CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Division of Police has made progress complying with the consent decree on uses of force by officers, but it has also failed in some of its investigations into such cases, according to the Cleveland Police Monitoring Team.
In a report released this week, the monitoring team charged with overseeing the city's compliance with the federal consent decree focused on the police department’s Force Investigation Team (FIT) that conducts investigations into officer use of force. They reviewed 28 investigations the division conducted from July 2020 through October 2022, including seven officer-involved shootings.
The report states FIT investigators should be objective, but in 28% of the cases they looked at, monitors found those investigators were biased toward officers in their reviews. They also ruled the department failed to conduct timely interviews of officers who were involved in most cases, delaying those interviews by weeks, if not months.
Additionally, in about a third of the cases, investigators reviewed use-of-force using outdated department policies rather than current policies.
When 3News reached out to City Hall, spokesman Tyler Sinclair noted that Mayor Justin Bibb's administration was in office only for the last 10 months of the monitoring team's review. Sinclair also pointed to the monitoring team's semiannual report that came out earlier this month. In that report, the team said "use-of-force is an area where the city has excelled" and where the police department continues to see improvement.
But that report also highlights the department's struggle to comply with what the monitoring team refers to as "community engagement and building trust" and the lack of progress in "community and problem-oriented policing.”
"Although the Monitoring Team initially anticipated that this reporting period would reflect improvement in the area of Community and Problem-Oriented Policing (CPOP), there are no significant changes to report. CDP's Training Section did develop a comprehensive, in-service CPOP training curriculum," the report read. "However, CDP regressed in its compliance, being downgraded to noncompliance."
The city’s compliance with the consent decree was the focus of a semiannual status conference in United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on Wednesday. In that meeting that included city officials and members of the monitoring team, the Department of Justice raised concerns about recent changes to the city's police contract.
The city told WKYC those concerns don't relate to the 25% pay increase or the switch to 12-hour shifts for police, but they have to do with changes to discipline. The new contract says some officers cannot be disciplined for some low-level violations, and Cleveland officials told us the judge asked them to work with the DOJ to resolve the disagreement.
3News also reached out to the monitoring team, the DOJ, Cleveland's police union, and Cleveland City Council for this report.