After nearly 11 years of under federal oversight, Cleveland asked to be released from the consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice that mandated broad reforms to how police use force and interact with residents.
The city and Justice Department jointly filed a motion Thursday requesting that U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver end the consent decree, arguing that the city and police department had reached “substantial compliance” with its goals.
Oliver will have the final say on whether to release the city. If he agrees, he will end an era in Cleveland that began with high-profile fatal shootings by police both locally and nationwide.
In a news conference at City Hall, Mayor Justin Bibb said Cleveland police had made strides since entering the decree more than a decade ago in an era of broken trust.
“Cleveland today is not the Cleveland of 2015, and the consent decree was never meant to be permanent,” he said. “It was meant to help us build the systems to get this moment right.”
Over those years, the city remade police policies and training under the eye of the Justice Department and a court-appointed monitoring team. The work cost the taxpayers around $40 million, Bibb said. (Cleveland City Countil estimates spending on the consent decree and police oversight since 2015 is $54 million.)
The mayor said that he was not declaring the mission accomplished. He acknowledged the city had not fulfilled 100% of the decree’s requirements. The city’s internal Police Accountability Team would keep an eye on the decree’s reforms, and Bibb said he had asked the court-appointed monitor to remain on the job for another year, he said.
“What we are saying today is that we have achieved a significant milestone in the progress that we’ve made under the consent decree, and now is the time for the City of Cleveland to take back the reins for local control,” he said.
Bibb says he aimed to end the consent decree ‘regardless of who is in the White House’
Cleveland entered the decree under then-President Barack Obama. Now, three presidential terms later, the city is working to end the decree under the administration of President Donald Trump — who ordered a review of such deals last year.
Bibb said Cleveland and the DOJ would have sought to end the decree even if Trump had lost the 2024 election to Kamala Harris. He said that he began asking about leaving the consent decree during President Joe Biden’s administration.
“Regardless of who’s in the White House, regardless of who is running the DOJ, we have set a foundation for reform, a foundation for progress,” Bibb said.
Among police reform proponents, reservations and outrage
Bibb ran on a police reform platform in 2021. He endorsed a charter amendment that gave new disciplinary powers to the Community Police Commission, which was created by the consent decree. Thursday’s news drew criticism from one of the architects of that charter amendment. Subodh Chandra, a civil rights attorney and former Cleveland law director, called the move “outrageous” and “a betrayal” in an open letter to current Law Director Mark Griffin.
“Without external oversight and motivation, including monitoring and court oversight, the meaningful, sustainable change that the public deserves is over,” Chandra wrote. “And the public has no voice at the table as the city and DOJ conspire with one another to end public oversight.”
In an interview with Signal Cleveland, Chandra said that ending the consent decree “will result in backsliding. It always has.”
Chandra was Cleveland’s law director when the city entered into a different agreement with DOJ to enact police reforms in 2004. That agreement ended a year later. But DOJ’s next investigation into Cleveland police, the one that resulted in the 2015 consent decree, found that reforms enacted during that earlier agreement “were either not fully implemented or, if implemented, were not maintained over time.”
Brenda Bickerstaff, another leader in the charter amendment campaign of 2021, said she had “some reservations” about ending the decree. Bickerstaff’s brother Craig was shot and killed by Cleveland police in 2002.
“Of course it can’t be here forever, I understand that,” she said of the decree. But, echoing Chandra, she said that the early 2000s agreement with DOJ didn’t have much effect “and we ended up right back where we started.”
Bickerstaff said she hoped that Cleveland police “learned a lot from this experience and they can move forward … with constitutional policing, especially for Black and brown people.”
At Thursday’s news conference, the mayor acknowledged that some in the city would greet the move with concern. But “Cleveland is ready for this moment,” he said.
Bibb has previously said that he was looking to retool the police oversight system that the charter amendment established. He did not elaborate Thursday on what those changes could be, saying he wanted to hear from residents about what is and isn’t working.
Left: Leigh Anderson, executive director of Cleveland’s Police Accountability Team, listens to reporters’ questions during a press conference at Cleveland City Hall on Thursday. Right: Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin voices support for ending the city’s longstanding federal consent decree. Photos: Michael Indriolo/Signal Cleveland/CatchLight Local
Council president: ‘Time for us to command our own destiny’
Cleveland City Council members who attended Thursday’s press conference welcomed the news.
Council President Blaine Griffin, who served under then-Mayor Frank Jackson when the city entered the consent decree, agreed with the move to end it. In a court affidavit, he said the settlement had become a “bottleneck” to progress, with bureaucracy slowing down efforts such as drone technology.
“It’s time for us to command our own destiny and make sure that we control our own police department,” Griffin said at Thursday’s news conference. “It’s time for us to govern on our own.”
Council Member Brian Kazy, a frequent critic of the cost of the monitoring team, said ending the consent decree would save the city money.
“I want to thank the DOJ for setting the foundation for police reform moving forward,” he said, “but I also want to say to the monitors who’ve been making anywhere from $175 to $750 an hour, goodbye.”
To Bibb’s suggestion that the monitoring team would stay on the job for another year, Kazy said, “That’s something I think that we need to have a conversation about.”
Cleveland agreed to federal monitoring more than a decade ago
Cleveland inked its consent decree with the Justice Department in 2015, after a federal investigation found evidence that police violated residents’ constitutional rights through excessive force and unlawful searches.
The probe followed a number of high-profile deaths at the hands of Cleveland police. In 2012, a car chase ended with 13 officers firing 137 gunshots at a motorist and his passenger. Two years later, a police officer fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who had been playing with a toy gun in a city park.
A decade later, the city and DOJ’s court filing points to recent high marks from the consent decree monitor who said that, in the vast majority of cases, when officers use force or search citizens, their actions are constitutional. The division also has established training and response to crisis calls.
Another argument is that the city has created systems of oversight that will continue beyond the court’s jurisdiction and prevent and address police misconduct. That includes a slew of revised police policies, city laws and changes to the city’s charter that strengthened accountability over police discipline and policies.
Earlier this month, an assessment from the team paid to monitor police progress under the consent decree found that while the total number of times police used force against residents had ticked up, 97% of the time police used non-lethal force they did so constitutionally.
The report also showed that citizen complaints about officers using force had dropped by 55% from 2018 to 2024. Injuries to officers also dropped during that time by 40%.
