CINCINNATI — During a Monday evening meeting, nearly 100 members of Cincinnati's chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police unanimously voted to demand the Cincinnati Police Department walk back its stated plan of eliminating District 5.
City of Cincinnati officials and CPD leaders, including Chief Teresa Theetge, announced in May that District 5 would be eliminated, split in two and merged into districts 3 and 4. Other neighborhoods were also shifted to different districts to accommodate crime data collected.
According to a press release from Dan Hils, president of the Cincinnati FOP, the plan is not popular with every officer in the department — particularly after a CPD officer was recently beaten with his own baton and struck several times with his own Taser.
"City leaders' plans to close District 5 and spread officers thinner will force officers to drive further to respond to calls," said Hils in the press release. "Under the city's plan, patrol officers could be more than 20 minutes one-way from their assigned beat. It’s ridiculous to have patrol officers spending 40 minutes round trip every time they have to go to their district."
The concern of officers being further from locations they must serve and protect came up during the May press conference given by city leaders; Theetge emphasized several times that response and service times would not suffer under the newly created Cincinnati police district map.
"There will not be a disruption to police service in any of the 52 neighborhoods," said Theetge in May. "Our response time will continually be monitored to make sure that we are always providing the most efficient police service to the city.
Hils also said the District 5 announcement wasn't one he or other officers were aware of until CPD and city leaders made the announcement to the public in May.
The press release says "city leaders kept their plan to close District 5 secret" from Cincinnati officers and the FOP.
As a result, Hils says the FOP has spent the past two months discussing the city's plan with its members. Those discussions led to Monday night, where nearly 100 CPD officers and FOP members voted to demand Cincinnati abandon the already-crafted plan.
"It's painfully obvious that we need more officers and more patrols in Cincinnati neighborhoods, not fewer," said Hils in the press release. "The FOP hopes that the city will keep the promise it made long ago and build a new District 5 headquarters that will keep our community safe."
The Cincinnati Police Department has been playing a numbers game for years in the face of staffing shortages, moving officers to cover more patrols and reducing the amount of sergeants.
However, the plan to close District 5 wasn't just about how many officers are available in the city.
District 5 has struggled to find a home over the years, since its move to a shopping center in College Hill in 2018 that was supposed to be temporary. Before that, the district operated out of a building on Ludlow Avenue — another location that was intended to be temporary, but instead became District 5's home for more than 60 years.
In 2019, the city voted to re-allocate funding for a District 5 permanent location to an issue that city leadership felt was more pressing at the time: the hillside collapse on Columbia Parkway.
After extensive debate, Cincinnati city council members of the time voted to take all $10 million dollars from the District 5 project and reallocate it for the parkway.
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