Word: cincinnati
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...Cincinnati, Ohio, police chief Thomas Streicher Jr. said he wanted his city to be a model of racial justice. Cincinnati could push beyond platitudes about racial profiling, he told the city council last month, and "get at what's in the officer's heart." Soon after, the council banned racial profiling, the practice of stopping suspects on the basis of race, and ordered officers to record the race of people they stop. But two weeks later, Cincinnati's streets were littered with the familiar iconography of failure: fiery Dumpsters, splintered storefronts and citizens sitting on the curb, weeping from tear...
Like all riots, the tumult that plagued Cincinnati for three days last week defies a single explanation. But the causes are scattered over the past weeks and years. In the city's short-term memory, there lies an unarmed 19-year-old African-American man named Timothy Thomas, killed by a white officer last Saturday. Thomas was wanted for 14 misdemeanor violations, most of them small-time traffic charges. His bigger mistake was to run from the police. Surrounded by 12 officers, Thomas was killed by one bullet. The officer who fired, Steven Roach, has said he thought Thomas...
Then there's the longer-term memory. Thomas joined a list of 15 men who died while being apprehended by Cincinnati police since 1995. That's more than four times the fatal-shooting rate of New York City's cops in the same time period. And all the suspects killed by Cincinnati police were black--in a city that's 57% white. Last month a coalition of civil-rights groups filed suit in federal court, accusing Cincinnati of a "30-year pattern of racial profiling" and excessive force. So the latest shooting--possibly the most egregious yet--put match...
...resisted attempts to change the insular, 1,020-person department's policy of refusing to hire chiefs from outside. "There has been a material distrust between the police and the black community, even though the force has become increasingly black," says Scott Johnson, former city manager and current Cincinnati resident. "The problem is, there are no blacks in the upper echelons of the force." To change the police culture, says the Rev. Damon Lynch III, head of the Cincinnati Black United Front, "some people need to be fired. If nothing changes, nothing will change...
...head of the police union has repeatedly denied that a problem exists. "Our officers don't have time to play these little racist games. Like, 'Ha, ha, I pulled you over because you're black,'" Keith Fangman told the Cincinnati Enquirer before the riots. Even after, Fangman refused to concede. "Our police officers are not some band of rogue Nazis roaming Cincinnati, hunting down and killing black men," he said Friday. "That is inflammatory, it's racist, and it's wrong." Then he made a new claim that was just as wrong--declaring that 10 of the 15 suspects killed...