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Slain black teenager mourned
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HUNDREDS of people mulled around outside the New Prospect Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio on Saturday as police helicopters buzzed overhead.
Some wore yellow chest stickers reading "Danger: Police in the area", printed up by the Black Panthers while others carried flyers saying "Slain but not in vain".
One young T-shirt printer had even made up a few T-shirts with the message "No justice, no peace, these our streets, f... the police. 1981-2001."
Overall, the mood of the overwhelmingly black crowd was relaxed and calm ahead of the funeral of Timothy Thomas.
"I just hope after today the city leaders will sit down and talk to the African-American youth of this town," said Vernon Kelly, 35, a youth worker with the city of Cincinnati.
Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell said many of the blacks he had spoken to felt disillusioned and disenfranchised.
But "I told them that the system is not without promise to meet their legitimate interest and needs," he told reporters.
"The great leaders of the civil rights struggles have demonstrated over the years we must have the courage not to get restless but to act with a common purpose," Blackwell said.
Cincinnati's much-criticized police force promised to keep its distance from mourners at the funeral services for 19-year-old Thomas.
The security presence around the church would be deliberately low-key even though thousands of mourners are expected to attend, the city's police chief Thomas Streicher told a press conference earlier.
"This is going to be an extremely sad day ... there is a loss of life here ... a family that no longer has a son, has a father," Streicher said.
"We certainly understand that's going to be an emotional situation."
There would be no police officers in the immediate vicinity of the church in the heavily black Over-the-Rhine neighborhood where the unarmed Thomas was gunned down by a white police officer just a week ago.
"Our emphasis is going to be on facilitating the needs of that family and Reverend Lynch in conducting that funeral today," the chief told reporters.
The fatal shooting of the youth in the early hours of last Saturday by officer Steven Roach touched off the worst unrest this southern Ohio city has seen in more than 30 years.
Hundreds of angry rioters, most of them black youths, went on the rampage in the early part of the week, looting, torching dustcarts and hurling bricks at white motorists in the worst civil unrest seen here since the disturbances that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.
Streicher said that Roach was devastated by what had happened and that the four-year department veteran was a "caring and compassionate man".
But the killing of Thomas, who was gunned down in an alley after he fled police officers trying to arrest him on 14 warrants -- mostly for traffic violations -- ignited racial tensions in this, not unusually segregated town, and tapped into black anger at the perceived racial bias in the city's predominantly white police force.
Mayor Charlie Luken acknowledged that the string of killings has undermined the black community's confidence in the force on Saturday.
"The extent of the anger and frustration certainly boiled over with the shooting of Mr Thomas but I don't believe we were unaware of the anger and frustration that is in the African American community ... as a result of the shootings we have had over the last few years," he said.
The mayor has called in the US Justice Department to conduct a thorough review of the force in the wake of Thomas' death -- the 15th killing of a black man by the city's police force since 1995.
The mayor has said the department has "nothing to hide", but he is determined that the force be given a clean bill of health by an independent third party.
Meanwhile the state of emergency and dusk to dawn curfew imposed by Luken on Thursday in an effort to stop the violence continued overnight, with some 216 people being arrested overnight for curfew violations, authorities said.
Overall though, the situation overnight had been peaceful, said Streicher, although authorities indicated the lockdown would continue at least another night.
Meanwhile the scene outside the New Prospect Baptist Church was calm on Saturday as a trickle of mourners mixed with a strong security presence supplied by the NAACP and the Black Panthers group.
(SD-Agencies)
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