Last year, 80% of pedestrians and 66% of motorists stopped by Cincinnati Police were Black, according to data officers recorded about their stops — a stark disparity in a city that census data says is roughly 41% Black.
A police reform advocacy group called Campaign Zero analyzed the data and issued a report on its findings.
Cincinnati and police department officials say they received the report about a week before it was made public. They told WVXU they have initial concerns about its methodology and conclusions, but stressed they take fairness in policing seriously.
The report includes data from more than 15 years of Cincinnati Police Department (CPD) records, suggesting significant and increasing racial disparities, even as the overall number of police stops has dropped considerably in recent years.
The Hamilton County Public Defender's Office obtained the data through public records requests and provided it to Campaign Zero.
Incoming Hamilton County Chief Public Defender Angela Chang says the city shouldn't sacrifice fairness for the sake of public safety.
"It's really important for citizens in this community to know that when they're going about their day-to-day business, that they're not going to be stopped for something that somebody who looks different from them isn't going to be stopped for," Chang told WVXU. "We're hoping to see a change in practice, and also really dig deep into the 'why' behind the data and to address the reasons."
City Manager Sheryl Long released a statement saying the administration "supports the work CPD has done over the last several months under the leadership of Interim Chief Adam Hennie to respond to the needs and voices of the community."
"We just got to get to work [and] get to the root facts of this," Long told WVXU in an interview. "If there is something that is going on, we want to make sure we're there to solve it."
Where the data comes from
The data comes from Cincinnati Police contact cards. Those are brief forms officers are required to fill out after they initiate any non-consensual stop of a person in the city. They list a person’s age, race, gender, the location of the stop and other details.
The department’s use of contact cards started with the Collaborative Agreement nearly 25 years ago. A federal lawsuit, filed by the Black United Front and ACLU of Ohio, accused CPD of racially biased policing. In the six years leading up to the lawsuit, Cincinnati police officers had killed more than a dozen Black men. In 2001, after the lawsuit was filed, Timothy Thomas became the 15th Black man killed by CPD, sparking months of civil unrest.
The Collaborative Agreement was a settlement to the lawsuit, and the city committed to five goals, including to "ensure fair, equitable, and courteous treatment for all." The city has not been legally obligated to follow the agreement since 2008, but officials have consistently voiced continued commitment to its goals and to community problem-oriented policing.
The city went through a "refresh" process that concluded in 2018. An independent report commissioned by the city recommended officials "routinely report to the public about progress toward bias-free policing, including the problem-solving efforts that have been applied."
Cincinnati publishes public dashboards that visualize a few years of contact card data at a time: one for traffic stops and one for pedestrian stops.
What the data shows
The 472,666 Cincinnati police stops between 2009 and 2025 analyzed in Campaign Zero’s report show significant racial disparities. For 2025, the report concludes Black people in Cincinnati were about 3.4 times more likely to be stopped by police than white people.
City officials point out that Campaign Zero cites Black residents in 2024 as 36.5% of Cincinnati's total population. That's true for people who identify as solely Black. However, when including those who indicate they are Black and another race, the share goes up to about 41% of the population that year. Using that metric, people who were Black or Black and another race were three times more likely to be stopped by police than people who are white alone.
The report suggests some of the city's policing disparities have been rising. In 2009, the first year covered by the dataset, Black residents made up 58% of motorist stops, for example — less than the 66% they represented in 2025.
Those disparities have come even as the overall number of motorist and pedestrian stops has dropped significantly. In 2009, CPD made roughly 35,000 stops involving Black people and about 22,000 stops involving white people. By 2025, those numbers had dropped to about 12,500 stops for Black people and about 5,000 stops for white people. Stops involving people of other races didn’t occur in statistically significant numbers.
“Fewer people are being stopped overall, but the burden of the stops is increasingly concentrated on Black residents,” Campaign Zero Managing Director of Research and Data Andrew Zaharia said.
Once stopped, Campaign Zero's analysis suggests Black people were roughly two times more likely to experience a search by officers; 1.9 times more likely to have force used against them; and 1.8 times more likely to be arrested.
Campaign Zero also analyzed the contact card data by neighborhood. The report says a neighborhood's crime rate does not explain the disproportionate number of stops. In fact, the report suggests the higher the percentage of white residents a neighborhood has, the greater likelihood a Black person will be stopped by police there.
In predominantly white neighborhoods, Black people were 4.5 times more likely to be stopped by police than Black people when controlling for share of the city’s population. Again, these calculations could be skewed by the specific racial category used to consider how much of Cincinnati's population is Black.
The report includes a list of ten named police officers who allegedly have the highest racial disparity in their individual stops, as well as ten named supervisors with the highest disparities among officers under their command. WVXU has reviewed, and has questions about, the methodology used to reach these conclusions, and made an editorial decision not to publish the officer and supervisor names.
City response
City Manager Sheryl Long said she fully supports the women and men of the Cincinnati Police Department, but takes the allegations seriously. Long says the city will work with a third-party vendor to analyze the report as well as data not included in the original analysis.
“I will not be caught flat-footed again with something of this matter,” Long told WVXU. “My goal is making sure that we are talking about, ‘What do you need and how can we support you all,’ so that we are examining what is happening and making sure that we are giving the amazing women and men of CPD the support they need to not be put in this position again.”
Long says the Citizen Complaint Authority (CCA) will also lead a problem-solving process that will include the community, led by CCA Director John Kennedy, Jr. and Collaborative Agreement Consultant Iris Roley. The CCA is another product of the Collaborative Agreement, which Long said the city remains fully committed to. She points to city efforts like the Alternative Response to Crisis Program and other community responders through the 311 system.
Long expressed frustration that Campaign Zero did not coordinate with the city on their analysis.
"I think what's important in the Collaborative Agreement is collaboration," Long said. "When you look at something like this that was not done in collaboration with us, that is the exact opposite of what we ask for as a city. Nonetheless, we are moving forward."
Long declined to answer questions about why the city was not already monitoring and analyzing the contact card data, saying she is focused on how to move forward.
Long said she expects to have some recommendations for City Council based on the third-party analysis and community problem solving process, when members return from summer recess in the first week of September.
Mayor Aftab Pureval said in a provided statement he supports the City Manager's response and plan.
"The bedrock of the Collaborative is open and transparent information, and CPD has repeatedly demonstrated a commitment to self evaluation. It is frustrating that the City was prevented from engaging on the study, especially when there are outstanding questions about the results," Pureval said. "We have a responsibility to take allegations of racial bias extremely seriously. I support CPD and our Administration in their work to fully review this report, and we will make sure the resources are there to implement any necessary studies and recommendations. Like all our work, if the findings show a systemic problem, they will be addressed immediately."
Real-world impacts
WVXU and The Cincinnati Enquirer recently interviewed a man who was arrested last autumn when about a dozen Cincinnati Police officers swept a West Side gas station, ostensibly on complaints people were loitering.
The man, whom WVXU is calling Rick, asked we not use his real name. WVXU has independently reviewed his court and arrest records and confirmed his arrest and a related trespassing charge.
Rick, who is Black, said he feels his stop was largely based on his race and his perceived youth.
He said the trouble began after he parked his car and was walking through a parking lot to pick up his younger brother at the gas station. The two were leaving with chips and juice Rick’s brother had purchased when multiple police cruisers pulled up.
"We were walking off and a swarm of police came out of nowhere," Rick said. "We continued to walk, and I guess they took that as disobeying, so they became more aggressive with us and told us to put our hands up."
Officers arrested Rick and his brother for trespassing. Rick’s arrest report simply states that a plainclothes officer observed him on the property. Both were booked at the Hamilton County Justice Center and were able to bond out later that night.
The arrest meant Rick temporarily couldn’t get his keys or his phone, he said. He’d just started a new manufacturing job a few days prior and missed his shift the next morning. The disruption caused him to lose the job.
Eventually, the court dismissed the fourth-degree misdemeanor trespassing charges when neither the gas station owner nor the arresting officer showed up in court.
Liam Grey Dowling is an attorney with the Hamilton County Public Defender’s office who represented Rick. Dowling says it isn’t clear what sparked the large police presence.
"It started like a lot of these cases we’ve been seeing," Dowling said. “We don’t get any context for what the underlying stop is, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, many officers appear. In this case, they arrested seven Black men who were just in the area, with no association as far as I can see."
Limitations
Public defenders say Rick’s case illustrates some of their concerns about disparities reflected in the contact card data. But in at least one way, it also shows the limitations of the dataset — because Rick's arrest didn't generate a contact card.
Officers are supposed to create a contact card for each non-consensual stop, but it's unknown how many do not and why.
There are other questions unanswered by the data, including an incomplete picture of the ways in which officers and supervisors are using discretion in relation to police stops.
Motorist stops involving non-moving violations — things like broken tail lights that don’t immediately threaten public safety — are usually indicative of an officer’s discretion. In stops with a higher likelihood of officer discretion, disparities are higher.
However, discretion in many stops isn’t clear-cut. It’s also unclear how internal decisions about where the department deploys officers within neighborhoods or its policing districts inform the disparities seen in the contact card data.
"We’d like to know how they decided to deploy officers and what sorts of instructions they were given," Campaign Zero’s Andrew Zaharia said. "These are big unknowns that obviously have a big impact on the disparities we record."
Geographic issues bring up other questions about some of the findings in the report, a police department data analyst told WVXU. For example, there are a number of spots around the city, including some highly-trafficked areas, that are often incorrectly geocoded. That means they don't map accurately in large datasets. The police official had questions about how the Campaign Zero analysis accounted for that phenomenon.
Other questions the data raises involve times Cincinnati Police seemed to be getting things right. Campaign Zero’s report notes that in 2012, the city saw near-parity when it came to the demographics of motorist stops. In 2016, the same thing occurred with pedestrian stops. The report asks what policies and practices CPD might have engaged in that caused that positive change and why the disparities began growing again in later years.
There are broader questions, too, about what the data might tell us about the 25-year-old efforts to reform policing in the wake of the Collaborative Agreement.
Rick, the man arrested during a police sweep at a West Side gas station, said his encounter seemed random and reminded him of things he’d heard and seen about the way police used to behave.
"It made me feel violated for real, discriminated against," Rick said. “It felt like a back-in-the-day type vibe, like how people probably used to feel … the way [the police officer] was coming at me aggressively."
Angela Chang, the incoming chief public defender, said it’s a moment to take stock in Cincinnati’s policing practices.
"I’d certainly like to see where things are at in terms of the models being used,” she said. "As in any organization, what happens on the day-to-day level can be very different than policy. That is a question for CPD to think about — are we practicing what we believe in, and if not, why not?"
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