Cincinnati Police gave their annual public safety statistics update to Council's Law and Public Safety Committee Wednesday.
CPD data shows that overall violent crime rose about 4% in 2024. That includes burglaries, assaults, and other violent offenses. The city had 73 homicides in 2024, one more than the year prior.
Senior Crime Analyst Jillian Desmond told Council the data is nuanced.
"Our shootings are going down, our gun violence is going down, while some of our other types of aggravated assaults are going up," she said.
Despite the increase over 2023, violent crime levels were almost 10% below those seen in 2019, according to CPD data, the year before a pandemic-related crime spike.
Among the stubborn spots: thefts of guns from cars. CPD data suggests 61% of stolen firearms were taken from cars.
Incidents involving youth
Incidents involving young people had similar troubling trends, as well as some bright spots. Calls for service involving youth have risen steadily over the past few years, and were higher for all but December 2024. Most of those calls were centered around transit centers like Government Square and Oakley Station and schools, many of which saw big increases in calls for service last year.
Police Chief Theresa Theetge said CPD is considering adding two bicycle officers at Oakley Station during after-school hours.
Desmond told Council CPD has increased patrols around the problem areas, but that sometimes groups of students congregating after schools shift locations to avoid officers.
"If they really want to find a place to fight, they can, and they have," Desmond said.
Overall levels of violent crime involving youth actually dropped by 8% last year, and property crime involving youth dropped 11%. The outlier in those trends were youth-involved robberies, which were up 25% in 2024 over the previous three-year average.
Theetge and Desmond said they had troubling reports of parents getting mixed up in disputes that started at schools.
"What has increased is parents now involving themselves in youth disorder," Desmond said. "Bringing their kids back to the scene where there are a lot of students because they want their kids to stand up for themselves, in some cases parents actually fighting kids themselves. That's something that's different than what we saw last year."
Car wrecks down; response time mixed
Auto wrecks were also included in the report. Desmond told Council those were trending down until the closure of the 471 bridge caused a spike.
Desmond said otherwise, wrecks were down last year. The city had 27 fatal wrecks in 2024 compared to 31 the year prior.
Another data point in the report: police response time following the redistribution of CPD's police districts.
Chief Theetge told Council the redistricting did not increase response times for calls significantly. Response time for all calls fell about 25 seconds, and it fell by almost a minute for routine calls. But it rose by between 33 and 49 seconds for more urgent requests for service.
Cincinnati City Council member Mark Jeffreys asked for a comparison of response times for the area covered by the former CPD District 5. Desmond agreed that's a good next step in tracking the effect of the city's changes to police districts.
The entire report is available online.
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