The City of Cincinnati will hire a New Orleans firm to review years of data collected by police officers about who they stop.
Assistant City Manager John Brazina revealed Friday that the city signed a contract in early September with AH Datalytics.
The contractor will review contact card data generated by Cincinnati Police Department stops and analyze the methodology used by an advocacy group that reported big racial disparities in the data earlier this year, Brazina said during a conference observing the 25th anniversary of police reform efforts in Cincinnati.
Contact cards are brief forms CPD officers fill out any time they stop a person, recording demographic and location information as well as the outcome of a stop. They're one outcome of Cincinnati's historic 2002 Collaborative Agreement, which came about after a 2001 federal lawsuit by the Cincinnati Black United Front and the Ohio ACLU over racial discrimination in policing.
The city issued the RFP for reviewing the data June 12 in the wake of a June 11 report by nonprofit police reform advocacy group Campaign Zero. That report analyzed 15 years of contact card data by race, location of stops, outcomes of the recorded interactions with police and more. Among its findings: in 2025, 80% of motorists and 66% of pedestrians CPD officers stopped were Black. Cincinnati's population is about 40% Black. The Hamilton County Public Defender's Office obtained the data through public records requests and provided it to Campaign Zero.
Overall, the report suggested significant and increasing racial disparities, even as the overall number of police stops has dropped considerably in recent years. A subsequent addendum by Campaign Zero suggested similar disparities in stops done by Cincinnati Police task forces.
Cincinnati leaders expressed frustration that Campaign Zero did not share the data with the city before making it public and questioned the methodology of the report. But Mayor Aftab Pureval, City Manager Sheryl Long and other city officials have stressed they're committed to equity in policing.
The RFP closed June 22. The selection process involved a committee chaired by Citizen Complaint Authority Director John Kennedy, Jr. The city in July declined to answer a WVXU reporter's questions about how much the report will cost and how many applications the city received. Brazina said the committee considered multiple applicants and interviewed two before selecting AH Datalytics.
"They will have 30 days to do their analysis and provide the city manager some preliminary recommendations and findings," Brazina said. "We expect to see something in mid-October."
Broader police reform efforts
In response to the Campaign Zero report, city officials have said the Citizen Complaint Authority (CCA) will also lead a problem-solving process including community input. That effort will be helmed by CCA Director Kennedy, Jr. and Iris Roley, a city consultant on the Collaborative Agreement.
Roley was among community leaders pushing for the Collaborative Agreement, including its requirement that officers fill out contact cards. She also helped organize the 25th anniversary conference, which opened Thursday night at the Freedom Center and held panels on policing data, how the media covers gun violence and other issues Friday at the New Prospect Baptist Church in Roselawn. Another slate of panels will take place Saturday at the church. It's the third year the Cincinnati Black United Front and other groups have held a conference around policing reforms.
In the six years leading up to the Black United Front's 2001 lawsuit that led to contact cards, the CCA and other reforms, 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.
A year of negotiation between community groups, the city, the U.S. Department of Justice over the federal suit eventually led to the Collaborative Agreement.
Roley said the report about contact card data the city has commissioned is one small part of police accountability efforts. Those efforts date back to the days before the original agreement and also include a series of Collaborative Agreement refresh initiatives that wrapped up in 2018 and produced 52 recommendations, including some related to contact cards.
"Cincinnati deserves to have its own analysis of the report," she said. "Cincinnati also deserves to have the recommendations around the contact cards from the Bias-Free Policing report, which was done in 2018."
At the conference, Roley encouraged attendees to join action teams related to the refresh to provide community input on issues related to equity in policing.
City leaders say they're committed to the Collaborative Agreement and ensuring equity in policing, whatever the outcomes of the AH Datalytics report. The city says 35 of the refresh's recommendations are completed or in progress. Those include changes to contact card policy that require officers to fill out every field and provide standardized location data.
"It is right and it is necessary to look back on the ground-breaking work that has been done to advance problem-solving oriented policing, to improve the systems our residents depend on," said Mayor Aftab Pureval during the Collaborative Agreement conference's opening night. "But even more important is what we do now with the lessons we can take from the past."
WVXU's Becca Costello contributed to this report.
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