BY SEAN HEALY
Authorities in the mid-west city of Cincinatti have lifted a week-long night-time curfew, imposed after the city's black residents rose up in anger at the police's April 7 killing of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas.
Thomas was killed as he fled police officer Steven Roach, who was trying to arrest him for failing to appear for misdemeanor charges and traffic violations. The police union claimed Roach feared for his life during the encounter.
The shooting sparked night after night of protest, during which police arrested nearly 1000 people. At one point, Mayor Charles Luken considered calling in the national guard. On April 12 he declared a state of emergency and made it illegal for anyone, other than those going to work, to be on the streets of the city between 8pm and 6am.
"Despite the best efforts of the good citizens of our city, the violence on our streets is uncontrolled and it runs rampant," Luken said at a news conference at City Hall.
"The time has come to deal with this seriously", he declared. "The message ... is that the violence must stop."
The city's residents must have taken Luken's comments as bitter irony, as it has been his police officers who have been at the centre of the violence. Thomas' slaying was the fifth fatal police shooting of a black person since November and the 15th since 1995.
On April 14, police even went so far as to attack the crowd at Thomas' funeral and wake in the poor, predominantly black Cincinatti suburb of Over the Rhine.
Accordingly to eyewitnesses, one of whom called the police action a "drive-by shooting" and another a "guerilla-style assault", officers shot into the crowd without warning, injuring three people, including two young children. One woman was hospitalised with a ruptured spleen, bruised lungs and a fractured rib.
The shooting sparked outrage not just in Cincinatti but across the US.
In a statement, the Black Radical Congress said, "The situation in Cincinnati almost reminds one of advertisements for the 1970s film Jaws: 'just when you thought that it was safe to go back into the water'. Just when many people thought that it could not get any worse, another blatant example of police abuse and murder."
According to the BRC, it was not the murder of Timothy Thomas that surprised many, but the outrage and rebellion on the part of the city's black population: "Clearly black people in Cincinnati had had enough. Their fury could no longer be contained and therefore exploded. Ours is not to address the dynamics of the rebellion but to affirm that the outrage was just and that only by calling attention to police rampages and lawlessness will we be able to bring it to a halt."
Cincinatti has a history of racist violence, it's Ku Klux Klan country and was the home to much racist terror during the days of segregation in the South. But, said the BRC, "the growing attention to police terror in the USA more than anything else reaffirms Malcolm X's old adage: the 'South' is everything south of the Canadian border. Thus, most recently the terror was in Cincinnati, but it has also happened in New York, Los Angeles."
"The bottom line, whether in Cincinnati with Timothy Thomas, or New York with Amadou Diallo [killed by police in 1999], is control. It is not simply a matter of racial fear, or even racial profiling. Those are all symptoms of a much deeper issue. It is about the control over the movements of the black population, and thereby the complete frustration of democracy ... Police terror ensures that we understand the limits placed on us and that we continue to lack any rights that the racist state is bound to respect."
"The Black Radical Congress suggests that Cincinnati must be a symbol of why we must fight the police state nationally and locally!", the statement continued, before concluding, "This is a time for action. We must cry for Timothy Thomas. We must grieve with his family and friends. But more than anything else we must organise ... It is not enough for us to express support to those in Cincinnati carrying out a valiant fight against police terror. The time to nationalise this issue and to sustain a national campaign has arrived. Enough is enough!"