Cincinnati’s recently terminated police chief alleges she was pushed out of her job by political pressure from Mayor Aftab Pureval — not for poor performance — and her attorney says he will file two lawsuits as early as this week for wrongful termination and a violation of her constitutional rights.
Teresa Theetge, who was terminated on April 23, claims in a nearly two-hour pre-disciplinary hearing recording released by her attorney’s office, Finney Law Firm, that Pureval issued an ultimatum to City Manager Sheryl Long following a pair of high-profile downtown shootings in 2025: fire Theetge or face termination herself.
“[The mayor] said, ‘it’s me or you, one of us has to go,'” Theetge said, repeating what the city manager had said to her in a panic.
A call to Mayor Pureval’s office went unanswered. City Manager Long could not be reached for comment.
Attorney Stephen Imm held a news conference Friday, where he called the firing “illegal” and said the lawsuits would follow as soon as possible.
The insubordination charge
The city’s central allegation against Theetge was that she defied Long’s orders by traveling to a law enforcement conference in Denver, conduct the city characterized as insubordination.
Theetge flatly denied it. She said Long never told her not to go and had actually given her a task list for the conference, including consulting other chiefs about crisis communications, learning how police leaders navigate national politics during local incidents and connecting with Honolulu’s police chief about a safety ambassador program.
She and her husband had barely arrived when Long asked her to return.
“We were probably in Denver for a total of about 30 minutes, excluding the time in the airport,” Theetge said.
According to the April 23 termination letter, Long wrote, “You said that I did not indicate that you should not go to Denver. This is wrong … You admitted you went to Denver two days after a shooting on Fountain Square, and after I told you that it was time for you to step down. This shows further poor judgment and failure of leadership.”
Staffing strain and a summer safety dispute
Theetge said the conflict with city leadership had been building for months. In August alone, she said, Cincinnati officers logged roughly 23,000 hours of overtime and off-duty work on top of their regular shifts.
“They were reaching a breaking point,” she said.
She also described a dispute over a Summer Safety Program proposed by 3CDC, a nonprofit developer focused on revitalizing the city, which she called “absolutely unreasonable” given staffing constraints.
The plan, she said, required 203 officer-hours per day across the urban core. She said these were commitments the mayor was making publicly that she could not fulfill.
Theetge alleged that Long privately agreed the plan was unworkable while publicly supporting it.
“When we would be in a meeting with the mayor or somebody else, she made it look as though she supported the program, but in private, when I would have conversations with her, she totally agreed that it was unreasonable,” Theetge said.
According to Theetge’s termination letter, Long sent an email on Augst 12, 2025, about the summer plan.
“I am getting feedback that the details of the summer plan we committed to are not being fulfilled as promised … Chief, if we say we are going to do something,” Long wrote. “We must follow through.”
A promise of dignity, then a termination
Theetge said she had asked Long, when she was interim chief (2022), several times if the relationship had ever soured, for a heads-up so she could leave with dignity.
“She said, absolutely, absolutely. Three times she told me that,” Theetge recalled.
Under Cincinnati’s city charter, the city manager holds sole authority to hire and dismiss most city employees, including the police chief. The mayor, however, may appoint or remove the city manager with the council’s advice and consent, and serves as the city’s chief policymaker.
Despite ongoing budget support for the department — which Theetge acknowledged — she argued the administration confused financial investment with genuine support, and said she had sought help addressing problems outside the Cincinnati Police Department’s control, including disorder in schools and what she described as a revolving door in the courts returning repeat offenders to the streets.
The termination letter discusses the way she saw Theetge as a member of city leadership.
“You said you were collaborative. This is not true. You showed an inability to build bridges and work with important city partners with whom you disagreed … Your failures in this area often caused damage to the relationships with city partners that required mending by other city officials and me,” Long’s letter said.