Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
"We Get to Hear Them Training to Kill Us"
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/09/lincoln-heights-police-gun-range-progress.html(snip)
You can hear it in church. You can hear it at the corner store. You can hear it at the day care center, at the food pantry, and outside the elementary school. Most days in Lincoln Heights, a small majority-Black suburb 10 miles north of downtown Cincinnati, the gunfire starts in the morning and lasts through midafternoon, though sometimes it continues past sundown. On the playground at one public housing complex, the shots can drown out a conversation. They’re close enough to have a distinct sonic texture: a crackle, an explosion, an echo, usually in rapid-fire bursts. In some backyards, the blasts are loud enough to make you jump.
(snip)
It’s not unheard of for police departments to train and test officers at locations outside their jurisdictions. Nor is it unusual for law enforcement agencies to use outdoor gun ranges; the Hamilton County officers who patrol Lincoln Heights train at one in a more rural part of the county. But an open-air police-run target range so close to a dense residential area is a rarity, presumably because municipal lawmakers don’t want to irritate their constituents. Therein lies the crux of Lincoln Heights’ problem: Though the gunfire principally affects Lincoln Heights and a cluster of homes in neighboring Woodlawn, the range is owned by the city of Cincinnati and sits in a third jurisdiction, the much more affluent village of Evendale, whose residential areas are largely protected from the noise by the buffer of a six-lane interstate and an expansive industrial zone. In other words, none of the public officials with the power to move the range are accountable to the people whose lives are most affected by it. To Lincoln Heights residents, it feels like an out-of-town company coming in to dump toxic waste in their backyards—an insult no whiter or wealthier community would be asked to accept.
The gun range was never supposed to be so close to people’s homes. In 1941, soon after the nearby Wright Aeronautical factory opened, a group of veterans employed by the plant built the range for their ex-servicemen’s club. Back then, the only other occupied building nearby was a school for the deaf. But after World War II, when the plant closed for a spell, the vets sold the range to the city of Cincinnati. The deal went through in 1946, the same year that Lincoln Heights incorporated. Over the years, every time Lincoln Heights leaders petitioned Cincinnati public officials to relocate it, their response was that the gun range was there first.
Which isn’t entirely true. The housing complexes closest to the range were built after CPD took ownership. But Lincoln Heights itself, the first Black self-governing community north of the Mason-Dixon Line, was born of grit and imagination in the 1920s. Black people were prohibited from buying land in much of Cincinnati proper at the time, so one group decided to build a town of their own in the unincorporated land north of the city—an area that seemed like an auspicious location for future development. Many of Lincoln Heights’ founders had moved to Cincinnati from the Atlanta area during the Great Migration, bringing with them agricultural knowledge that they poured into the town’s small farms and gardens. The lack of incorporation meant that there were no paved roads, no public amenities, and minimal access to running water or sewage systems. They built rain cisterns and whatever else they could to make their lives more tolerable.
You can hear it in church. You can hear it at the corner store. You can hear it at the day care center, at the food pantry, and outside the elementary school. Most days in Lincoln Heights, a small majority-Black suburb 10 miles north of downtown Cincinnati, the gunfire starts in the morning and lasts through midafternoon, though sometimes it continues past sundown. On the playground at one public housing complex, the shots can drown out a conversation. They’re close enough to have a distinct sonic texture: a crackle, an explosion, an echo, usually in rapid-fire bursts. In some backyards, the blasts are loud enough to make you jump.
(snip)
It’s not unheard of for police departments to train and test officers at locations outside their jurisdictions. Nor is it unusual for law enforcement agencies to use outdoor gun ranges; the Hamilton County officers who patrol Lincoln Heights train at one in a more rural part of the county. But an open-air police-run target range so close to a dense residential area is a rarity, presumably because municipal lawmakers don’t want to irritate their constituents. Therein lies the crux of Lincoln Heights’ problem: Though the gunfire principally affects Lincoln Heights and a cluster of homes in neighboring Woodlawn, the range is owned by the city of Cincinnati and sits in a third jurisdiction, the much more affluent village of Evendale, whose residential areas are largely protected from the noise by the buffer of a six-lane interstate and an expansive industrial zone. In other words, none of the public officials with the power to move the range are accountable to the people whose lives are most affected by it. To Lincoln Heights residents, it feels like an out-of-town company coming in to dump toxic waste in their backyards—an insult no whiter or wealthier community would be asked to accept.
The gun range was never supposed to be so close to people’s homes. In 1941, soon after the nearby Wright Aeronautical factory opened, a group of veterans employed by the plant built the range for their ex-servicemen’s club. Back then, the only other occupied building nearby was a school for the deaf. But after World War II, when the plant closed for a spell, the vets sold the range to the city of Cincinnati. The deal went through in 1946, the same year that Lincoln Heights incorporated. Over the years, every time Lincoln Heights leaders petitioned Cincinnati public officials to relocate it, their response was that the gun range was there first.
Which isn’t entirely true. The housing complexes closest to the range were built after CPD took ownership. But Lincoln Heights itself, the first Black self-governing community north of the Mason-Dixon Line, was born of grit and imagination in the 1920s. Black people were prohibited from buying land in much of Cincinnati proper at the time, so one group decided to build a town of their own in the unincorporated land north of the city—an area that seemed like an auspicious location for future development. Many of Lincoln Heights’ founders had moved to Cincinnati from the Atlanta area during the Great Migration, bringing with them agricultural knowledge that they poured into the town’s small farms and gardens. The lack of incorporation meant that there were no paved roads, no public amenities, and minimal access to running water or sewage systems. They built rain cisterns and whatever else they could to make their lives more tolerable.