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By Greg Moore
The City of Cleveland, and the Cleveland Division of Police (CDP) has been under a Consent Decree since 2015 following an extensive 21-month investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that there was “reasonable cause to believe that the CDP engaged in excessive use of force” in prior years. The DOJ concluded that “the alleged pattern and practice of excessive force was related to structural and operational issues within the Division, and potentially violated the U.S. Constitution and federal law.” The Consent Decree – Cleveland Community Police Commission (clecpc.org)
The Consent Decree was designed “to repair community trust and protect the constitutional rights of the people of Cleveland by identifying problems within the CDP and by creating and implementing policies and practices to correct these problems.” The problem areas which the CDP is required to make policy changes include: (1) Community Engagement, (2) Community and Problem-Oriented Policing, (3) Bias-Free Policing, (4) Use of Force, (5) Crisis Intervention, (6) Search & Seizure, (7) Accountability, Transparency, & Oversight, and (8) Officer Assistance, Support, and Supervision. http://209.200.155.143/CityofCleveland/Home/Government/CityAgencies/PublicSafety/ConsentDecree#main-content
As part of the steps to remedy these issues, a Cleveland Police Monitoring Team was created to evaluate the progress made by the city and the CPD. The decree requires the Monitoring Team to provide periodic semi-annual reports that monitor and evaluate the level of compliance within each of the eight problem areas identified by the consent decree. The four levels of compliance for evaluation are:
• Non-compliance: The City and/or Cleveland Division of Police (CDP) has not yet complied with the relevant provision of the Consent Decree.
• Partial Compliance. The City and/or CDP has made sufficient initial strides or sufficient partial progress toward compliance toward a material number of key components of the Consent Decree—but has not achieved operational compliance.
• Operational Compliance. The City and/or CDP has made notable progress to technically comply with the requirement and/or policy, process, procedure, protocol, training, system, or other mechanism of the Consent Decree in existence or practice operationally—but has not yet demonstrated, meaningful adherence to or effective implementation, including across time, cases, and;
• General Compliance. The City and/or CDP has complied fully with the requirement and the requirement has been demonstrated to be meaningfully adhered to and/or effectively implemented across time, cases, and/or incidents.
In October of 2023 the Independent Monitoring Team released its 13th Semi-annual report which demonstrated noticeable progress in 3 problem areas; Crisis Intervention, Search and Seizure and Accountability that moved completely out of the non-compliance category to partial or operational compliance Three other areas; Use of Force, Bias Free Policing, and Community and Problem-Orientated Policing were reported to have only 1 or 2 remaining areas of non-compliance.
There were four areas where the report noted continued non-compliance including Community Engagement, Transparency and Oversight, Office Assistance and Support, and Supervision. The Executive Summary and complete report of the Monitoring Team can be found at the following link Monitoring-Team-13th-Semiannual-Report-Oct-2023.pdf (clecpc.org)
