The rioters in Cincinnati looted businesses, burned buildings, and even pulled white motorists from their cars and beat them. The police arrested hundreds of them. On April 13, six days after Roach fired his fateful shots, Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken declared a state of emergency, called in the state highway patrol and announced a curfew for 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. The curfew largely worked, and the unrest subsided.

Just a few weeks before the riots, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio and a few other organizations had sued the city of Cincinnati, alleging 30 years of racial profiling. After the riots, the ACLU, Cincinnati Black United Front, the city of Cincinnati and police union settled the suit with the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement, which made numerous changes to police protocol. Officers are now trained in low-light situations, like confronting a suspect at night in an alley, as was the case in Thomas’s death. The agreement also created the Citizens Complaint Authority to investigate incidents when officers used serious force. Most importantly, it instructed officers to build relationships with the community by soliciting feedback with residents and using all available information to find solutions to problems before necessarily resorting to a law enforcement response. The ACLU of Ohio, which was one of the signatories of the agreement, hails it as “one of the most innovative plans ever devised to improve police-community relations.”

These new policies have not fixed all of the racial injustices in Cincinnati, but they have improved them. In 2010, the Rand Corporation conducted an analysis of the Cincinnati Police Department and found “no evidence of racial differences between the stops of black and those of similarly situated nonblack drivers.” The report also found that some individual officers "stop substantially more black drivers than their peers do." But that's still a big improvement over 2001, when one analysis found that black drivers were twice as likely as white ones to be cited for certain traffic violations.

“Now we have a police department that goes around and talks about it in a positive way and they talk about community-oriented policing,” Iris Roley, who was intimately involved in crafting the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “They brag on working with the community and being transparent. We can look backwards and say we did something, we didn't just complain and moan. As hard as it was, we did something. The police and the community sat at the table and hammered an agreement out.”