Twenty-five years after the killing of Timothy Thomas sparked a citywide reckoning with police accountability in Cincinnati, a new Campaign Zero analysis reveals that racially biased policing has not only persisted — it has deepened. Drawing on over 472,000 police contact cards filed between 2009 and 2025, our report Contact Cards in Cincinnati documents what the data makes undeniable: Cincinnati Police officers stopped Black people 3.4 times more often than White people in 2025, searched them at twice the rate, and were nearly twice as likely to use force against them once stopped. These disparities exist across every neighborhood, every stop type, and every outcome measured — and they are getting worse, not better.

The report goes further than documenting the gap. It dismantles the most common justification for it. Using rigorous statistical analysis, Campaign Zero researchers tested whether higher crime rates in certain neighborhoods explain the racial disparities in policing — and found that they don’t. The strongest predictor of whether a Black resident will be stopped at disproportionate rates is not how much crime occurs in a neighborhood, but how White that neighborhood’s population is. The more White the neighborhood, the more likely a Black person is to be stopped there. This is the data Cincinnati’s elected officials, police leadership, and community members need to demand structural change — and it is a call we cannot afford to ignore.