The City of Cincinnati is Waging a War Against Our Children

The City, its officials (including Mayor Aftab Pureval), and the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD) intentionally deny the children of Cincinnati the care and support they need to survive.

Cincinnati's Unhoused Children

The Cincinnati housing crisis, which leaves more than 4,000 children in the public school system without a place to stay, is one of many ways in which the city is failing our children. Housing instability affects students’ attendance levels, test scores, graduation rates, and has serious psychological effects (e.g., social isolation; vulnerability to drug abuse, domestic abuse and sexual abuse; sleep; anxiety; depression; and loss of sense of place and belonging). These effects, both psychological and educational, impact students’ futures. Exposure to such trauma has lasting effects on children spanning into adulthood, often taking years (if not decades) of therapy to process and heal from. 

According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the unhoused population increased by 18% in the last year to over 770,000 people. Between 2023 and 2024, families saw the single largest increase in houselessness at 39%, and those under 18 experience the largest increase in houselessness out of every other age group.

Houselessness doesn't happen by accident or because people are lazy. In order to maintain compliance within its workforce, capitalism perpetuates houselessness in order to create what Marx defined as a “reserve army of labor.” This army of sequestered workers not only keeps enough of the population desperate enough that they will take any work or alms that they’re offered, but also makes those who are fortunate enough to have a house and a job fearful of losing either or both at any moment.

Over half of unhoused adults in the US have a job, but year after year, housing is made increasingly unaffordable because wages haven’t kept up with rising costs of living. There is no place in the US where someone can work a full-time minimum wage job and afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment.

Poverty is political violence perpetuated by the capitalist ruling class. Instead of providing stable housing for unhoused students and their families, Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) and city officials have decided to open a "Safe Sleep Lot" opening in March 2026 — a parking lot for families living in their vehicles to sleep safely at night — outside Taft Elementary School.

While this is touted as a solution for the immediate situation, it doesn't address the root causes of housing insecurity, and merely prolongs the same destructive cycle of poverty that capitalism creates. CPS and Cincinnati city officials willingly protect the capitalist system, which incentivizes NGOs or programs like Project Connect to work within the bounds of capitalism to provide only a band-aid to the housing crisis.

Project Connect, while doing necessary mutual aid work such as providing transportation, meal services, and school supplies to children in need, doesn't and can't directly provide housing for families and children. Instead, they give families access to housing services such as Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CHPA), Community Action Agency, and the family housing partnership. They also provide families who are unsheltered with an emergency hotel room stay of up to 3 days if certain eligibility criteria are met.

On their website, CHPA states that they "repeatedly called for reform," and while we agree that the working class must struggle for reforms to build working class power and improve living conditions, they are not the end goal. Reforms do not address the root cause of houselessness: capitalism. Instead, they preserve the underlying structure, keeping people in poverty in order to extract maximum profit from the labor of workers. Any gains won from the capitalist ruling class can be taken away whenever they please.

The poor and working class must organize under one banner and fight to create a new democratic order that leaves no one without a home. We cannot continue to live in a world that emphasizes the false narrative of an individual's culpability in improving their life circumstances when it's capitalism itself that keeps them there. The public deserves actual solutions that challenge the perpetual exploitation of families in Cincinnati.

CPD Militarizes Itself to Fight Children

CPD and Cincinnati city officials are actively villainizing children, especially Black and Brown children. They are no longer allowed to make mistakes without severe consequences that often lead to violence and death. Take, for instance, the video showing teenagers fighting at The Banks that circulated social media and Local 12 news during the weekend of Aug. 9. Upon seeing the footage, a just society would invest in after-school programs and spaces for children to safely interact with their peers.

Instead, Cincinnati city officials implemented a curfew, increased police budgets that militarize the department, and continue to erase third spaces. These locations, such as cafes, parks, and anywhere people may gather besides home, work, and school, are crucial for adolescents who are seeking independence. They are, however, becoming more and more inaccessible to our children due to gentrification in Cincinnati, primarily catalyzed by 3CDC. 3CDC is an unelected and unaccountable privately-owned corporation that uses public funds to invest in privately owned businesses. Its primary effects on this city have been gentrification, displacement, and houselessness—another prong in the city's war on our youth.

The city-wide curfew requires all unaccompanied minors to be home by 11p.m. and be out of the "Special Curfew District" (three separate parks and large portions of downtown) by 9PM. The curfew makes exceptions for various situations, like minors who can't be home by 11pm (or 9pm in some areas), but it does not explain how an officer would know whether an exception applies. For example, a teenager who has to work to support their family may be stopped by police for a curfew violation while walking home from a late-night shift. The optimal outcome would be for the minor to explain their exception, and the officer to then let them go. However, this could easily lead to unnecessary charges, detentions, and violence.

The city and Mayor Pureval claim that this is an effort not to criminalize children, but instead to ensure they are home at night. CPD and City Council are pushing this initiative as a safety measure to prevent children from gathering at unsafe times while, in reality, it is an excuse for increased police funding and greater surveillance of children, putting them in harm’s way.

Cincinnati's new "public safety measures" will cost Cincinnati taxpayers a whopping $5.4 million. Taxpayer funds will provide the CPD with new drones and technology, overtime for CPD officers, and increased recruiting efforts. These projects combine to account for over $2.5 million of that spending going directly to CPD. While there are some infrastructure improvements planned and a small amount of funding for a youth outreach program ($200,000), these investments pale in comparison to the next-largest benefactor, 3CDC, which is receiving nearly a million dollars in this funding package for nine new ambassadors who will supposedly interface with the public, provide directions, and offer other non-law enforcement assistance.

Across the city, particularly in Downtown and the West End, CPD is installing a series of new cameras and teaming up with business owners to share access to live feeds of their surveillance systems. These expensive and intrusive systems will likely do little to prevent crimes, but will ensure that our children are harassed and stopped by the police at even higher rates. Non-aggressive actions, such as loitering, will become excuses to send patrols to "problem areas," and the over-policing of children will be praised by the city for "increasing visibility" of officers.

Cops do not serve our children, and they certainly don't protect them. For evidence of this, we need not look farther back than May 2025 when a CPD officer murdered Ryan Hinton, a Black child, in Price Hill. Ryan is by no means the only victim of the CPD's brutality, but his death reminds us that the police serve capital first and foremost; to them, a stolen car is worth more than a child's life.

Cops also do not exist to solve crime or fix social problems. They disappear people who the bourgeoisie deem to be “social problems,” hence why so many Black and Brown children each year are forced into the criminal justice system or killed by law enforcement. The police's main function is to uphold capitalism through harassment and violence. Police patrol the streets to remind everyday citizens that they can do as they please and use whatever force they deem necessary to keep the working class subordinate. Because the police were created alongside the birth of capitalism, which is inextricably linked to racism, policing is inherently racist.

Police were created to forcibly organize and maintain a social order benefitting the interests of the ruling class, in this case, the capitalist ruling class. In their book "Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, brian bean states, "The ruling class's status and position in society depend on the police behaving as designed. Thus, ruling class politicians and the capitalists behind them are greatly invested in working against and resisting any attempts at reform that would alter the core function of the police." Therefore, the only way to build a new, just society free of police brutality and violence is the abolition of the capitalist state and its protector.

Cincinnati's School to Prison Pipeline

The populations that faces the highest rate of repression and abuse by the cops nationwide are Black and Brown children from poor and working class families. This is also the case in Ohio. Of the youth incarcerated by the Department of Youth Services (DYS) in Ohio, 72% are Black children even though only 17% of the general Ohio population is Black. Police are given free rein to use their own judgment to determine whether someone is "about to" commit a crime. This subjective scrutiny, also known as "broken window" policing, continues to reproduce the racist belief that Black and Brown people are more likely to commit crimes than white people.

If children don't comply in school, they are driven out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system. The school-to-prison pipeline obstructs children's educational success and pushes the most "at-risk" children into the criminal justice system. The bourgeoisie has put in place certain policies that ensure this pipeline is working as intended. These policies include the presence of police officers in schools, zero-tolerance policies that lead to severe punitive practices (i.e., suspensions and expulsions), lack of federal funding for education, and test-based performance policies (i.e., No Child Left Behind Act). This is not a mistake or a flaw, but the system working as intended.

The School to Prison Pipeline starts with suspensions and expulsions. Students with frequent suspensions and expulsions have less classroom time which hinders their ability to learn and socialize with their peers. This creates a disconnect between them, their school, and their community. Without a place to go for most of the day, children are more likely to be picked up by cops and be involved in the criminal justice system.

Even if children are in school, they can be arrested by School Resource Officers (SROs). SROs are cops with little to no training on how to interact with the youth, nor do they treat them with respect and dignity. Students are three to five times more likely to be arrested in schools with SROs than in schools without. Black and Brown students and those impacted by trauma are more likely to be arrested.

These children need support and services, not pigs and over-surveillance. There is little evidence that having police officers in schools make schools safer, just like there is little evidence that cops make communities safer. The state acts like it has no choice but to assign cops to schools due to zero-tolerance policies and school funding cuts which reduce support and services that our children desperately need.

When children are incarcerated rather than killed outright by the police on the street, they are likely to experience violence and neglect at the hands of prison guards in youth prisons and juvenile detention centers. The Enquirer stated, "[T]he state’s juvenile prisons consistently fail in their most basic mission: to provide a safe environment for young offenders while trying to turn them into productive members of society."

In Ohio's youth prisons, severe injuries, medical conditions, and deaths often go unnoticed or unreported for hours. These incidents are not required to be reported, which is in contrast to Ohio's adult prisons reporting requirements. Prison guards are known to use excessive force when interacting with incarcerated children, claiming they're "resisting" to justify beating kids unconscious and leaving them in their jail cells over minor infractions.

In July 2025, Ohio's Correctional Institution Inspection Committee (CIIC) was dissolved by a majority vote by the state legislature after over almost fifty years. The CIIC was the independent oversight coalition that inspected the state's prisons and reviewed cases of abuses reported by incarcerated people. The Ohio Attorney General's Office—the body responsible for defending prisons against reports of abuses and neglect—will now be responsible for upholding prison standards. This means that children who are not tried as adults will be held in facilities with no outside oversight. Without the CIIC, there will be no accountability for children and their families.

The Fight For Socialism

Slave labor in practice was never abolished, it merely changed in form and is known by another name: prison labor. The bourgeoisie needs the cheapest, most exploitative labor practices to maintain their rule, and the easiest way to do this is to guarantee that a portion of each generation of workers goes directly into the unpaid workforce.

Capitalism operates under the false promise of unlimited profit growth. If something or someone is not already producing a profit, a way must be found to extract surplus value by any means necessary. Before the advent of public schools, children were sent to work in factories and mines. After compulsory public education was created, the bourgeoisie pivoted to extracting value via private and charter schools. We're seeing that same motive play out today in these current attacks on the safety and security of Cincinnati's Black and Brown children. The defunding of Cincinnati's public schools, the lack of secure housing and food access for too many children in the area, and the villainization of idle youths all work in concert to funnel these kids into the prison system where their value can be extracted through their incarceration and their labor.

It is deeply ironic that the city of Cincinnati offers their half-hearted solutions to the very problems their greed has created. Actual solutions would require cutting into the profits they receive from the many gentrification projects of 3CDC as well as the already-bloated CPD budget. All children—regardless of race, disability, or economic status—deserve a safe place to live, a healthy diet of nutrient rich foods, and the space to be kids without the threat of police harassment. If Mayor Pureval and the City of Cincinnati actually cared about child welfare, they would find a way to provide these things. Instead they shift the blame and paint these kids as the problem.

We demand the abolition of Cincinnati Police Department and 3CDC. We demand the application of those funds go towards solutions that actually support Cincinnati's children, like affordable housing and public school funding. But we also understand that the capitalist ruling class including Cincinnati City Council will never get rid of the very institutions that protects their status.

To abolish the police, we must abolish the capitalist state, and this is achieved via an international revolution for socialism. By organizing collectively under one working class banner, we can build power by pushing for reforms such as the defunding of police, cutting their numbers, getting rid of their legal immunities, and using alternative resources to them all while fighting for our end goal: building our own democratic institutions in a society that treats every human with dignity and justice, and not as commodity to exploit for increasing profits.