Cincinnati's police force has promised to keep its distance from mourners at funeral services for black teenager Timothy Thomas later today.
The security presence around the Baptist church holding the service 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.
The fatal shooting of the 19-year-old in the early hours of last Saturday by officer Steven Roach touched off the worst unrest the 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 since the disturbances that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.
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 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.
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 in an effort to stop the violence continued overnight, with some 216 people being arrested overnight for curfew violations.
Meanwhile, the scene outside the New Prospect Baptist Church was calm today as a trickle of mourners mixed with a strong security presence supplied by the NAACP and the Black Panthers group.
AFP