‘Today marks a new way of policing in the city of Cleveland,’ says Mayor Frank Jackson after police department agrees to take steps to rein in abusive behavior

Federal prosecutors have announced a settlement with Cleveland in which the city’s police department has agreed to take steps to correct a pattern of abusive behavior by officers.

The announcement makes Cleveland the first American city to have cut two such deals to rein in its police force.

Federal prosecutors announced the most recent settlement at a news conference at Cleveland city hall on Tuesday afternoon. The deal was reached after investigators documented a pattern of harsh and chronic abuse by police officers in a December 2014 report.

Among other measures, the settlement mandates:

New firearms rules including no warning shots.

A civilian monitor inside the police department.

Better data collection on use-of-force incidents.

Additional officer training.

Documentation of all disciplinary decisions.

No neck holds.

No Taser use targeting head, neck or genitalia.

Mental health consultation.

The deal lays out rules for the review of footage collected from body cameras worn by officers, but does not mandate that every officer wear a body camera.

Steven M Dettelbach, US attorney for the northern district of Ohio, hailed the deal as “a historic agreement that will transform the way the city of Cleveland is policed for years and years to come”.

“I am deeply optimistic that transformation is coming to Cleveland,” principal deputy assistant attorney general Vanita Gupta said at the news conference.

The agreement provided more than an echo of a settlement reached 11 years ago between the Justice Department and the Cleveland police department, following a similar federal investigation of similar reported abuses by Cleveland police. That agreement instituted a ban on officers firing at moving vehicles and required investigations of all officer-involved shootings.



Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson, who was first elected in 2005 in part on a promise to reform policing in the city and who now faces a recall petition based on what some Clevelanders say has been his failure to do so, did not mention the earlier settlement in an appearance Tuesday.

“This is a transformative time with the city of Cleveland division of police, but most important with the citizens of Cleveland,” Jackson said. “Today marks a new way of policing in the city of Cleveland, one built on a strong foundation of systemic change.

“At the end, we will have community policing as part of our DNA.”

Tuesday’s 105-page comprehensive consent decree outlines reforms in six categories including use of force, community policing, equipment and staffing, accountability, bias-free policing and crisis intervention. The agreement calls for “state-of-the-art training” to ensure that “any use of force is constitutional and lawful”, Dettelbach said. It establishes a new inspector general of police to be appointed by the mayor, and a new civilian oversight post in the internal affairs division of the Cleveland division of police.

Jackson said the city could not afford to implement the reforms on its own, and would be seeking outside aid. “Having the city bear the entire cost will not work for us,” Jackson said.

Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has studied all such consent decrees, said the Cleveland deal was a “model” agreement. While some provisions in the deal, such as the use-of-force policy, were “standard,” Walker said, other provisions were notably forceful, such as a requirement that police supervisors file reports on incidents before the ends of their shifts.

“It’s among the best,” Walker said of the deal. “I think the law enforcement profession has learned that the devil is in all of these details, and the special litigation section of the justice department has learned that as well. So it’s these detailed things that are necessary to make a general use-of-force policy effective.”

Walker cautioned that reform in Cleveland and elsewhere around the country “will not be quick or easy. It will take a lot of dedicated work and some years.”

The Justice Department opened its most recent investigation of Cleveland police after multiple reports of abuse, including a November 2012 incident in which police officer Michael Brelo climbed on to the hood of a vehicle following a car chase and fired 15 times through the windshield. Two unarmed passengers, Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell, both African American, died in the shooting, in which officers fired a total of 137 shots. Brelo was acquitted of voluntary manslaughter on Saturday.

Jackson said peaceful protests in the wake of the Brelo verdict had buttressed his faith “that Cleveland is a city for peaceful demonstrations and dialogue”.

Gupta said the Justice Department had no immediate plans to bring charges in the Brelo case, but was reviewing the case “given the limited nature of our federal statute in this regard”.

In Cleveland, the reaction over the settlement was mixed. Bishop Eugene Ward, of the Greater Love Missionary Baptist in Cleveland said the “police in Cleveland have an attitude that if you run and they have to chase you, then they have every right to give that person a whupping. The higher ups in the Cleveland police need to have a greater understanding that a whupping isn’t necessary in all case.”

Cleveland City Councilman Kevin Conwell said he didn’t see any changes in what he called “an abysmal record” of investigating and solving murder cases, especially for those involving African-Americans. “These unsolved case tell the community that their lives don’t matter, and as a consequence of that, we have even more crime because of that message,” Conwell said. “The DOJ does not address that issue.”

Cleveland City Councilman Jeff Johnson said the city needs a complete overhaul of its police department and this consent decree is a good start. “When you have 100 police officers and 60 cars chasing tow unarmed suspect, it means the department isn’t in accordance with the law and the US constitution,” he said.

“But if they implement the agreements – and get police officers to think differently about the community they are policing, working with the community instead of against – I think this can be a very positive first step in getting things back to being acceptable.”

Other DOJ settlements

The Cleveland settlement is one of about two dozen such deals between the justice department and local law enforcement since the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act gave Washington the authority to investigate improper use of force by police, unlawful stops and searches, and biased policing.



The first major consent decree, as the deals are known, was reached in 1997 in Pittsburgh, following a federal complaint prompted after an African American man died while being taken into custody by four police officers following a low-speed car chase, and after a white police officer shot dead two black men in a car that had dragged him.

The Justice Department reached three such settlements in 2014: with New Orleans; Newark, New Jersey; and Albuquerque. Two current federal investigations – into policing practices in the cities of Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore – are ongoing. The Justice Department released its report on police abuses in Ferguson in March.

The report on Cleveland, released in December, found “a pattern or practice of using unreasonable force in violation of the fourth amendment”, including “the unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons”; “the unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including Tasers, chemical spray and fists”; and “excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check”.

In one case, police Tasered a man strapped to a gurney. In another, they repeatedly punched a handcuffed teenager who had been accused of shoplifting. The investigation began before a police officer shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice dead in a Cleveland park last November.

Cleveland is in northern Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie. The greater metropolitan area has about 2 million residents, ranking it among the top 30 largest nationally.