Nine wetherboecasts. Not bad clout for you today.
Low humidity, high seventy six, clear skies over night fifty eight, Tomorrow mostly sunny eighty two overnight clear in sixty and a mostly sunny Thursday as well, high eighty eight fifty eight degrees. Now, let's get a traffic update.
From the use of Traffic Center. From massage therapy to stress for fan cancer surveyments. So you see Cancer Center offers the region's largest supportive services program for cancer patients AM survivors called five one three, five eighty five. You seek sixty highway traffics. It's not bad at all this morning, no accidents to deal with. You do have a bit of fog to deal with, but I'm not seeing any
slow downs because of it. Northbound Fourth seventy one under five minutes to seventy five minute town shot, King Vermont, fifty five KR. See the talk station.
At six thirty fifty five ARI see the talk station A very happy uh Tuesday to at Corey Bowman run from Mayor gonna be talking about whether the city is safe. Coming up at seven oh five. In the meantime, Welcome back to the fifty five care mornings. It's always a pleasure to have the FOP president. Ken Kober joined the program. Ken, welcome back, my friend, Thanks Brian, thanks for having me.
I wish he was under better circumstances. Obviously, no one is happy that Patrick Heringer was murdered, and Sarah Heninger is all over social media and you know, complaining, and you know about the mayor, the police department, the Adult Parole authority.
Uh. He was released from custody.
I guess he had served his time, but put on an ankle monitor, which he cut off in February. Then he committed a burglary sometime I guess in May, and then he murdered Patrick Heninger just a last week.
I guess.
Can you address some of her concerns? I guess the first concern? The question is these ankle monitors, how closely are they monitored? And how can someone cut off their ankle monitor and authorities not be aware of it? Or were authorities aware that he did cut his ankle monitor off and out looking for him? Was were you aware of it? Were the police department aware of it? You
get where I'm coming from. And I'm sorry to ramble, but it is sort of a puzzling mystery question that's floating around out there.
Ken No, sure, I mean their first I can't imagine what this woman's going through right to deal with this, you having your own husband get murdered in his own home.
It's just it's just, Yes, it's senseless and hard hard to imagine, it really is.
Uh. I know, the Adult Parole Authority did put out a statement yesterday saying that they had been looking for him since February. To my knowledge, no one in the police department knew that he had had his ankle monitor cut off, but and that that might be part of a bigger discussion in the future.
If if you've.
Got parolies that are at large, that are running around in a particular jurisdiction, maybe it is appropriate that you know, they start notifying, you know, certain agencies to let them know, Hey, you've got this guy that's dangerous and he just did nine and a half years or bolonious assault and aggravated riot.
Why did we not know?
You know, that's typically not the responsibility of a local jurisdiction.
It is for the Adult Role Authority.
But I can only suspect that they're probably in the same boat that the Cincinnati Police is, which is we're one hundred and thirty cops short, so they have limited resources just like we do. Not trying to make any excuses, just trying to clarify why some of these things probably happened.
Yeah, and one of our complaints. And you know, I understand the difficult position the sinsint police departments and so just moving away from the pear authority and whether or not they knew he was out or had cut his ankle monitor off. You usually are responding to criminal acts. Now, your presence may prevent something from happening, but the general public doesn't know when you were capable of that. When something doesn't happen, they don't realize or know any given
certain circumstances because of your presence. That's the reason a crime didn't occur. But if a crime occurs, that's when nine to one one is called, and that's when you show up and try to arrest the bad guy or otherwise deal with the situation. I get the order of things. But she was critical of the lack of police presence in the neighborhood and made a claim that, uh, in
the district there was only maybe she pointed. District one covers four neighborhoods, Clifton, Mount Adams, West End and OTR. She wrote, each may have only one officer per zone.
That's it.
Now, is there any accuracy to that? I know your short staff, but one officer in District one at any given time?
Is that is that accurate?
There are nights where it is like that, Oh my god. And that's that's the reality of being short. You know, I worked in District one back in two ty eleven, twenty twelve, and there were back then we only had three beats and there were nights where there were only two or three of us working. And that's that's the reality when you're so short staffed, you're spread thin. And you know, especially this time when we're talking like four
o'clock in the morning. So a District one has two different shifts that work at night, and the one shift gets off at four o'clock in the morning. So now all you have from four am until six am when day shift starts as an even smaller crew of people. And that's that's the unfortunate reality of where we're at.
That's that's hard, that's difficult to imagine. I mean, the the the visible presence of police, I think is an important thing to present the perception of a safe community good. We have police officers patrolling around, there's one right there, but there's only one in that entire geographic area. No one's going to ever see that one police officer who's
probably already responding to a call. Because you're talking about late night hours, isn't that when most of the bad things actually happen ken.
You know, late late at night, early mornings like that is typically and you do have a lot of breaking and enterings things like that because there's less people out on the streets, so that's when a lot of people are lurking, you know, looking to break into stuff. So
I mean, it's just it's terrible. But that's unfortunately where we are, which is why I was in front of city Council yesterday asking them to take action and have a lateral class where we can get officers that are already experienced, get them through an abbreviated academy, and get them on the streets so they can start making a difference, because having one class every nine months isn't cutting it. We're not able to keep up with attrition because we have so many people that are leaving.
All right, we'll pause, will bring Ken Gober back on that topic and more.
This is just tragic. Six thirty five. If you five cars of the talk station.
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Got a cloud free day to day low humidity highest seventy six clear overnight fifty eight Sunday Tomorrow eighty two for the high clear overnight low of sixty and a sunny Thursday as well.
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It's time for traffic that you see a Tramfic center from besides therapy to stress relief and cancer surveyillment, so you see cancer Center offers the region's largest supportive services program for cancer patients and survivors called five one three
five eight five U see CEC. Highway traffic continues to look pretty good this morning, just beginning to slow a bit southbound two seventy five between the Lawrenceburg ramp and the bridge Men's a rack outside of Trenton on Wayne Madison below Riverside chuck Ingram on fifty five KR see the talk station, say forty.
Fifty five KERR CD talk station trying to make it happy Tuesday. Inspite of the subject matter, we're going over with Ken cover fof President Sin Saint Police Departments representatives for the police union. So, Ken, you appealing to city council to get more law enforcement officers on the street. You're down over one hundred more people retiring, and I know that's a phenomenon, and I understand, and you can
feel free to chime into the subject. Police morale is not very high right now now generally speaking, so feel free to comment on that if you like. So you're in front of city Council and you're asking for an additional I don't know, recruit class. What was the reaction from council members? Did they agree with you or suggest they would do something about it. I presume this is a matter of budgeting.
It is, and that's why they have their original budget. And then yesterday and Budget Finance they were doing their adjusted budgets and actually council and Seth Walsh's one that came to me and said, listen, how much money do you need for this class? It's important we need the city to be safe, what do you need? And I started to talk to some other council members that it was met with support. So I'm hoping that it's going to be in the final budget. I would suspect that
it's going to be. But the reality is we're about nine hundred and thirty nine thirty five right now by August. By August, we're projected to be below nine hundred people.
Oh no, so.
I mean that's that's the reality. We had three retirements last week, we had three resignations two weeks prior to that. You lost ninety two people last year. We're probably going to lose close to that amount this year. And having a class of only fifty or sixty once a year is not helping. And talk about morale, Yeah, morale is
certainly a challenge. You know, when you have officers that are you know, being asked to work on their off days come in because they're so short that they need to fill these gaps with overtime you have, I mean, you have some officers that work in our they are a SWAT team and our Civil Disturbance Response team that
work every Friday and Saturday. They work every event, and it's just it's getting to the point where it's exhausting and something's going to give and the way to fill that gap is to start having these lateral classes.
Well, okay, now I am glad that you were not met with opposition. So the whole idea of defunding the police, it didn't appear to be the attitude you were met with, which is that that's that's up a hell, that's helpful,
and that that's a positive thing. But in terms of being able to get police or individuals to joining the police force, is that going to be a problem because you know, with all this anti police sentiment out there, and the and the hard work that you have to deal with in the community every single day, and how dangerous it is, that's not a job that a lot of people gravitate toward, especially with this whole you know,
public anti police sentiment that's brewn around out there. So are you if you if they said we're going to have five classes this year, would you actually be able to fill the roles given that a lot of people don't even qualify to be police officers.
Well, the lateral classes, those are already officers that are that are certified police officers, and what we're looking to do is capitalize on the fact that geographically Cincinnati sits right near Kentucky and Indiana, and those two places, those two states historically have benefits that are that are significantly less than what we have.
I get you. So that's kind of that's our kind of goal.
Is to you know, get some of these officers from other agencies. I've had other agencies reach out to me, I mean just begging when you guys a gonna have a lateral class because we do make significantly more money than those other places. And these are already experienced officers that can go through an abbreviated eight or ten week academy. We can get them on the street to where they're making a difference quickly compared to new people that it's
twenty eight weeks. Then they go through a twelve week you know, field training officer program. You're looking at a year to two years before they're truly making a significant impact.
On our street strength. Wow.
So you're poaching officers, which is great. I mean, if you're offing better benefits and all of that, I understand. You know, if the fools, the one is not looking out for his best interest. So if you're making, you know, insignificant salary elsewhere it might be a great lure so that at least you have that option out there. Now, that's going to leave those other police departments with a problem on their hands, but that's not your issue.
You're doing this for the city. I get it.
Well, it's certainly right now is a game of shuffle in the deck because we've got officers that are leaving Cincinnati to go to other apartments for one reason or another, and it's just everybody's kind of moving around about. And like I said, if it's an opportunity for us to do the same thing, why would we not do it?
It only makes.
Sense understood now in terms of dealing with the morale problem. If you had more officers, that would satisfy a certain component of it. But in terms of the administration, do you feel as being effectively run or is that something you don't feel? Don't want to comment on me because it might get you into trouble.
Listen, I'm not really worried about being in trouble. I could. I could tell you that every administration has its strengths and.
Everyone has its weaknesses.
I mean, that's that's just the reality of it. You know, what I tell people is listen, you cannot like something that the chief does, you know when you're talking about administrative things. But the reality is what we need to have as a chief that when we have a critical incident, we have an officer involved shooting something like that, we need someone that's going to evaluate it. They're going to recognize the all did the right thing, and they're going
to stand behind that officer. And I mean, you look at this shooting from from May first, and that's exactly what Chief Fiji has done. I go the rest of the stuff does it really matter? You know, and in my opinion, if it's administrative things that people are complaining about, it beats the heck out of you know, the alternative, which is you could have a chief going, I don't know if this is a good shooting or not. You know, we're going to that's so that's that's where I want
to support. I want to support when we absolutely need them, when it's life and death, to know that we've got a leader that's going to stand up there and say the officer did the right.
Thing, fair enough. It was widely reported the inquiry, reported on among other news outlets that crime is up. I think it was forty eight percent over the rhyme, which is where this murder occurred. Are we being given accurate information on the crime statistics in the city of Cincinnati generally speaking, Well, you.
Know, if you look at the city as a whole, crime I think they said down three or four percent. But you're absolutely right when you look at over the line and what's going on right now, crimes going through the roof in that particular neighborhood. So you know this it comes back to the old, you know, college level class of lying with statistics. You can make them seem anything you want them to be. You know, I had heard that recently that they said, look, there's six hundred
and thirty seven people that are assigned to districts. Like if you look at the assignment report, there's actually four hundred and fifty officers, less than half of the department is assigned to a relief to answer calls for service. You add the sergeants and lieutenants whose primary function is not to answer the radio and patrol. That puts us at five hundred and twenty four. So where are the other one hundred and thirty people? One hundred and ten people,
whatever it is. And the answer is they're including in this the investigative units that aren't responsible for answering radio runs, the neighborhood liaison unit that's not responsible for answering radio runs, the violent crime squad that's not responsible for answering radio runs, hear, and then some administrative folks in there. So were the numbers that you know that was thrown out this past
week that success. Yeah, it's right, that's how many people are in these districts, but that's not how many people are responsible for actually answering calls for service.
An excellent point you made there. Put an exclamation point on that one. Now, in terms of the reality of the situation, now I blame the I mean the Department of Rehabilitation Correction said. This guy was assigned a multi agency law enforcement task for US. A warrant was issued for his arrest. He was designated a violator at large within twenty four hours of leaving the Halfway House after
he cut his ankle monitor off. But if that information isn't conveyed to you, then you don't know that you're looking for this guy. That's one point. The other point is you know that's why we have a crime stopper, bad guy of the week. You don't know where people are all the time, and you know, focusing efforts and resources to the police department looking for one guy Mordisha Black who cut his ankle monitor off. Probably, I don't know best use of your resources, limited as they are.
Would a full contingent of police though, going back to your point about being understaff, it wouldn't necessarily have changed the sad reality of what happened to the Herringers, would it. I mean, you can't be at all places at all times, and merely having a full contingent of police department doesn't mean there aren't going to be crimes, and notably breaking and murder.
No, sure, you know, I wish I could only have the crystal ball to be able to say what the future was going to do or could this have been prevented? But the reality is if we had more officers and there were more officers on the street, there would have been more of an opportunity for the officers to have a confrontation with this guy yeah to where you know,
maybe they stopped him for you know, jaywalking. Maybe they would have had a better opportunity to see that he was lurking around at four o'clock in the morning before this actually occurred. We don't know, but I could tell you one thing is for certain. The odds would have been better if we had more officers because it would be more opportunity, more people in patrol that maybe could have come across this guy before it happened.
But we just don't know.
I know, and I appreciate the reality of that. But you make some wonderful points. FOP President ken Kobert, it has been great talking with you, clearing the air on and some of these important issues, and real quick before we part company, do you feel like you're getting adequate and your counsel meeting yesterday went really well, at least in terms of how they receive your your hope for this lateral class, but in terms of their outward response
to things about the police department. Do you feel like you're getting full support from the mayor and council or do you think there's silence is deafening, which is my perception.
Yeah, I mean it is. The hard part is you know, in this as tragic as this case is, we've had three more murder sins. Yeah, and there's there's been no So, you know, while I feel for you know, Patrick's wife, she's absolutely right that, you know, and I've seen some of her stuff on social media that's this isn't just about her husband, this is about all the other people that are victims amen in Cincinnati, and it's just the lack of response has said the silence has been deafening.
Well, they're more interested in presenting a picture of the city of Cincinnati as a peaceful, welcoming environment and they're trying to get people to move into the city. And if they talk about crime and they stand up for police officers and criticize crimes and murders when they happen, that is not exactly a good marketing scheme. And I think they're more worried about marketing.
Yeah, it's a shame, you know, instead of face and reality and finding ways to make things safer. Yeah, it's certainly, certainly not a good look that people are seeing it for what it is.
Ken Kober, great having you on today. A blessing to you and all the CINCINNT Police Department. I know you guys are doing the best you can possibly can, and I know my listeners truly appreciate members of law enforcement and your sacrifices what you do every day.
So keep up the great work, my friend.
All right, Brian, thanks for having me.
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