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WYSO Iris Roley, member of the Cincinnati Black United Front, speaks in Cincinnati on Saturday afternoon about her work to end qualified immunity. She has been a civil rights and police reform activist for about 20 years. A coalition of local and statewide civil rights groups are trying to end qualified immunity in Ohio. The group, Accountability Now Ohio, set up a petition drive in Cincinnati Saturday afternoon. Their goal is to collect about two thousand signatures from Montgomery, Franklin and Hamilton counties in order to register as a political action committee. Once they are a PAC, the...

and last updated 2021-04-07 23:30:30-04 CINCINNATI — April 7, 2021 marks the 20-year anniversary of the death of Timothy Thomas. His fatal shooting by a Cincinnati Police officer led to civil unrest in the city and – ultimately – the Collaborative Agreement, designed to improve relations between police and the public they serve. A crowd gathered in Washington Park Wednesday night to mark the solemn occasion and ask the question: “What’s changed in the two decades since he died?” “I want to get this story right because history cannot be told by other people,�...

4:59 The CCA investigates all cases of serious police interactions like firing a weapon or when a person dies in custody. But it's just beginning work on some of the key goals. Cincinnati is often cited as a model for other cities looking to establish police oversight boards. CCA Executive Director Gabe Davis says the city has a nearly 20-year head start. "There are a lot of other models out there for how to do this work," Davis said. "We are unique in the sense that we have an investigative driven model. We're not there just to audit what's done by the police, but really there's an independe...

1:01 Mona Jenkins speaks to the crowd as people gather at Washington Park in memorial of Timothy Thomas, who died 20 years ago this month after being shot and killed by then-Cincinnati Police officer, Stephen Roach, which eventually led to city-wide civil unrest for nearly a week. Credit Jason Whitman / WVXU Thomas, a Black man, was 19 years old when he was shot and killed by a Cincinnati police officer in 2001. He'd run from police who tried to arrest him for past nonviolent misdemeanors, mostly traffic citations. Officer Stephen Roach and Thomas both ended up in an alleyway near Republic St...

Tom Uhlman / AP The civil unrest in 2001 sparked by the deaths of Black men at the hands of Cincinnati police did more than grab international attention. It also accelerated advocates' efforts for systemic reforms to the city's police department. Those reforms, mandated by federal courts after the unrest, became known as the Collaborative Agreement. Cincinnati has received national praise for the agreement, but its component parts are sometimes not well understood. And a 2017 effort to update the Collaborative Agreement has left questions about whether it is being administered as intende...