A police reform advocacy group that issued a report on Cincinnati policing disparities last month has added to its analysis, saying Cincinnati Police task forces, specifically, have stopped Black people at six times the rate they stopped white people over more than 15 years of contact card data.
Those stops represent a tiny portion of the overall number of police stops in the dataset, the report acknowledges, and were made by a small number of officers.
Original analysis
Campaign Zero's initial report, released last month, considered data from 2009 to 2025 contained on those contact cards, or short forms officers fill out when they stop a person. The analysis found Black people accounted for 80% of pedestrian stops and 66% of motorist stops reported on those cards in 2025 — even though Cincinnati is only 40% Black.
Contact cards were instituted as part of the city's 2003 Collaborative Agreement policing reforms. Those reforms arose from a federal lawsuit filed by the Black United Front and ACLU of Ohio accusing Cincinnati Police 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, sparking months of civil unrest.
City and police officials questioned the methodology of the initial report, pointing out it does not take into account how officers are deployed and other factors. WVXU sought comment from the city on the more recent addendum about task forces and will update this story if the city responds.
Public defenders
Hamilton County Chief Public Defender Angela Chang says the contact cards were created to allow for this kind of scrutiny. She says Campaign Zero's task force analysis raises important questions.
"The community as a whole, we should reasonably ask more follow-up questions," she says. "I think the data was always meant to flag — in the most simplistic way possible — that there may be something amiss. Maybe the policies on how officers are trained or deployed might need examination."
Chang says the disparities found in Campaign Zero's analysis mirror concerns about policing and tactics task forces employ that attorneys with the public defender's office run into when representing their clients.
"Looking at the addendum, it's not surprising," she says. "I think it just confirms the patterns we see day to day in court."
Task forces
Cincinnati Police task forces carry out various roles related to crime reduction. Some, like the violent crime, vice, and narcotics task forces, as well as the task force attached to the Crime Gun Intelligence Center, are focused on specific subsets of crime. Others, like the Safe Streets task force, have a more general crime-reduction mission.
Most of these task forces are made up of a small number of officers, Campaign Zero's analysis acknowledges.
Campaign Zero's addendum uses data about where within the department officers are assigned. That data was provided by the city after Campaign Zero released its district-level analysis of racial disparities in stops by specific officers and supervisors that the city said was likely flawed.
Updated data
Using the updated data, the addendum report breaks assignments out into five categories:
- Task forces
- Investigative
- Patrol
- Specialty
- Traffic
The analysis found combined task force stops accounted for a small portion of overall stops conducted by Cincinnati Police officers — only about 13,000 of the more than 472,000 stops in the data set. But Black people were represented 6.29 times more often in those stops than white people when controlling for share of the population.
Other categories had smaller disparities in stops. The investigative and patrol categories stopped Black people at roughly three times the rate they did whites when controlling for each demographic's share of the city's population, according to Campaign Zero's analysis. That's roughly equal to the overall disparities found in the group's initial report. Patrol stops made up the bulk of the stops in the dataset — more than 347,000.
The specialty and traffic units had lower disparities, with traffic having an almost equal number of stops based on each demographic's share of the population.
City officials have said they take equity in policing seriously. Mayor Aftab Pureval released a statement saying he supports the police department and believes it is committed to transparency and evaluation. Pureval pledged that any systemic issues found during further analysis "will be addressed immediately."
Next steps
The city late last month put out a request for proposals for a third-party contractor to conduct an independent analysis of police contact card data.
Cincinnati City Manager Sheryl 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, to which Long said the city remains fully committed. She points to city efforts like the Alternative Response to Crisis Program and other community responders through the 311 system.
Community groups, including the Urban League and the NAACP, announced two community forums around the results of the Campaign Zero report. They held the first June 30. Another is scheduled for July 14.
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