SPEAKER_00: Amika is a different type of insurance company. We provide you with something more than auto, home, or life insurance. It's empathy. Because at Amika, your coverage always comes with compassion. It's one of the reasons why 98% of our customers stay with us every year.
Amika. Empathy is our best policy. I know I can count on you.
SPEAKER_12: Join Walmart Plus because members shop Walmart Black Friday deals online three hours early. In other words, shopping amazing Walmart Black Friday deals just got more amazing-er. Join Walmart Plus today. Paid members only, online only, while supplies last.
SPEAKER_05: This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you'll hear kids playing outside the local elementary school. You'll hear the highway that takes commuters down to Cincinnati. At the woods on the edge of town, the bird song is delightful.
SPEAKER_06: Lincoln Heights is small. Less than one square mile with about 3,100 people.
SPEAKER_05: Christina Cattarucci is a senior writer at Slate.
SPEAKER_06: It's a quiet, residential place that seems far from the bustle of the city, even though it's just 13 miles north of Cincinnati. It's the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. If you live there, it's hard to get anywhere in town without someone stopping you to say hi. There are well-kept single-family homes and low-lying apartment complexes. People gather in their grassy backyards for cookouts and in parking lots for pickup basketball games. The town feels calm and peaceful. At least until the gunfire starts.
SPEAKER_05: Most weekdays, it begins in the morning and lasts through the afternoon. Sometimes it goes past sundown and occasionally into the weekends.
Once the shooting begins, it comes in rapid-fire waves throughout the day. People say it makes it hard to focus or relax, and those who work the night shift say they can't sleep.
SPEAKER_06: Residents worry about what the gunfire is doing to their hearing and their stress levels. They're especially concerned about their kids, who are listening to gunshots all day long while they're trying to play or study.
SPEAKER_05: The noise of gunfire isn't from street violence. It all comes from an open-air gun range that's owned by the Cincinnati Police Department.
This thing is huge, the size of about 22 football fields. It sits just outside of Lincoln Heights, right along the town's northern border. And the cops use it a lot. In 2019, the department reported that officers trained there about 300 days out of the year.
SPEAKER_06: The constant, nerve-fraying sound from that gun range has been plaguing Lincoln Heights for the last 75 years.
SPEAKER_04: That noise truly was just like bird's chirping. It was just like your environment. You just grew up with it.
SPEAKER_06: That's Duron Daniels. He's a town council member in Lincoln Heights. His family goes back five generations to when the town was founded. He went away to college in North Carolina. In one Thanksgiving break, he brought his roommate home to visit.
SPEAKER_04: We were just kind of outside, just kind of hanging out. And he could just hear that boom, boom, boom, boom sound right in front of my parents' house. He just literally just looks at me and says, D, what is that noise? Who's over there shooting? What's all that going on? It's just the gun range. It's kind of what we... It's like, y'all just live around that every day? That's just kind of what y'all just deal with every day?
SPEAKER_06: It was the first time Duron's had really thought about it, about how he wasn't even startled by something that was alarming to anyone who didn't live there.
SPEAKER_04: That kind of just was awakening for me that this isn't normal.
SPEAKER_05: As if living with the relentless sound of gunfire wasn't bad enough, there are a lot of things that make the situation even worse. This is nonstop police gunfire bombarding a town where almost all of the residents are black.
SPEAKER_06: In Cincinnati police, the cops who practice there don't even patrol Lincoln Heights or any of the other towns around the range. So these are out of towners coming to let off shots in Lincoln Heights backyard.
SPEAKER_05: A majority of Lincoln Heights residents live below the poverty line, and they can't help thinking that if their town were wealthier or whiter, the city of Cincinnati would never get away with this.
SPEAKER_06: When I started reporting on this gun range, I was expecting to get a straightforward story about a particularly disturbing kind of noise pollution. But there's another layer to it, because Lincoln Heights isn't just any suburb. It's the first black self-governed town north of the Mason-Dixon line, founded almost a century ago with ambitions of becoming a sprawling, self-sufficient community.
SPEAKER_05: That vision never fully came to pass, and today the bullets that echo through town are a daily reminder of how the founders' dreams for Lincoln Heights were obstructed right from the start.
During the Great Migration, Doron Daniels' great-grandfather and his great-great-grandfather joined a group of others making their way from rural Georgia up to southern Ohio.
SPEAKER_04: A lot of the men first started moving up towards this area in the early 1920s, late, you know, 19-teens. My grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my great-great-grandmother, they were also kind of came up in my aunts a year after that.
SPEAKER_10: The folks that were leaving the South, this first wave of migrants, were individuals who were filled with hope and the possibilities of a better life.
SPEAKER_06: Henry Louis Taylor Jr. is a professor at the University at Buffalo and an expert on the history of Lincoln Heights.
SPEAKER_10: They were very high-spirited individuals who believed in hard work and wanted to be in a situation to control their own lives and their own destinies. As one of the Lincoln Heights residents said to me, I came here to live better and to do better.
SPEAKER_05: After crossing the Ohio River, which separates northern Kentucky from Cincinnati, the migrants first tried settling in the city. But property was really expensive and racist real estate practices were rampant.
SPEAKER_04: So they found a space 13 miles from Cincinnati where they were able to buy some land, organize, and say, hey, let's create our own community.
SPEAKER_06: The spot they settled on was north of the city, deep in unincorporated Hamilton County. There was a lot of land there. And since it had no electrical grid and minimal running water, the acreage was cheap. With plans to build a whole new town from scratch, the residents started homesteading in the 1920s.
SPEAKER_10: These were people from rural areas. They weren't from the city. And so they knew how to build cisterns. They knew how to tap into the waters and build wells. So looking back at what they managed to accomplish with limited resources was quite astounding.
SPEAKER_06: Once a critical mass of Black people had settled in the area, those homesteaders had a realization. In order to have any real power over their own lives, they needed more than just land. They needed to govern their own space. And they knew, from living under Jim Crow, what it was like to be denied that autonomy.
SPEAKER_05: By the late 1930s, plans were underway to open an aircraft manufacturing plant in Hamilton County. Once a rural no-man's land, that region would soon become an industrial hub.
SPEAKER_04: So there was a lot of opportunity where an all-Black neighborhood was going to become an economic powerhouse right in the middle of Hamilton County. It was already set for it.
SPEAKER_06: So a group of residents took a county map and drew a set of ambitious boundaries around nearly 10 square miles in Hamilton County. The space encompassed the homes they'd built and lots of land primed for industrial development, plus plenty of room to grow. The map was part of a plan to incorporate all of that space into a single town. It would be their town, a place they would control. They named it Lincoln Heights.
SPEAKER_10: It was a brilliant strategy. They would have an industrial and an economic base to help support the community. And that taxation would have allowed them to develop their schools, their roads, and would have created a level of prosperity that would not have existed before.
SPEAKER_05: It was a bold move for an all-Black community to lay claim to this much land, especially with white towns nearby. Henry says the founders were excited and full of hope. In 1939, they presented their Lincoln Heights plan to the county for final approval.
SPEAKER_06:
But the white county leadership and the neighboring suburbs all put up immediate heavy resistance. They were terrified that an expansive Black community would attract people from the so-called slums of Cincinnati out into the suburbs.
SPEAKER_10: And the idea of a small group of Black people getting a foothold was something nobody wanted to see happen. And there was a movement underway that simply attempted to wipe the town out.
SPEAKER_05: Hamilton County officials deliberately slow-walked the Lincoln Heights plan for seven years. In that time, a lot of other property in the proposal was snapped up by the surrounding towns.
SPEAKER_10: Once whites begin to understand their ambition, they waged a relentless campaign designed to keep Blacks from acquiring these industrial lands.
SPEAKER_06: One critical piece of that land was an open-air gun range. It was 30 or so acres owned by a group of war veterans who had a shooting club. In 1946, the city of Cincinnati bought it as a place for its police to train. At that time, the only other building in the immediate area was a school for the deaf.
SPEAKER_05: The local Black community had asked for that parcel of land for themselves seven years earlier to develop Lincoln Heights.
SPEAKER_10: If they had succeeded, you would probably be here telling a very, very different story. Because they would have also had control over the land where the gun range was located. And certainly they wouldn't have agreed to allow it to be placed there.
SPEAKER_05: In 1946, the same year the Cincinnati Police Department took ownership of the firing range, Lincoln Heights was finally approved for incorporation. But the Black residents only got a tenth of the land they'd originally set out to govern, less than one square mile, shaped like a teacup. Really just the original housing settlement with no aircraft manufacturer or any other big businesses. Yes, it was a victory.
SPEAKER_06: They had created the first Black self-governing town north of the Mason-Dixon line. But they didn't have the industrial tax base or the open, developable land the town would have needed to thrive.
SPEAKER_05: And to add insult to injury, because the way the county had divvied up the land, the Cincinnati Police gun range was now right on the border of Lincoln Heights. And because Lincoln Heights was granted precious little space for expansion, residents would ultimately end up living right next door.
SPEAKER_06: But whatever nuisance the range presented, it wasn't enough to dull the shine of an all-Black town on the rise. In the 1950s and 60s, the population of Lincoln Heights ballooned, small businesses thrived, and the community started its own police force and town council. The aircraft manufacturer became a General Electric plant. And although it wasn't in Lincoln Heights, like the founders wanted, residents still got good jobs at GE.
SPEAKER_04: This is Wakanda, you asked my grandpa. We did it. Oh, man. I say, I've literally heard, you name it, we did it. We had everything here.
SPEAKER_06:
Deron Daniels loves regaling his kids with stories from the town's glory days that he heard from his elders. They would tell him, I'd work a job here, go to the grocery store here.
SPEAKER_04: I went to the pharmacy here. My dentist was here. I went to go party here. Like, you know, everything was here and you never had to leave it. Everybody looked like you and everybody knew you and everybody was essentially family in some aspect of it. That sounds like paradise.
SPEAKER_05: But of course, it wasn't perfect. Deron's grandfather, Elbert Daniels, has lived in Lincoln Heights since before it was even called Lincoln Heights. Oh, yeah, I was born here in 1927.
SPEAKER_09: Born down there on Beale Street.
SPEAKER_05: In the 1970s, Elbert got elected to the town council and he always told Deron that when he thought back on his tenure, he had one big regret.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, the gun range, oh, years ago, when I got elected to the council, I couldn't get nobody on council to go along with me to start fighting it. I think they were scared. They figured they would lose.
SPEAKER_06: A few decades after Lincoln Heights was incorporated, the town fell on hard times. First, manufacturing jobs started disappearing in the 1970s.
SPEAKER_04: You have the crack epidemic in the 80s, the crime bill in the 90s, and late 90s, early 2000s. It was crazy out here.
SPEAKER_06: When Deron was a kid, the community lost a lot of young people to drugs, gun violence, and prison.
SPEAKER_05: At the same time as home values rose in the surrounding towns, inside Lincoln Heights, they tanked. It was no longer the place black Cincinnatians wanted to be. In the year 2000, Cincinnati Magazine ran a feature called The Best Places to Live, ranking all the communities in the metro area. Lincoln Heights came in at number 84, dead last. Today, its population is less than half the size it was in 1960, which means there are a lot of abandoned lots and buildings around town.
SPEAKER_06: And as life got harder in Lincoln Heights over the decades, the noise from the gun range was also getting worse. Cincinnati's police force grew by the hundreds in the 60s and 70s. And starting in the 90s, the department ramped up its use of military-grade tactical weapons, just like other police forces around the country.
SPEAKER_05: That meant more and more officers spending more hours training with bigger and bigger weapons, like shotguns, semi-automatic rifles, and sometimes even concussion grenades. Today, Cincinnati police spend a cumulative 50,000 hours a year training at the range.
SPEAKER_06: And because Lincoln Heights is so small, it's had little choice but to build closer and closer to the edge of the range. There are a lot of reasons why Lincoln Heights has struggled over the years. The nerve-rattling chaos of constant gunfire is one of them.
SPEAKER_10: The way land use occurs within these metropolitan areas and regions, black space is devalued.
SPEAKER_06: Here's historian Henry Louis Taylor again.
SPEAKER_10: And the moment you put a gun range next to a community, you have truly devalued that space because you've created structural noise pollution.
SPEAKER_02: My name is Ruby Kinsey-Mumphrey. I'm the mayor for the village of Lincoln Heights, lifelong resident. I grew up in Lincoln Heights, born and raised.
SPEAKER_06: Ruby told me that several years ago, a developer had a plan to build a series of single-family homes in Lincoln Heights. The properties would have been a big boost to the town's tax base. But once the developer realized how loud the gunfire was, the deal fell through. Even though Ruby loves this town, there's an alternate history she sometimes imagines.
SPEAKER_03: When I go to other communities and stuff, I think about what would Lincoln Heights look like if we didn't have that shooting range and if we would have had that land? What would we be like? What would our population be?
SPEAKER_06: The closest the town ever came to realizing this vision was back in 1999. The mayor of Cincinnati offered to close the range, which sits in a wealthier, majority-white suburb called Evendale, right next door to Lincoln Heights. Cincinnati would then give some of that land to Lincoln Heights so the town could zone it for commercial use and generate extra tax revenue.
SPEAKER_05: But the Cincinnati Police Department was not okay with that. It had no interest in moving the range. The firearms training commander said the facility was too valuable to give away. And besides, he said, the noise couldn't really be that bad in Lincoln Heights.
SPEAKER_06: The president of the police union went even further. He said anyone who supported the plan was spitting on the graves of officers who'd been killed in the line of duty.
SPEAKER_04: The talking point has always been, this is a police safety matter. That if you try to take this away, you are against police safety. You're against the police. It wasn't a real argument. It was emotional gaslighting to keep a gun range, to keep it environmental, injustice, right outside of a black neighborhood. I mean, that's all it was.
SPEAKER_06: After all that police pushback, the plan fizzled out. That was almost 25 years ago. Today, the residents of Lincoln Heights have been hearing that gunfire for nearly eight decades. There are people who have lived their whole lives in this town and never known quiet.
SPEAKER_05: Lincoln Heights predicament is extremely rare. Usually city lawmakers aren't eager to place open air government owned shooting ranges in the middle of dense neighborhoods because the people who live there would get fed up and vote them out.
SPEAKER_06: That is the heart of the problem in Lincoln Heights. Cincinnati owns the range and Lincoln Heights residents don't vote in Cincinnati. And the land that the range sits on isn't in Lincoln Heights or Cincinnati. It's in a third town. But hardly anyone who lives in that town can hear the gunfire because their residential areas are way off in another part of the community. So no one with the power to move the gun range is directly accountable to the people who have to live with the noise, the people of Lincoln Heights.
SPEAKER_05: This type of cross-jurisdictional conflict happens all the time, whether it's between neighbors who share a fence or nations that share a border. Pollution, noise, a hideous display of lawn ornaments. If someone is producing it on their own land, they don't always have to listen to you when you ask them to stop.
SPEAKER_04: So we're in Mariana Terrace, so we're literally like another fence line apart from us and the shooting range right now.
SPEAKER_06: When I visited Lincoln Heights, Dorrance took me to one of the corners of town that gets the worst of the gunfire. It's called Mariana Terrace. It's a public housing complex with 76 units spread across a few low-lying apartment buildings and townhouses. On one side of the development is a playground and I-75, which goes down to Cincinnati. On another side is a long chain-link fence, the edge of the gun range.
SPEAKER_04: So it might be just a little separation from about 50 feet between us and the shooting. But once again, the direction that we're... At one end of the gun range, there's a wall that's supposed to dampen the noise so it
SPEAKER_06: won't bother one of the other towns nearby. But for Mariana Terrace, that wall has had the exact opposite effect.
SPEAKER_04: The sound is amplified because where their wall is, it projects and echoes those sounds back so we don't just get the initial boom, we get that and the echo pushing back towards Lincoln Heights.
SPEAKER_06: You can probably hear the gunfire in the background of that clip. I assure you, in person, it's way louder and a little scary if you're not used to it.
SPEAKER_05: There's been quite a bit of research on the effects of sustained loud noise on the nervous system. As you might imagine, none of those effects are good. Background noise can impair a kid's cognitive performance. It can cause chronic stress and hypertension.
SPEAKER_06: And of course, it's not great for your ears. Regular exposure to sounds louder than 85 decibels can cause hearing loss over time. An audiologist from the University of Cincinnati went to Lincoln Heights and made a recording of gunfire noise in the neighborhood. It repeatedly spiked to over 100 decibels, louder than a construction site.
SPEAKER_11: I can't actually, as an entrepreneur, it's very hard to work from home and try to get anything done. Like, I do multiple different things and this is constantly, you know, all day, every day.
SPEAKER_06: Alanda Brooks has lived in the complex for eight years with her three kids.
SPEAKER_11: Actually, a lot of people on this side of the street work nights. How do you get any rest during the day? There's no way to muffle it even inside of your home. So it's really bad, like to the point where you can be having a conversation with somebody inside of your home with the doors closed and everything. And they're like, oh my God, what is that? You tell people all the time, like I live at the back of a gun range and they're like, wow, that's, that's crazy. It's traumatizing. Do you ever feel like you don't want to bring people to your house because of that?
SPEAKER_06: Oh yeah, no, I don't really have any people.
SPEAKER_11: I don't have visitors.
SPEAKER_06: When we drove away from the complex, Durrance told me he's not a gun guy, but he's learned a lot about firearms from listening to the range his whole life. He talks about it like it's the weather. There are good days and bad days and none of it is under your control.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so today's a light day. So you probably maybe have about maybe three or four officers using their hand weapons, just a nine millimeter, but you can still hear the intensity of the sound. This is the pop out. Those days when they're using like the shotgun weapon days are bad. Your automatic rifle days are bad. Like those just the constant, you know.
SPEAKER_05: A lot of people in Lincoln Heights have their own horror stories about the gun range. Some people remember times when there were real shootings in the community and the victims were hurt, but because everyone who heard the shots just assumed they came from the range, the emergency response was delayed.
SPEAKER_06: And then there was the time in 2008 when a stray bullet escaped from the range and broke the windshield of a car parked nearby.
SPEAKER_05: Parents in Lincoln Heights worry about possible lead in the soil and water from all those bullets in the ground. And kids in town have a history of busting through the chain link fence and sneaking onto the range to collect bullet casings as a game.
SPEAKER_06: And the gunfire you hear in Lincoln Heights is not just any gunfire. It's police gunfire, which makes the range feel even more intimidating.
SPEAKER_13: I don't even know how to put it into words. It's kind of like a traumatizing experience, even through adulthood.
SPEAKER_06: Alicia Franklin grew up in Lincoln Heights and now she's raising her kids there, four black boys.
SPEAKER_13: Conversations with my sons have kind of looked something like, OK, we have the gun range. That's the gunfire you're hearing. The reason that the police have the gun range is so that they can practice. Now when you possibly get into some kind of trouble, there could possibly be an escalated situation. And police shoot black men for no reason. Followed up with, well, why?
Which is typical for a kid. And there's no way that you can explain it. And so it's basically like you're saying they're using this range as target practice for you.
SPEAKER_06: Like a lot of communities in the U.S., the Cincinnati area has seen multiple black men killed by police officers over the years.
SPEAKER_13: I also have a five-year-old. Now the five-year-old is questioning, like, Mom, what's that noise? He hears guns and he knows that they are associated with violence. And it makes me feel helpless because there's not really anything that I can do except move.
SPEAKER_06: People like Alicia had grown up hearing the legend of Lincoln Heights, how it was built from scratch by black migrants who'd escaped Jim Crow and sacrificed everything just to have some real control over their own community.
SPEAKER_05: But the gun range has made many of the residents feel powerless. Historian Henry Louis Taylor says that's not just a feeling. To some extent, it's reality. The idea of controlling the space that you live is a very, very powerful idea among,
SPEAKER_10: in the African-American population. But there's a limit to what you can do with that level of control when everything else is outside of your power. And that's what we learn from the experience of Lincoln Heights.
SPEAKER_06: Over the course of eight decades, people have tried again and again to move the gun range. Durrance's grandfather led that fight back in the 1970s. The mayor of Cincinnati tried in the 90s. Every effort failed.
SPEAKER_05: And then in 2019, a new movement took off in Lincoln Heights, and the energy behind that effort was unlike anything the town had ever seen before. That is coming up after the break.
The people that bring their cars to Firestone Complete Auto Care aren't just ordinary customers. They're never just a number. They're neighbors. And Firestone technicians will go above and beyond for every one of their neighbors, every time.
They're here to help keep your car running newer, longer. So when you leave their shop, you know they've done everything to make sure you get home safely. That's how Firestone Complete Auto Care has done it for 97 years and counting.
Find a Firestone Complete Auto Care in your neighborhood and see our current offers at FirestoneComplete.com forward slash invisible. That's FirestoneComplete.com forward slash invisible.
SPEAKER_08: Accounts for 10 plus. Certain apps, games and experiences may be suitable for a more mature audience. Learn more at META.com.
SPEAKER_05: and change, something to look forward to, to make you feel grounded, to make you feel like you're doing something for yourself and to give you the tools to manage everything going on. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient. It's designed to be flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Find your bright spot this season with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10 percent off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible.
This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace, the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Everyone knows the holidays can take a toll on your bank account if you're looking for creative ways to increase revenue and give your family and friends the holiday treats they deserve, then you need to get started with Squarespace's new feature, Squarespace Courses. So say you are a podcaster. Squarespace has all the tools you need to create and sell your own online course in podcasting. Start with a professional layout that fits your brand. Upload video lessons to teach techniques and skills and tailor your course with the powerful built in fluid engine editor. With Squarespace Courses, you can create engaging content your audience will love. Then simply add a paywall and set the price. Plus, you can charge a one time fee or sell subscriptions. Turn your creativity into income with Squarespace Courses. Head to Squarespace dot com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to www dot Squarespace dot com slash invisible to save 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace dot com slash invisible.
Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress free. My Article dining room table is the center of my house. My partner works at it all day long. And when everyone's at home, we eat around it at night because it's the only table that fits us all. It is the greatest. Article is offering 99 percent of visible listeners 50 dollars off your first purchase of 100 dollars or more to claim. Visit Article dot com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's Article dot com slash 99 for 50 dollars off your first purchase of 100 dollars or more.
Lincoln Heights Councilman Dorrance Daniels and Mayor Ruby Kinsey-Mumphrey had both lived with the gun range for their whole lives. By 2019, they were starting to see it as more than a source of traumatizing noise pollution.
SPEAKER_06: The firing range, they believed, was an existential threat to the town's survival. The population had been shrinking since the 1970s because who wants to stay in a place, much less move to a place that constantly sounds like it's under siege?
SPEAKER_04: If Lincoln Heights fails, it's our fault. It's not our grandparents' fault anymore. Our parents' fault anymore. Can't blame the kids. It's on us now.
SPEAKER_06: With that mindset, Dorrance put his head down and got to work. In March 2019, on his 32nd birthday, he showed up at an open meeting of the Cincinnati City Council.
SPEAKER_04: And that the constant hearing of bang, bang, bang throughout the whole community echoing is a problem.
I have young kids that can tell you the sound of an automatic rifle, which kind of gun that is before they can do their ABCs. I have kids that have a playground. Dorrance was asking the Cincinnati council members to show some empathy.
SPEAKER_04: Just kind of pleading with them like, hey, from one council member to another, do you guys know that you've been down here shooting? A lot of the council members didn't even know where they practiced at. It was like, wait, we have a gun range in Lincoln Heights?
SPEAKER_06: To Dorrance, this was the crux of the problem. The gun range wasn't affecting any residents of Cincinnati, so no one was complaining about it to Cincinnati lawmakers. So they had no reason to think about it.
SPEAKER_05: Later that year, Ruby, the mayor of Lincoln Heights, teamed up with the mayors of the other towns around the gun range to send a letter to the Cincinnati mayor asking for relief. They went down to city hall to make their case to the council to.
SPEAKER_06: But Cincinnati was not ready to budge. The vice mayor of the city said if the residents of Lincoln Heights wanted the gun range to move, they should be prepared to pay for it themselves. The facility had been there since the 1940s. It was Lincoln Heights that made the decision to keep building next to the range, the vice mayor said. Basically, it's your fault, not ours.
SPEAKER_05: That argument doesn't hold water. The founders of Lincoln Heights were living in that area long before Cincinnati police started shooting there. And because they only got a tiny fraction of the land they wanted to incorporate, they had no choice but to build right up to the border of the gun range.
SPEAKER_06: So Dorrance had truth on his side, but he knew that compared to Cincinnati, Lincoln Heights was small. If it wanted to make itself heard, it needed allies in its corner. So when U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown came to the area to talk about health care, Dorrance showed up and raised his hand.
SPEAKER_04: I've never been bashful to ask a question, especially if you're an elected official. You know, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask the question.
SPEAKER_06: Dorrance asked the senator, speaking of health care, did you know there's an open air, government owned gun range in your own state that's causing health problems in my town? Senator Brown was shocked. His staff said there might be federal money available to relocate the gun range, especially because federal officers practice there, too.
SPEAKER_04: He was very aggressive on let's do something about it.
SPEAKER_06: By this point, Dorrance and Ruby had been pressing their case for the better part of a year. They'd spent all this time making appearances at City Hall, educating Cincinnati council members and recruiting supporters from other towns in the county. And now they had the backing of a U.S. senator. The movement seemed like it was finally gaining momentum.
SPEAKER_05: Then in March 2020, COVID hit. All of a sudden, kids were going to school at their kitchen tables. People were working from home if they could. In Lincoln Heights, that meant no escape from the gunfire. Even if you were used to it before, you really noticed it now. For lifelong residents like Alicia Franklin, a sense of urgency was building.
SPEAKER_13: Because now you're hearing it all day. You don't get to leave home and then, you know, have a little bit of peace. No, you're you're hearing it all day into the night.
SPEAKER_05: And soon, whenever Lincoln Heights residents turned on the TV, there was one news story and one horrifying video dominating the airwaves.
SPEAKER_01: A wave of protests over the death of George Floyd spread from coast to coast on Saturday and spilled over into the morning. At least 25 cities across the U.S. Strategically, we felt our best way to honor George Floyd.
SPEAKER_04: The best way to kind of honor our residents was to be more aggressive with the situation.
SPEAKER_10: Do we want it in our neighborhood? No! Is it time for it to go? Yes!
SPEAKER_06: When? On Juneteenth, 2020, Dorrance led a protest right outside the gates of the gun range. CPD?
SPEAKER_02: Don't shoot near me!
SPEAKER_06: CPD? Don't shoot near me! CPD? Don't shoot near me! A few months later, he brought the fight down to Cincinnati with a rally outside City Hall. The city council agreed to hold a hearing specifically dedicated to the gun range issue.
Good evening, everybody, and welcome to what on the City Hall side is official—
SPEAKER_05: This would be the first time many Lincoln Heights residents had a platform to tell Cincinnati in the official record how its police force had been terrorizing their town by way of the shooting range for nearly three-quarters of a century. One by one, people from the community sat in front of the council and told their stories.
SPEAKER_06: One of them was Alicia Franklin. She showed the council a video she'd taken of one of her sons.
SPEAKER_13: Hey, why do you have your hands over your ears?
SPEAKER_06: He's standing outside on their stoop, covering his ears and pointing in the direction of the gun range.
SPEAKER_13: I can't hear you. They're gonna shoot.
SPEAKER_06: It's gutting. He's so young, way too young to make sense of what's happening.
But you can see his instincts sounding the alarm, telling him something's wrong.
SPEAKER_13: Do you think they're gonna shoot again?
Mm-hmm. The four-year-old who you all saw on the video, he used to get startled and scared when he heard those gunshots, and that video wasn't long ago.
Now they don't phase them, which is very concerning.
SPEAKER_05: Audiology expert Brian Earl also spoke at the hearing. He told the council about one time he visited Lincoln Heights to measure the sound levels near the range.
SPEAKER_07: My eyes widened and my ears started to flutter. We have what is called an acoustic reflex that starts to trigger when our bodies are telling us it's too much.
My ears were doing that from a distance, but in between me and the range was a housing development and a playground.
So there's the father in me, but it's too close.
SPEAKER_06: You can hear Brian getting a little choked up in that clip. It happened when I interviewed him a couple years ago, too. Seeing children in Lincoln Heights not even reacting to the noise that was making his ears twitch, it was almost too much for him to bear. The housing development he visited was Mariana Terrace, the same place I went with Durrance.
SPEAKER_05: Durrance was at the hearing, too. He gave his own testimony.
SPEAKER_04: I coach football. I teach at the elementary school. I've lived through it. My dad lived through it. My grandfather lived through it. Why does my son have to live through it, too? It doesn't make any sense. You heard that crap, man. Nobody wants to live in that. You are killing us. Do stress. I'm sorry if I look like I'm animated right now, but I'm not playing. We ain't playing.
SPEAKER_06:
The residents of Lincoln Heights had been trying to get rid of the gun range for almost as long as the town had existed. But now, finally, after this hearing, the generations-long gridlock seemed to dissipate. Even the Cincinnati police, which had long refused to relocate the range, now said it was officially open to the idea.
SPEAKER_05: The city of Cincinnati began searching for a new place for its police to train, and it landed on a location in a less densely populated township just a few miles west of Lincoln Heights. The advantage of the new location is, there is actually already an open-air firing range there where the county sheriff's department trains. Now there are plans in the works to expand that facility so Cincinnati police can train there, too.
SPEAKER_06: It's such a simple solution. Elegant, almost. The cops will get a brand new facility, and Lincoln Heights will get some peace and closure. It almost makes you wonder why it took so long for Cincinnati to come around.
The move will cost about $31.5 million. Cincinnati only agreed to chip in about $4 million. The rest is coming from the state, the federal government, and the county. I asked the Cincinnati police for comment, but I haven't heard back.
SPEAKER_05: This past January, the county officially announced the plans for the new range, and the expected closure of the old one next to Lincoln Heights. Alicia Franklin saw Durrance post about it on Facebook.
SPEAKER_13: I just really could not believe it. I'm like, is this for real? Like, I mean, I was just elated. I lit up. Like, this is finally, you know, gonna happen.
SPEAKER_06: But nobody's planning a victory party just yet. Durrance told me the most excited he's been so far was the day he called me in January to tell me about the county's announcement that the range was getting moved. But after we hung up later that day… I came home. You know what I heard? They still out here shooting.
SPEAKER_04: So, you know, you don't get to get too excited because they're going to consistently remind you that they're still here.
SPEAKER_06: When I talked to people in Lincoln Heights, I heard lots of different opinions about the projected closure of the range. Some people think it's definitely going to happen. Others think those people are just fooling themselves, and they'll believe it when they see it. And a lot of residents think moving the gun range isn't enough. They say Cincinnati owes Lincoln Heights reparations for 70-plus years of pain and suffering.
SPEAKER_05: There's also a cynical read on this story. Some Lincoln Heights residents believe Cincinnati is moving the range less because of public pressure and more as a sensible business deal. Even Dale, the town where the gun range sits, has been itching for years to reclaim that land from Cincinnati. They want to use it for industrial development. Even Dale is utilizing and leveraging the efforts that the residents are putting forward to make this happen.
SPEAKER_04: But with politics, I think you always try to realize, how do you benefit from it? That's just the game that we play.
SPEAKER_05: At the end of the day, a win is a win. Doron says he's already seen a change in the mentality of some of the residents who helped mobilize against the range. There's a feeling of power and possibility now that wasn't there before.
SPEAKER_04: I want the residents to really realize what they did here. Not only what they did here, but what y'all can do moving forward with this community. Because the community was just an idea 75 years ago, just a bunch of Black folks that come together and said, we want to provide Black people jobs. And that was just an idea. Now we're still standing here. And that is now going to lead to who knows what 75 years from now. And that's the coolest thing about it, for real, in my perspective.
SPEAKER_06: Today, the gun range on the border of Lincoln Heights is still active. It'll take at least a year or two for the new facility to open, knock wood, and the shots will continue until then. But if all goes to plan, the day the Cincinnati police shoot the last bullet at that range will mark the end of a struggle that has been passed down through Lincoln Heights families for generations. The way Mayor Ruby Kinsey-Mumphrey sees it, that would put them one step closer to realizing the dream the founders had for a town in control of its own destiny.
SPEAKER_03: You know, I lost my father last year and I knew he wanted that to go. He would be really happy and proud of me that I helped get that gun range moved. And so it's going to be like a new story. It's going to be like opening a door to a new day.
SPEAKER_05: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Christina Cottarucci, edited by Christopher Johnson, sound mix by Dara Hirsch, music by Swan Rial, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Our executive producer is Kathy Tu, Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Emmett Fitzgerald, Martine Gonzalez, Vivian Ley, Jason De Leon, Lasha Madon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Stephen Kramer of the Greater Cincinnati Police Museum. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on most of the social media sites, but we should probably all spend a little less time there. But you can find other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_00: Amika is a different type of insurance company. We provide you with something more than auto, home or life insurance. It's empathy because at Amika your coverage always comes with compassion. It's one of the reasons why 98% of our customers stay with us every year.
Amika, empathy is our best policy.
SPEAKER_02: Join Walmart Plus because members shop Walmart Black Friday deals online three hours early.
SPEAKER_12: In other words, shopping amazing Walmart Black Friday deals just got more amazing-er. Join Walmart Plus today. Paid members only, online only, while supplies last.
SPEAKER_05: Hello, beautiful nerds. During this holiday season, I want to thank you for being listeners of 99% Invisible. I also want to remind you that if you're traveling this holiday season, catch up on all 99% Invisible episodes to give your mind something to chew on as you're staring at the miles and miles of road ahead of you. Or turn on 99PI to distract yourself from the crying baby in the road behind you who is just having a rough day. Listen to 99% Invisible on Amazon Music. Head to Amazon.com slash 99PI and make sure to follow us there.
