By Amy DePaul and Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, April 13, 2001; Page A01
CINCINNATI, April 12 -- Officials imposed a citywide curfew and deployed 75 Ohio state troopers alongside local police tonight in their latest effort to quell the violent demonstrations that erupted this week after the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer.
Acknowledging "a very legitimate and real problem with race relations," Mayor Charles Luken announced the measures this morning after a third night of scattered violence and vandalism. A police officer was shot on Wednesday, but the .32-caliber bullet glanced off his belt buckle, saving him from serious harm.
"I think the black citizens are tired and scared. I think the white citizens are tired and scared," Luken told reporters. "There's gunfire going on here like you might hear in Beirut. It's dangerous, and it's getting more dangerous."
President Bush directed Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to offer counsel and support, while NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume led a prayer vigil here tonight after meeting with the family of Timothy Thomas, the 19-year-old man who was killed on Saturday by a police officer.
Thomas was the fourth black man killed by police since November and the 15th since 1995, a period when no whites have died at the hands of police.
Bush issued a statement calling for "a calm and a nonviolent solution to the present situation."
A curfew will be enforced from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. throughout the city, where roughly 1,000 police officers -- armed with foam bullets, propelled bean bags and tear gas -- have been working 12-hour shifts for several days. More than 150 people had been arrested by late today.
Three hours into the curfew tonight, the streets were quiet. There were reports of 20 curfew violators being arrested.
Nighttime events for Good Friday have been canceled. Taxi service has been abandoned. Drivers are choosing their routes carefully after a white woman was dragged from her car. She was rescued by people nearby.
"Right now, we need to bring peace and order to the streets and get the violence to stop. Then we can work on police-community relations and improving the way the police department is organized," said City Council member Chris Monzel. "Hopefully this will work. If not, the National Guard will be called in."
Hundreds of residents gathered this evening at the New Friendship Baptist Church in Avondale, one of the neighborhoods where some of Wednesday night's rioting occurred. Inside the church, Mfume urged his audience to abide by the curfew and to treat police with respect, but he also asked police to treat blacks with respect.
"When I got here, the first thing I did was visit Mr. and Mrs. Leisure, the parents of Timothy Thomas," Mfume said. "I held on to her [Thomas's mother] and held on to his baby, who will never know who his father was and could've been."
Mfume made three demands of city officials: justice in the investigation of the Thomas shooting, a civilian review board for the police department with subpoena power, and elected officials who spend time in the black community.
The church audience cheered Mfume, while outside speakers passed around a megaphone. Some members of the crowd urged others to violate the curfew.
"The riots are not just a reaction to the killing of an African American male, but to the injustice to our people for so long," said Christopher Johnson, 16, as he stood on the church steps. "Just walking down the street I get asked [by police], 'What are you doing?' I pay taxes like they do. I should be able to walk down a public street."
Among police officers, stress mounted with Wednesday night's shooting of an officer.
"There's fatigue. And there's concern because of the shooting, not only among officers but their families and friends. There were a lot more incidents of shots being fired at officers last night than the previous nights," Lt. Ray Ruberg said today.
Mfume asked Ashcroft to order a broad investigation of police relations with the black community. The case could provide an early test of Bush's campaign trail opposition to Justice Department oversight of local police agencies. When Bush took office, more than a dozen such civil inquiries were underway, from Los Angeles and New York to Prince George's County.
A Justice Department spokesman said the FBI is investigating the Thomas shooting as a criminal matter. Two mediators from the department's Community Relations Service arrived in Cincinnati on Wednesday. In 1998, the service negotiated an agreement with the city to establish a citizen review panel and to improve racial sensitivity.
The disturbances began after Officer Stephen Roach shot Thomas, who had fled into an alley in the city's low-income Over-the-Rhine neighborhood when Roach tried to arrest him on a dozen traffic charges and two misdemeanor charges.
Roach told investigators that he thought Thomas was reaching for a gun. After investigators learned that Thomas was unarmed, Luken said the early findings did not support Roach's account.
The Thomas case is the latest incident here to spark protests, which have included a brief takeover of City Hall and a spate of looting and shooting. Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union and a community group filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Cincinnati Police Department of 30 years of discrimination.
The lawsuit charges that police habitually violate the rights of blacks through such practices as racial profiling and excessive use of force. In a city that is 43 percent black, the ACLU contends, blacks are subjected to more frequent traffic stops and more discretionary tickets for offenses such as jaywalking.
"We have not a few isolated incidents," said Raymond Vasvari, legal director of the ACLU of Ohio. "We have a pattern perceived by the Kerner Commission in 1968 and perceived continuously to this day. It's difficult for the city to credibly deny that this problem exists."
Protest riots broke out in Cincinnati during the violent summer of 1968 after blacks charged that local police unfairly used loitering laws to harass them, an allegation supported the next year by the Kerner Commission, which studied Cincinnati and seven other cities.
During the next two decades, a succession of local and federal oversight groups criticized the policing of blacks by Cincinnati's predominantly white police force. Groups and individuals as varied as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, city administrators and an organization of black officers found racial problems in the department.
Special correspondent DePaul reported from Cincinnati, and Slevin reported from Washington. Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.