CINCINNATI, July 6 — The fight over police contact-card data has laid bare a city government that has, for more than two decades, failed its own basic management duties. The data collected from police interactions with people through these cards should have been analyzed years ago, according to a new opinion piece. City managers and mayors, not the Cincinnati Police Department, have owned and failed those responsibilities since before the Collaborative Agreement was signed.
That agreement marked a turning point. Right before it was signed, the city eliminated the safety director position, declaring the city manager would oversee police and fire more directly.
The move gave the mayor more direct influence over the chiefs. The shift toward political management of public safety, the piece argues, has not worked well. The chaos and expense from the recent firings of Police Chief Teresa Theetge and Fire Chief Michael Washington now stand as compelling evidence.
The opinion calls for a re-engineering of the city charter to restore good government. The first step, it says, is for City Council to restore a functioning safety department and director.
Police, fire and emergency communications functions together traditionally make up around 75% of the city’s nearly $2 billion annual budget. That is a lot of money. Until the safety department and the director were phased out, those functions were all supervised by a dedicated professional.
Now, the argument goes, the political layer has created chaos. By nightfall, the debate over the contact-card data had become a proxy for a larger argument: whether Cincinnati’s public safety oversight has become too political to function. The opinion piece makes clear that the failures predate the current administration.
It points to a structural problem in the charter that has been building for years. What comes next is uncertain.
The call to restore a safety director and re-engineer the charter is a direct challenge to the current power structure. City Council now faces a choice: continue with political management of public safety, or take the first step toward changing the system entirely.
