Cincinnati: First Outsider, First African American Police Chief
Cincinnati's recent selection of someone who is not white and is
not from the West Side of Cincinnati as the city's new police
chief is a victory for justice and civil rights, and a
vindication of the efforts of those activists who for decades
have struggled against the racism, violence and abuse that have
characterized the Cincinnati Police Department. The Cincinnati
Police Department's long history of malfeasance reached a crisis
on April 7, 2001 when a police officer pursued a young unarmed
African American man named Timothy Thomas, wanted for nothing
worse than traffic violations, and shot and killed him in a
downtown alley. Thomas was the fifteenth African American man
under 50 to have been killed by the police between 1995 and
2001, some of those black men had been unarmed and some were
killed in police custody. The African American community,
finally having reached the breaking point, erupted in four days
of unrest, an uprising against rac