Timothy Thomas and the Collaborative Agreement
Ohio
April seventh, two thousand one, was a Saturday. Timothy Thomas was nineteen years old. He had outstanding warrants, all of them for nonviolent offenses, mostly traffic stops. He was running through Over-the-Rhine when Cincinnati police officer Stephen Roach saw him in an alley. Roach fired. Thomas was unarmed. He died at the scene.
Thomas was the fifteenth Black man killed by Cincinnati police between nineteen ninety-five and two thousand one. Not the fifteenth suspect, not the fifteenth person with a record. The fifteenth Black man. The pattern had been documented. Complaints had been filed. Community members had raised alarms at city council. The pattern had not changed.
The days after Thomas's death brought the largest urban civil unrest in the United States since the nineteen ninety-two Los Angeles riots. Crowds filled the streets of Over-the-Rhine. Curfews were imposed. The National Guard was called. Businesses were damaged. Mayor Charles Luken declared a state of emergency.
What happened next was unusual. Over the following year, a negotiated process brought together the city government, the Cincinnati Police Department, the police union, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Black United Front. Community members participated directly. The process was difficult, contested, and, at times, close to collapsing.
On April twelfth, two thousand two, the Collaborative Agreement was signed at two in the morning. It established a Citizen Complaint Authority, revised pursuit and use-of-force protocols, created mobile crisis mental health teams, and installed federal monitoring for six years. A separate Memorandum of Agreement with the Department of Justice was signed the same day.
Police scholars and civil rights advocates from cities across the country studied it. When police accountability reform became a national conversation after later killings in other cities, researchers pointed to Cincinnati's two thousand two agreement as an example of what negotiated reform could produce.
Officer Roach was acquitted of the charges brought against him. Timothy Thomas's name is not on the agreement.
