CLEVELAND, Ohio - Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson's settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice will make way for a substantial - and substantive - overhaul of a use-of-force policy that top police brass once bragged was a model for the country.

Officers will be held to higher standards on unholstering and firing their weapons and no longer will be allowed to use their guns to strike suspects as they would with a baton.

They will be required to take immediate steps to provide or secure first aid for suspects they injure, addressing an issue raised in many lawsuits that cost the city money.

And retaliatory force - such as tussling with a suspect at the end of a chase - will be explicitly prohibited under terms of the so-called consent decree announced Tuesday.

"Banning the use of guns as 'batons' is long overdue," said Samuel Walker, an expert on policing and criminal justice issues and emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "Controlling foot chases and the resulting uses of force is very important. This has gotten a lot of attention in recent years."

The 105-page consent decree, which must be approved by a federal judge, calls for dozens of rewrites to the Division of Police rulebook on force, many of them tactical and aimed at preventing the kinds of cases that have become front-page fodder in recent years. The agreement also demands levels of accountability and transparency that did not exist or were not endorsed or enforced previously.

(You can read the full document at the end of this post.)

In 2011, for example, Plain Dealer Publishing Co. found that then-Police Chief Michael McGrath often signed off on use-of-force investigations without questioning irregularities or discrepancies. McGrath, whom Jackson since promoted to public safety director, defended the city's force policy at the time as one of the nation's best.

The Justice Department, which reviewed Cleveland's police practices at Jackson's invitation, acknowledges that the city "recently has made important changes to some of its force policies." It will be on Jackson, McGrath and Chief Calvin Williams to adopt the reforms spelled out in Tuesday's deal. And these reforms will cut much deeper.

The tactical changes

From the tighter rules involving guns to the ban on retaliatory force, so many of the new rules will emphasize "de-escalation techniques." Officers will be told to give suspects a chance to surrender and to use verbal warnings before applying force.

Police also will "provide emergency first aid until professional medical care providers are on scene." There has been a demand to explicitly require such a protocol, particularly since the officer-involved shooting death last November of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Two officers, including the one who shot Tamir, made no attempt to offer first aid. Tamir's family questions if he would be alive today had he received immediate care.

Officers also will not be permitted to fire their guns at a moving vehicle "unless use of lethal force is justified by something other than the threat from the moving vehicle."

The issue of moving cars as a threat was key in the defense of officer Michael Brelo, who was acquitted Saturday on voluntary manslaughter charges. Brelo was among more than 100 officers involved in a 2012 car chase and one of 13 who fired a total of 137 bullets at a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu. The shooting ended with the deaths of the driver, Timothy Russell, and his passenger, Malissa Williams. No gun was recovered from the car.

Aside from guns, the consent decree calls for refined policies governing the use of Tasers and pepper spray and for a ban on neck holds as a method of subduing a suspect.

The changes to promote transparency

Use of force is only half the equation.

The other half comes in how that force is chronicled by the officer who uses it.

Cleveland officers tend to be awfully sparse with the details they provide.Beyond that, their supervisors hardly ever demand fuller narratives. When they attempt to, they often find unhelpful or uncooperative witnesses in the form of other police officers. A case against officers accused of beating Edward Henderson after Henderson led them on a 2011 car chase went nowhere, in part because officers wouldn't cooperate. Henderson later won a $600,000 settlement from the city.

The consent decree aims to change this ingrained part of police culture.

Notably, the new policy "will explicitly prohibit the use of ... 'boilerplate' or 'canned' language. Cliches such as "furtive movement" or "fighting stance" are singled out in ignominy.

And supervisors will have more teeth when investigating, as those who "use or observe force and fail to report it will be subject to the disciplinary process, up to and including termination, regardless of whether the force was reasonable."

In the past, officers had a broad menu of options to justify which of five levels of force they applied. The lowest levels include tactics as physical as tripping; the highest encompass deadly force. In between are responses such as punching, kicking and "takedowns," as well as the use of Tasers, pepper spray and batons.

Within a year, Cleveland's Division of Police must implement a "single, uniform reporting system" that classifies force more clearly in three levels.

Level 1 will cover force that causes only fleeting pain or disorientation. Level 2 will cover most uses that cause or have the potential to cause injury, including Taser shocks, closed-fist punches and leg sweeps. Level 3 will include all lethal force and any response that leads to death, "serious physical injury," loss of consciousness or hospitalization.

The changes to promote accountability

Investigating the use of force will in itself become a more robust process.

Supervisors all the way up the chain of command will be required to order additional queries if information from the use-of-force reports doesn't square. And Internal Affairs will house FIT, a new force investigation team to investigate all Level 3 cases and any use-of-force case where an officer faces accusations of criminal misconduct.

Also new: a Force Review Board that will review all FIT cases, all Level 2 cases where misconduct was found and a sample of other Level 2 cases. The police chief or a designee will chair the board, which will include a training supervisor, an Office of Professional Standards representative, an Internal Affairs representative and a representative from the police district where the incident occurred.

"The quality of investigations of uses of force is extremely important," said Walker, the criminal justice expert. "That, in fact, is one of the things I regard as a major part of a department's 'culture' -- what kind of questions do sergeants/supervisors ask? Do they probe? Do they look for inconsistencies and contradictions?"

Perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to improve accountability will come through a database that will track officer performance, including all uses of force. The computerized program will run through the city's Officer Intervention Program.

The city, according to terms of the consent decree, "will set threshold levels for each OIP indicator that will trigger a formal review, and the thresholds will allow for peer-ground comparisons between officers with similar assignments and duties."

Read the entire consent decree below: