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Improving Police–Community Relations in Cincinnati

In 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice reviewed the use of force by the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD). This review, combined with a brief period of civil unrest, sparked partly by several police killings of black residents in a relatively short period, led the CPD to enter into an agreement with local police and civil rights groups to improve police–community relations.

The RAND Center on Quality Policing researchers were asked to evaluate progress over a five-year period. The second-year results from the evaluation focused on one of the agreement's key goals: "ensure fair, equitable, and courteous treatment for all" parties in police–community interactions.

The study found there is a perception of bias in Cincinnati policing, fueled in part by the fact that more blacks than nonblacks live in the high-crime neighborhoods where CPD engages in more proactive policing. This perception is reinforced by experiences at traffic stops. Researchers analyzed 325 randomly sampled video records of traffic stops and found several key differences, including the fact that black drivers were more likely to experience proactive policing during the stop (e.g., more questions about drugs or weapons and longer stops that were significantly more likely to involve searches).

But although blacks citizens tend to experience a more intensive police presence than nonblacks, analysis of vehicle stop data showed, as they did in the first-year evaluation, that there is no systematic pattern of racial bias, once stops of black and white drivers from the same neighborhoods at the same times of day and with other matched situational characteristics are compared. When situational factors are not equivalent, differences between blacks and nonblacks are very large. But when black and white drivers are matched, most differences disappear.

The study findings suggest room for improvement. For example, CPD resource allocation and crime control policies disproportionately affect blacks, which places a greater burden on law-abiding residents living in the areas where enforcement is intensive. The burden may be partly alleviated by developing a clear sense of what the community values in crime reduction and then tailoring interventions.

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