CINCINNATI – Police will have more officers on duty and on call Wednesday when a judge announces his verdict in the trial of a white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man.

But authorities said they don’t expect a repeat of the rioting that followed the April 7 shooting of Timothy Thomas, 19. The terrorist attacks on the nation have drawn some of the attention away from police officer Stephen Roach’s trial on misdemeanor charges of negligent homicide and obstructing official business.

“We expect that we may see small pockets of unrest, but nothing like we saw in April,” police spokesman Lt. Kurt Byrd said.

The shooting sparked three nights of rioting, the city’s worst racial unrest since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. A citywide curfew was ordered, dozens of people were injured and more than 800 were arrested.

Lawyers presented testimony all last week to Hamilton County Municipal Judge Ralph E. Winkler, who heard the trial without a jury.

It is believed to be the first time since the police department was started in the late 1800s that a Cincinnati officer has gone on trial for the shooting death of a suspect, Byrd said.

Roach, 27, a city officer since 1997, could get up to nine months in jail or be placed on probation if convicted of both charges.

Cecil Thomas, executive director of the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission, said he also doesn’t expect widespread disturbances after the trial. However, he said, “Young black males, in particular, are very concerned as to the outcome.

“They are already angry over the fact that the most he can get is nine months. They want to see justice as if it were them on trial,” Thomas said.

“The old folks, for the most part, are resolved to the fact that yes, we’ve got problems here, but we’ve got bigger problems with what’s going on around the country,” said Thomas, who has joined with clergy members in recent months to walk the city’s streets and talk to young blacks about their concerns.

Timothy Thomas had run from three other police officers, scaled fences and was in a neighborhood plagued by guns, drug deals and violence, defense lawyer Merlyn Shiverdecker said in the trial’s closing arguments Monday. Roach was doing his job by trying to catch a man named in arrest warrants, Shiverdecker said.

Prosecutor Stephen McIntosh countered that Roach was wrong to run through the alley with his finger on the trigger of his revolver. He said other officers who had been chasing Thomas testified they had not drawn their weapons or perceived a need to do so. McIntosh also said Roach told homicide investigators differing versions of what happened “to salvage his job.”

The officer at first said Timothy Thomas made a threatening move toward him, and he thought Thomas had a gun. Roach later told investigators that Thomas stepped around a corner in the alley and startled him, and that the officer accidentally shot him.

Shiverdecker said investigators failed to take into account how the darkness would have affected Roach’s perception, or how the instinctive fear he experienced when he felt threatened could have affected what he recalled when he spoke to police about the shooting.

Shiverdecker said the officer’s fear made him involuntarily fire his weapon.

After the trial is over, Roach faces possible department discipline, including firing, Byrd said. Cincinnati’s Office of Municipal Investigation and the city’s Citizens Police Review Panel also are to review the shooting.