As media focus on national crisis
Judge frees Cincinnati killer cop
By Greg Butterfield
On Sept. 26 Hamilton County Municipal Judge Ralph E. Winkler
acquitted Cincinnati Police Officer Stephen Roach of all
charges. Roach, who is white, shot Timothy Thomas in the back
and killed him last April 7. Thomas, a 19-year-old Black man,
was unarmed.
Thomas's brutal killing grabbed headlines all over the
world. It sparked a three-day rebellion in Cincinnati's African
American community-the largest uprising there since 1968. Eight
hundred people were arrested.
Cincinnati, whose population is 43 percent Black, has been
called one of the country's 10 most segregated cities. Thomas
was the sixth Black man killed by a white Cincinnati cop in
just over a year, and the 15th since 1995.
Roach's acquittal sparked renewed protests. After some
youths defiantly took to the streets, the mayor imposed another
curfew.
Yet outside Ohio, it barely made the papers.
The corporate media's attention was focused on something
else: drumming up support for the Bush administration's "war
against terrorism" following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Judge puts victim on trial
Roach was the first Cincinnati cop to ever face trial for
killing someone. Some activists contend that if not for the
rebellion, and the subsequent global attention, the cop would
never even have been charged.
At Roach's request, there was no jury. The verdict was left
entirely in Judge Winkler's hands.
This is a common ploy in police brutality cases. Cops know
they stand a much better chance with a judge who is part of the
same apparatus of repression-the police, courts and
prisons-than they do before a jury.
Roach made a safe choice. But what surprised many was the
lengths the judge went to justify the killer cop's actions.
In his decision, Judge Winkler emphasized that Thomas had
"14 outstanding warrants."
"Police Officer Roach's history was unblemished until this
incident," he said. "Timothy Thomas's history was not
unblemished."
What Winkler failed to say was that 12 of the 14 warrants
were for minor traffic violations like not wearing a seat belt.
These are the kinds of warrants that typically result from
racial profiling of motorists.
The other two warrants were for fleeing police.
Obviously, Thomas's fear of the police was warranted.
Timothy Thomas's 14 misdemeanor warrants greatly moved
Winkler. But the fact that Officer Roach changed his story
about the incident three times was "not relevant" to this
judge.
After the verdict was read, Thomas's mother, Angela Leisure,
asked: "Why is it that officers are not responsible for their
acts when other citizens are?"
Leisure vowed to carry on her struggle against police
brutality. She said: "My son, I wanted him to be the last. But
he won't be the last. Until serious changes are made in the
police department, this will happen again."
Outside, dozens of demonstrators chanted, "No justice, no
peace!" Later 150 people packed a City Council hearing to
denounce the verdict. The Rev. Damon Lynch III said, "It was a
travesty. ... Black life has no value in Cincinnati."
'National unity' a lie
Consider the words of Lorenzo Komboa Ervin. He represented
the Southwest Michigan Coalition Against Racism and Police
Brutality and the Black Autonomy International at the World
Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. On Sept. 6,
he gave a report there on police brutality in the U.S.
"Although the U.S. government refuses to report on the exact
number of persons killed by police use of deadly force each
year," Ervin said, "we have been able to document 500-1,000
cases per annum ... through the work of local grassroots groups
like ours, national activist groups like the October 22nd
Coalition, and others.
"The USA is an outlaw nation," he continued, "a white
supremacy regime, hiding under the erstwhile cloak of democracy
and human rights ... while it uses its law enforcement agents
to practice terrorism against the Black population and those of
other racial minorities."
Timothy Thomas was a victim of this sort of terrorism-the
state-sponsored terrorism of police brutality that plagues
communities of color across the U.S.
After the U.S. Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the
presidency, he and Attorney General John Ashcroft promised to
take steps to end racial profiling. Last April, Ashcroft even
promised a thorough federal investigation and action in the
case of Timothy Thomas.
But what has happened?
There were no outraged speeches from the White House after
Roach was acquitted. Bush didn't denounce the terrorism of the
Cincinnati police. No federal troops were ordered to Ohio to
capture Roach and protect the African American community from
further violence.
At the same time, Bush and Ashcroft have authorized the
biggest act of racial profiling in memory against Arabs and
other Middle Eastern people. The FBI and local police agencies
have illegally detained people of Arab descent without cause.
The media frenzy since Sept. 11 has encouraged hundreds of acts
of racist violence against immigrants.
Bush is unwilling to protect young people of color and
workers from police terrorism. But he is prepared to march them
off to fight a war in the Middle East.
Rank-and-file enlisted soldiers are overwhelmingly from
working class and poor families. Many are people of color. They
have far more in common with Timothy Thomas, and with the
struggling people of the Middle East, than they do with Bush or
those he represents: the Big Oil barons, Wall Street bankers
and military contractors who are itching for a war.
The Bush government's response to Roach's acquittal-or
rather, the lack of one-shows that all the patriotic hype about
"national unity" is a big, ugly lie.
Reprinted from the Oct. 11, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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