Contact-Card Fight Exposes a City’s Unchecked Spending
CINCINNATI — For the average Cincinnatian, the fight over police contact-card data might seem like a bureaucratic squabble. But the money is impossible to ignore. Police, fire and emergency communications together eat up roughly 75 percent of the city’s nearly $2 billion annual budget.
That is $1.5 billion a year. And according to a new opinion piece, that money has been managed without a dedicated professional safety director for more than two decades.
The city eliminated the safety director position right before the Collaborative Agreement was signed. The move gave the city manager direct oversight of police and fire. It also handed the mayor more direct influence over the chiefs.
The opinion piece argues that shift turned public safety into a political tool. The result, it says, is chaos.
The recent firings of Police Chief Teresa Theetge and Fire Chief Michael Washington are offered as proof. The cost of those decisions — in severance, in lawsuits, in lost leadership — falls on taxpayers. Residents in neighborhoods like Over-the-Rhine and Avondale have lived with the consequences longest.
They are the ones stopped, questioned and documented through police contact cards. Those cards were supposed to be analyzed years ago. They were not.
The opinion piece makes clear that city managers and mayors, not the police department, owned that failure. The data sat.
No one asked why. No one demanded answers. That failure predates the current administration.
It stretches back before the Collaborative Agreement was even signed. The opinion piece traces the problem to a structural decision: replacing a professional safety department with a political layer.
That layer, it argues, has created chaos. The safety director used to supervise police, fire and emergency communications as a single unit. Now those functions answer to the mayor’s office.
The difference is not subtle. A safety director is a career public safety official. A mayor is a politician.
The opinion piece calls for a re-engineering of the city charter. The first step, it says, is for City Council to restore a functioning safety department and a safety director.
That would mean taking direct oversight of police and fire away from the mayor and the city manager. It would mean putting a professional back in charge of the $1.5 billion. The contact-card data fight became a proxy for that larger argument.
By nightfall, the debate was no longer about the cards themselves. It was about whether Cincinnati’s public safety oversight has become too political to function.
The opinion piece argues it has. It points to the firings as evidence. It points to the unanalyzed data as evidence.
It points to two decades of inaction as evidence. For the people who live in the neighborhoods where police interactions are most frequent, the stakes are concrete. They are not abstract.
The contact cards are a record of how the city treats its citizens. That record was never studied.
That money was never properly managed. The opinion piece says the failures belong to city managers and mayors. The people affected by those failures have no say in who holds those offices.
They only feel the results. The city’s budget is nearly $2 billion.
Three-quarters of that goes to public safety. That is a lot of money to spend without a professional overseeing it. That is a lot of trust to place in a political system that just fired two chiefs in quick succession.
The opinion piece argues the system is broken. The evidence is already on the record.
