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CINCINNATI, OHIO – Southwest Ohio residents are expressing outrage at local leadership after a viral street fight in their backyard that captured the nation’s attention. One resident, a local political activist, told Fox News Digital a “Democrat monopoly” is partially to blame.
The Saturday night violence in downtown Cincinnati on July 26, which left a woman knocked unconscious on the street at the hands of a male assailant, was the result of a city that wasn’t “prepared” due to political ideology, Price Hill native Adam Koehler told Fox News Digital. He added that the response to the fight was “not leadership.”
“Leadership comes out and says, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem. Here’s my solution to fix it,'” Koehler said. “But instead, they want to be cowardly and hide the fact that crime is actually happening.”
Cincinnati’s mayor and other local officials have faced heated criticism in recent days over the perception they are not taking crime seriously. One elected Democrat, Councilwoman Victoria Parks, posted on social media saying that the victims of the fight “begged for that beatdown.”
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“This is a Democrat monopoly they’ve got here,” Koehler, an entrepreneur and former candidate for Hamilton County commissioner, told Fox News Digital. “So, I mean they can just pretty much do whatever they want. And a lot of that kind of rhetoric is excused, right? It’s, you know, past injustices and you know now I feel like I can say whatever I want and it’s excused. And luckily there are some city council members that denounced the words that Victoria Parks said, which is great, but you’ve got other people that just want to stoke the flames.”
Holly, the woman brutally knocked out and bruised in the attack, told Fox News this week she is yet to receive a phone call from the mayor or top officials “just apologizing for what happened and for letting these thugs and criminals run the streets when they should have been in jail to begin with.”
Koehler told Fox News Digital that Democrats running the city “have an agenda” and “want to look a certain way” and “ignore the problem.”
“It’s a lot of these ideologies that come out of the universities, right?” Koehler said. “Every generation thinks they figured something out about crime and they’re soft-hearted people, they wanted to do things, but, you know, policies like what Giuliani did in New York, those kind of things work.”
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Koehler, who was speaking to Fox News Digital outside a GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy town hall event on Cincinnati’s west side, said figures like Ramaswamy, Sen. Bernie Moreno, and Ohio native VP JD Vance are reasons to be optimistic about addressing the crime spike downtown.
“Those guys got power,” Koehler said. “I mean you start throwing the DOJ down here and start investigating some of the things that are happening, why wasn’t there more police there?”
Koehler added, “I mean there’s a lot of grifting that goes on whenever you have a one-party monopoly in any city. Obviously, you’re gonna have corruption. And it’s just, it’s festered here, and it’s culminated in what you see.”
Moreno said this week he is introducing “Holly’s Act,” a move aimed at ending what he calls the justice system’s revolving door for repeat offenders.
“Let’s be honest, because a lot of times you guys are qualifying this as a brawl,” Moreno told reporters. “This was attempted murder of an innocent woman. And that person had a rap sheet a mile long. Nobody who has that rap sheet should be walking the streets of any Ohio city free.”
Fox News Digital’s Julia Bonavita and Peter D’Abrosca contributed to this report.
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