allegations against the police department.
“We need answers, and we need them now,” Mallory said in the press release. “There must be some sense of accountability. The community is fast losing faith in the system, and they need an answer as to why this has happened.”
Senior Claire Miller, who grew up in Cincinnati, offered some answers. Miller said Thomas’s shooting is only the most recent and visible incident in a long history of tension between the city and the African-American community. A white woman whose house was stoned during protests Wednesday night, Miller recognized the deep racial divisions in the city. Despite the violence, she asserted that the city needed to hear the demonstrators’ frustration.
“I was kinda glad,” Miller said about hearing news of the unrest in her neighborhood. “I live on a segregated street. There’s a sign at the intersection where suddenly the houses get rich. Cincinnati is really, really messed up.”

According to her, most neighborhoods in the city are segregated, and the disparities between them are evident. Complicating matters is the fact that police only patrol lower income areas, such as the community of Norwood located in the heart of Cincinnati, which Miller said some have compared to a police state.
As a matter of fact, the city’s mayor, Charlie Luken, has declared a state of emergency and has imposed a new curfew on the city between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Those not travelling to and from work are not allowed to be in public areas during that time period. According to initial reports, this curfew, which was implemented for the first time last night, brought calm to the city after two nights of chaos. Although the National Guard has yet to be called in, Governor Bob Taft of Ohio has dispatched Highway Patrol Units to aid the local police department.
Taft expressed his condolences to Thomas’s family in a statement released Thursday. He also commended his mother, Angela Leisure, for statements she made appealing to the community to end the violence.
“I appeal to members of the community to cease unlawful activity,” Taft said, “and I ask all citizens to remember that restoring order is the first step toward resolving the issues surrounding the difficult situation.”
“My house is probably getting protected [by the curfew],” Miller said. “But at the same time, it’s probably aimed to silence people. The city is coming down in all these different ways along race lines and [the protestors] have had enough,” Miller said.
She provided the example of the West Side Council, an organization of community members and actvisists that deals with some of these issues. The city appointed an individual to the police department in order to mediate some of these concerns, but Miller said he has a terrible history when it comes to race relations.
“The fact that he was appointed to the police was a slap in the face to people who have been working so hard on this,” Miller said.
Other Cincinnati natives at Oberlin were concerned about the echoes of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles and the destruction being caused by vandals “It’s all very upsetting to me,” sophomore Jacob Adams said. “I think the rioters’ frustrations are certainly justified, and I support them in their quest to end the police brutality, but I hate to see what is typically a real low-key city become such a war zone.”

Miller, who is directing a play about race relations and pacifism in South Africa under apartheid, said she is worried that local papers in Cincinnati and the media outside of the city are only focusing on the violence occurring of the past four days.

“What worries me is that they are not mentioning that there is a reason that this is happening,” she said.
“These disturbances are not productive and will only increase tension between the community and police,” Barrett said in the statement released by the legislators. “Our voices need to be heard loud and clear, but we can’t tear down the community in which we live.”