Stop Cincinnati’s Cop City!
A rendering of the Regional Safety Complex.
THE FACILITY
In October 2024, ground broke on the site of the future Hamilton County Regional Safety Complex (colloquially known as Cincinnati’s Cop City) at 9500 E Miami River Rd in Colerain Township. Construction is expected to be complete by 2026.
Cincinnati’s Cop City will serve as a playground in which the police—local, state, and federal—will be trained on tactics of repression and violence against civilians. Some of the facility’s features will include a K-9 classroom, sniper shooting range, and a match house (an armored tactical combat house, meant to simulate real life close combat).
THE CONTEXT
In recent years, Atlanta’s “Stop Cop City” movement has garnered national attention for its fight against the construction of a police training compound in an environmentally crucial forest near a predominantly Black community. In 2023, police shot and murdered an activist named Tortuguita Terán while they were sitting cross-legged with their hands up as they and others occupied the future construction site. In late 2024, the construction of Atlanta’s Cop City was completed.
The construction of Cincinnati’s Cop City is being touted as an equitable act, meant to benefit the predominately Black community of Lincoln Heights, with one article claiming that their “prayers [have been] answered.” For years, Lincoln Heights residents have been imploring the City of Cincinnati to move the Cincinnati Police Department’s Lincoln Heights Gun Range out of their community.
Nearly every day since 1947, those living near the gun range have had to listen to gunshots ringing out, with children as young as eleven referring to its noise as the sounds of a “war zone.” Residents have long argued that hearing the near-constant gunshots has harmed their mental and physical health; when they invited a UC professor who studies noise exposure out to their community, he was shocked at the noise levels and subsequent trauma residents endure on a daily basis.
Though Lincoln Heights residents are surely celebrating the relocation of this facility out of their community, Cop City’s larger implications for the Cincinnati region—police militarization and urban warfare training for officers—are deeply sinister, especially for marginalized communities.
Hamilton County doesn't plan on giving that land back to the Lincoln Heights, Evandale, and Glendale communities. Instead, Neyer Properties will be using the now-vacant land for what they're calling "Project Aerohub Project Aerohub," an $11 million manufacturing district and gentrification project that will continue the ever-expanding military industrial complex that facilitates US imperialism.
THE COST
In 2019, cost projections for either an indoor or outdoor law enforcement training facility sat at $9.7 million and $4.6 million, respectively. However, Cincinnati’s Cop City’s final cost sits at over $31 million.
Local, state, and Federal funding will be used to pay for the facility. Nearly one-third of project costs will be covered by a portion of Hamilton County’s Federal funds from the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) program. This a grant program that claims to address the continued impact of COVID-19 on the economy and public health; other recipients of this funding included small businesses, youth programming, and affordable housing.
With the prevalence of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and growing civil unrest every year since the pandemic, it appears an unspoken goal of the SLFRF grant program is to support projects that will quell future protests against injustices of the state.
Similarly, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown committed $4 million to the project, from a federal Economic Development Initiative grants program.
The City of Cincinnati is committing over $4 million toward this project while simultaneously cutting funding to nonprofits and programs. Those losing funding include an initiative that provides local produce and healthy foods to residents living in food deserts, programs teaching children sexual assault prevention, a free community arts center, an emergency shelter for women and children, and many more. These organizations are not requesting millions from the city: the funding cuts that these organizations face, which are threatening their ability to continue to serve the community, are often just tens of thousands of dollars—a minuscule amount compared to the funding being allocated to Cincinnati‘s Cop City.
This situation serves as a prime example of how bourgeois government—Democrat and Republican alike—bastardizes our tax dollars. Money that could be spent actually meeting peoples’ material needs is instead going toward funding projects that directly oppress us.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
As outlined in our previous statement “No Climate Justice Without Proletarian Power,” these facilities have massive negative environmental impacts. Cincinnati’s Cop City will be located near the Great Miami River and the Glen Oaks Nature Preserve.
The Nature Preserve is home to two state-endangered animals (the Cave Salamander and Lark Sparrow) and two potentially threatened plant species (Pale Umbrella Sedge and Spring Coral-root). The pollutants generated at this site—not only from the construction of the facility, but from the guns and explosives being detonated there—can leach into the soil and waterways, harming not only these species but all others.
Cincinnati‘s Cop City is being celebrated as though it will cause less noise pollution than the Lincoln Heights Gun Range. However, there will still be just as much, if not more, noise; after all, guns and bombs will be used at this facility. The only difference is now that noise will “just” be harming and traumatizing all of the non-human inhabitants of a previously serene natural area. The police terrorize all living things, no matter the species, with their mere presence.
THE PATH FORWARD
Though it is being referred to as a “Regional Safety Complex,” we know the truth: Cincinnati’s Cop City will not make this region any safer.
Against the backdrop of the National Guard being deployed to major cities—suppressing anti-ICE protests in LA and arresting anyone the state deems a threat in Washington D.C. (including a Black man whose only “crime” was smoking)—it’s evident that we are living under full-fledged fascism. In the midst of this, by approving and applauding the construction of a police militarization compound, the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County are showing which side they stand on, and it’s not the side of the people.
Cincinnati's cop city is not inevitable, though. It can only be built if the people allow it to be built. We call on all workers, students, and community members to stand together to shut down construction, disrupt business as usual, expose the corporations and politicians behind the project, and defend our communities from police militarization.
Our safety will never come from sniper ranges or combat houses. It will come from mutual aid, solidarity, and collective struggle.