Seattle’s rocky road to establishing a police oversight system might sound familiar to Clevelanders.
In 2023, six years after the Seattle Community Police Commission gained new influence and resources through legislation, it was still “not fully functional” and needed a “reset,” according to the federal monitor overseeing the city’s consent decree. Since then, the commission has been hampered by vacancies, staff turnover and internal tension. Commissioners have complained that city officials ignore and sideline them, and citizens have expressed the same frustration with the commissioners.
A mother who lost her 19-year-old son to gun violence last year accused the commission of doing too little, saying, “This isn’t just about them having a job — they have to be out in the community and do something.”
The Cleveland Community Police Commission and other aspects of the city’s police oversight structure were modeled in part on Seattle’s. And like Seattle, Cleveland has struggled to fully enact the voters’ mandate to give citizens more say over police discipline and policies. But neither city is unique.
“What you’re experiencing [in Cleveland] is not unusual,” said Sharon Fairley, a law professor at the University of Chicago who studies police oversight. “This is happening across the country. Everywhere I look, there are struggles.”
Hundreds of cities, large and small, have tried to launch or strengthen civilian oversight bodies in the last 10 years, especially since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the ensuing nationwide protests. In virtually every place, these efforts have faced challenges, from lawsuits to bureaucratic logjams to infighting.
In most cities, oversight entities can only make recommendations. In Cleveland they have real power that no police chief or elected official can ignore. But that hasn’t made it easier to live up to expectations.
Justin Bibb and Issue 24 have a complicated relationship
Cleveland voters chose strong citizen involvement in policing when they passed Issue 24 in November 2021. The ballot initiative, conceived and supported by people who had lost loved ones to police shootings, changed the city charter to give unprecedented authority and independence to the bodies overseeing police discipline and policies.
The 13-member Cleveland Community Police Commission is the most powerful and community-facing part of the city’s oversight system. Any Cleveland resident who is at least 18 can apply. The mayor selects 10 members, city council chooses three, and council confirms all of them. They serve four-year terms.
The other major players are the Office of Professional Standards, an independent agency staffed by city employees who investigate complaints against police officers; and the Civilian Police Review Board, which is made up of nine citizens, chosen by the mayor and city council, who decide what if any discipline should result from those complaints.
Mayor Justin Bibb was elected to his first term in the same election in which Issue 24 passed and later said supporting it “propelled me into office.” He has since questioned whether Cleveland has too many police oversight bodies and floated asking voters to amend the charter again to “consolidate” them. He has not specified how.
In February, his administration asked a federal court to end the consent decree, Cleveland’s 2015 agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to reform policing. Judge Solomon Oliver denied the request in May and in October extended oversight another two years.
The attempt to end the oversight angered Issue 24 supporters and Community Police Commission members, who had not been consulted. A bitter legal feud followed, one of many clashes between the commission and Bibb’s administration.
Meanwhile, the city and DOJ hired consulting firm Jensen Hughes in March to review oversight bodies’ powers and workflows and recommend ways to improve coordination. That review was due to end in August, but a city spokesperson said in October that it remained underway with no end date.
Other cities are struggling with police oversight, too
Civilian oversight systems “are like snowflakes — no two are alike,” Fairley wrote in a 2020 report following her survey of 100 cities across the country.
In that report, Fairley commended four cities in particular for their efforts: Seattle; Oakland, California; Newark, New Jersey, and Austin, Texas. Each has faced challenges, some that are similar to Cleveland’s and some that are very different.
The Oakland Police Commission’s first year was marked by public and private spats between commissioners, between commissioners and staff and between commissioners and city officials — and no meetings. In 2024 and again this year, elected officials threatened to strip away some of the commission’s authority and assert more control over its membership. The commissioners have also clashed with the police officers union, former police chiefs and each other.
Newark’s Civilian Complaint Review Board was one of the strongest oversight bodies in the country when it was established in 2015. But the local lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, a union representing officers, challenged the board’s subpoena and investigatory powers. After a long legal battle, the New Jersey Supreme Court agreed with the union that the board’s authority conflicted with existing state laws. State legislators could amend the laws and restore the board’s power but have not acted. The board’s general counsel recently described it as “a board with potential, limited by law.”
Austin launched oversight bodies in 2001, but a 2018 review found that they’d had little impact. City officials formed a committee to look at best practices in other places. Planned changes got bogged down in the city’s negotiations with the police union but eventually resulted in a new review panel. In 2023, Austin voters approved a ballot measure establishing another, more powerful commission, but it took two years for it to even meet for the first time.
Closer to home, Akron voters will decide this week whether to give that city’s two oversight bodies more power following the police killing of Jayland Walker.
Overseeing ‘the power to take liberty and life’
Fairley said that the most common question she gets about oversight is, “Does it even work?”
There’s not a lot of evidence either way, she said, in part because it’s a difficult thing to measure. She’s working now with a student to review all existing research and look for patterns.
But data isn’t what drives communities to adopt or expand oversight efforts, she said. Usually, it’s tragedy. At least 35 oversight bodies were created in 2015-2016, following high-profile deaths like Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s, and another 55 in the early 2020s, following the Black Lives Matter protests.
“Police powers are among the most serious powers that we bestow on our government as citizens,” Fairley said. “We give them the power to take liberty and to take life. And because of that, as a democracy, we want to have a say in how those powers are being executed.”
Unions in Cleveland and elsewhere often not on board
The Cleveland Community Police Commission’s authority over police discipline is rare and perhaps unrivaled among civilian bodies in the U.S., Fairley said. But the commission has wielded that power just once since gaining it in 2023, and has made multiple unsuccessful attempts to update the discipline policy that’s been in place since 2019.
The latest challenge to that effort comes from the unions representing officers, who say that their contracts with the city supersede the commission’s discipline authority.
Pushback from unions is very common across the country, Fairley said.
The unions representing Cleveland officers opposed Issue 24. The then-president of the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association, the union for rank-and-file officers, said its passage “will be the downfall of Cleveland.”
Civilian oversight “has been a complete failure,” said Capt. James O’Malley, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 8, the union representing supervisors in the Cleveland Division of Police.
Issue 24 “provided too much power to unelected officials,” O’Malley said. “Policing is a very difficult job, and the men and women of this great police department deserve the very best when being criticized.”
The current model “simply does not accomplish this,” he said. O’Malley said he was speaking for himself, not the union.
Andrew Gasiewski, current president of the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association, did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Humans with issues trying to work through stuff’
Charmin Leon is a former Cleveland police officer who now works with the Center for Policing Equity, an organization that guides cities on accountability and safety issues. She sees a bit of hypocrisy in her fellow officers’ resistance to civilian oversight.
“On the one hand, we say we believe in principles [like] ‘The people are the police, and the police are the people,’” she said. “But then we say, ‘But the community doesn’t understand us.’”
Oversight bodies and police forces are typically made up of people from communities that “historically haven’t really heard each other,” Leon said. And in the beginning, the effort will tend to attract people “with the biggest gripes” who will try to dominate the discourse. That’s why it’s vital that the members receive early and ongoing training and support from facilitators with experience in guiding people through difficult discussions.
Without such support, “you can spin your wheels for years in these power struggles,” Leon said. “Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who’s smart? Who’s dumb? And it’s just tragic.”
Leon wishes the documentary 13th were required viewing in police academies. The title refers to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” The film lays out the connections between historic racial inequality and mass incarceration.
In many communities, she said, there is historic distrust of police, and “for good reason.”
That’s a difficult truth for officers, especially those working in police forces with their own histories of inequities related to who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets disciplined. And too often a civilian oversight system “gets these two factions together and sits them at a table and just says, ‘Work it out,’” Leon said.
The result is “a bunch of humans with issues trying to work through stuff” and struggling with whether they’d “rather be right or be effective.”
Bringing the Community Police Commission ‘back to life’
Issue 24 established a budget for the commission to hire staff for research, community outreach, office management and other day-to-day operations. The staff is led by an executive director.
Bibb rejected the commission’s first choice for a permanent executive director in 2023. The commission then conducted two searches before hiring one, Shalenah Williams, who started in January. In the interim, the full-time staff dropped from five people to one. Williams has since filled seven vacant positions and as of this month the commission is fully staffed for the first time.
“We have brought the office back to life,” Williams told city council’s Public Safety Committee at a hearing last week. Williams and the staff walked the committee members through a detailed presentation of everything they’ve accomplished this year, including nearly catching up on the long-delayed community grants program.
It was a much different scene from the last time Williams faced the committee, alone, in February, when Council Member Brian Kazy went on at length about how, from his perspective, the commission was “an utter failure.”
Last week, the members had questions and some concerns, but the tone was civil — even after Williams said the commission was seeking more funding in 2027 to create four new positions. This prompted Council Member Mike Polensek, who chairs the committee, to rattle off the list of other oversight bodies that council funds, for millions of dollars, including the monitoring team that tracks the city’s progress under the consent decree.
“We’re here to work with you, but we have other challenges,” Polensek said.
Williams said in an interview that she was encouraged by the “vastly different” tone of the hearing.
“I knew [the job] was going to be a heavy lift,” said Williams. “It hasn’t disappointed.”
Working hard ‘to turn the perceptions around’
Like Leon, Williams said that the history of policing, and its relationship to communities outside traditional power structures, looms over everything. “To have those populations now be the overseer of the police is what makes it challenging,” she said. “We’re here to establish trust between the police and the community and help to change that narrative.”
The commission will have at least six and possibly seven brand new members in January. Williams is planning almost two months’ worth of training on policing, conducting public meetings and just getting along with each other.
Assistant Director Timothy Scott, Williams’ first hire, is working on a reorganization plan that he said will help the commissioners spend more time in the community. Williams wants the staff to function like “genies in a bottle,” fulfilling the commissioners’ wishes based on resident input.
She acknowledged that there is a long way to go to build trust — among citizens, city officials and police officers.
“We are working fast and hard to turn the perceptions around,” she said.
Polesenk said he is skeptical that council will approve a budget increase for the commission. “I don’t see that happening,” he told Signal Cleveland, despite the “excellent” presentation at his committee hearing.
But he said that he and Williams have forged a “good working relationship” and that the commission seems to be inching away from the “chaos” of its first couple years. “It was like watching ‘The Gong Show,’” he said.
The Bibb administration needs to seize this chance to appoint up to seven new members by making sure they are competent and not “anti-police,” he said, referring to the commission’s drone policy, which he considers overly restrictive, and its plans to revisit and possibly limit the use of license plate readers.
‘Stability is the key’ for police oversight in the future
Brenda Bickerstaff, founder of Citizens for a Safer Cleveland, the police accountability coalition that led the effort for Issue 24, pointed to the staffing shortages as one of the main reasons for the commission’s slow start. She also talked about the infighting of the past and the ongoing problem of meeting disruptions.
But she sees progress, she said, and remains hopeful. She’s especially encouraged by the new applicants.
“It’s getting better,” Bickerstaff said. “Stability is the key. And we’ve got to get the public more engaged.”
Kareem Henton, co-founder of Black Lives Matter – Cleveland, said he saw trouble ahead back in 2022, when he and other Issue 24 advocates disagreed with the city’s interpretation of the law’s section on selecting commissioners. Today, he said he’s not sure if Bibb sincerely supported Issue 24 and started to change his mind in office or if he just saw it as a way to win the election.
But, like Bickertstaff, Henton remains hopeful and agrees on the need for more community involvement.
“Someone else needs to take the baton,” Henton said. That doesn’t mean those who ramped up oversight are no longer on the team, he said.
“It just means that we carried the load up to this point and we need other folks to kind of jump in and start carrying the load, and we can still follow behind.”
