Thousands of Cincinnatians have protested police brutality and systemic racism over the summer and now into autumn. Across the country, activist groups have proposed suggestions for reform and altogether new ways of approaching policing. One such group includes the Cincinnati-based People’s Safety Reimagined.
The organization bills itself as “a political action committee that is reimagining public safety by way of an amendment to the Charter of the City of Cincinnati, which would fundamentally replace ‘police’ with a comprehensive Public Safety Department.”
That amendment fell “just a hair short” of the signatures needed to put it on the ballot this November, PSRe’s campaign manager Jeremy Schlicher says. But their work will continue into 2021. (They’re looking at next year’s spring and fall elections to see if it makes sense to put it on the ballot, alongside considering other avenues for implementation.)
Schlicher, an Over-the-Rhine resident, says that their volunteer base, who hail from 29 different Cincinnati neighborhoods, are eager to continue.
From July 23 to Aug. 13, they collected about 6,870 signatures; of those, Schlicher says 3,871 were validated — 4,680 valid signatures would have been needed to land on the ballot.
“The challenge with this is that the people who sign a petition have to meet two requirements: One, they must live in the city of Cincinnati, which is a lot harder to define than what I think most people realize because it is kind of an amoeba with pockets in it,” Schlicher says. “And then you need to be registered to vote.”
Through their own internal validation, the latter issue accounted for about 1,500 signees, many of whom believed they were registered to vote but had moved and had not yet updated their information. According to Schlicher, they found almost 750 signatures that the Board of Elections invalidated that PSRe believes shouldn’t have been.
“As a steering committee, we’ve discussed that (voter registration) obviously is an issue, particularly with the November 3 election coming up,” Schlicher says, “and one of our next steps (has been going) to these 1,500-ish people and saying, ‘Hey, we want to help you update your registration because we want to make sure that we enfranchise your vote.’”
The PSRe public safety proposal hinges on five concepts: to refocus, restructure, retool, reinvest and rebuild.
“One of the central tenets of our group is the understanding that public safety is a holistic endeavor,” says steering committee member and Clifton resident Maliq Matthew, “and that better-resourced, more politically enabled communities are safer communities; not all of what public safety entails has to even go through the police department.”
About 36%, or $152.6 million, of the city’s $411.9 million operating budget goes to the Cincinnati Police Department. PSRe, as outlined in their amendment language, would lower it to 25%. PSRe aims to create the Public Safety Department, which would consist of no more than seven divisions, including health and human services, peace officers, enforcement, felony crimes and a citizen complaint authority.
Only the Felony Crime Division, meant to investigate violent and felony crimes, would be equipped with lethal weapons. Instead, the amendment cites that Peace, Mental Health and Social Services Officers would be used to de-escalate and defuse conflicts without the use of deadly force.
Schlicher says that, according to data from the city’s Cincy Insight, only 9% of police service calls between January 2017 and the present have dealt with crime. Only 0.7%, he says, handled violent crime. (The New York Times reported that, in 2020 so far, serious violent crimes have made up 1.2% of all CPD service calls. These statistics are similar to other cities, including Baltimore, Seattle, San Diego and New Orleans.)
“When we speak about public safety, lots of people think about police brutality as a beginning or end of it… If we’re talking about better communities, we’re also talking about public health, mental health, education,” Matthew says, adding housing and food security as other elements that need to be prioritized.
If those issues are addressed, the need for police engagement lessens, he says.
As stated on PSRe’s website: “An evidence-based, proportional restructuring of public safety will allow for more efficient and effective operation. We agree with (Cincinnati Police Chief Eliot Isaac) that police officers are expected to solve too many problems, and we agree that the City also needs to ‘focus on employment and housing and education.’ To that end, we call for Public Safety funding to be redirected to programs that support economic inclusion and development.
“Reinvesting in a reimagined vision of public safety will lead to more positive outcomes than will the status quo of spending an undue portion of taxpayer dollars on inefficient and ineffective policing strategies.”
The group cited programs and departments they looked to while drafting the amendment, which included Eugene, Oregon’s mobile crisis unit known as Cahoots; Portland, Oregon’s and L.A.’s peace officers; and, closer to home, Alexandria, Kentucky’s 2016 decision to hire a social worker instead of another police officer.
Of course, there are other activist groups proposing measures throughout Cincinnati. One of those, which PSRe references in their mission statement, is the Collaborative Agreement — a set of reforms put in place following the 2001 killing of Timothy Thomas, the 15th Black man to be shot in five years by CPD. The agreement aimed to implement more community-oriented policing, as opposed to aggressive tactics. Two years ago, an independent review found that the city hadn’t held up several parts of the deal. Activists have been calling for a much-needed refresh.
PSRe said that the foundation the Collaborative has built should be made stronger and that without reimagining the role of police officers and restructuring CPD to include mental health and social services units, lasting change is not possible.
“Where are we holding these people accountable? There’s (a lack of) accountability there. It’s that sort of tension of: How do we hold the cops accountable to what they agreed to do?” says Petra Hostetler, PSRe’s volunteer spokesperson. “Can you really negotiate with people who don’t want to negotiate and shouldn’t that power be within the people?”
Hostetler, a resident of Price Hill, said that money should be targeted not at the symptoms of crime, but at the source of the problem via reinvesting in communities and positive programs.
“One of the things that’s come across during the course of our campaign is how much hunger there is out there for this,” Matthew says. “But we didn’t invent that energy. We just recognized it, distilled it and tried to perform to it.”
As 2021 approaches, the group will continue working on fleshing out the amendment, reaching out to communities and seeing if there’s a path forward to get the charter amendment to voters.
“On a personal note, but I think as a group we’re pretty confident as well, I’m 100% confident that we will get our signatures the next time around,” Schlicher says. “For one, we’d have more than three weeks to do it.”
To learn more about People’s Safety Reimagined, visit psrecincinnati.org.
This article appears in The Fall Guide.
