Justin Bibb stood apart from most of his opponents in the 2021 election by embracing tougher police oversight.
He backed the campaign for Issue 24, which would place the final authority over police discipline into the hands of a citizen board called the Community Police Commission. It would take power away from the mayor — and all future mayors.
“The police can’t continue to police themselves,” he said in a summer 2021 interview with Ideastream Public Media.
The issue became a defining one in the race for mayor. Bibb, a newcomer, weathered the accusation from his established opponent, then-City Council President Kevin Kelley, that he would defund the police. Bibb called it the “worst label” in American politics.
Bibb won by a large margin. So did Issue 24. The push for police oversight “frankly propelled me into office,” Bibb said in a 2022 interview.
But five years later, Bibb’s administration has been in a tug-of-war with the Community Police Commission he helped to empower. The group has seen upheaval and has been slow to begin wielding its authority over discipline. The mayor who ran on police oversight said recently that “we almost have too many” police watchdog bodies that aren’t working together seamlessly.
Meanwhile, Bibb has dismayed some core supporters of Issue 24 by trying to end a decade of federal court oversight of the police.
Although he teed up the idea of streamlining Issue 24 more than a year ago, he has not laid out details on how he would change it. He avoided answering that question concretely at a news conference last month.
His office originally agreed to an interview with Signal Cleveland about his stance on police reform, but then asked to reschedule. Bibb’s office did not answer a list of written questions by the end of the day Wednesday.
Michael Nelson, a retired judge whom Bibb named to the Community Police Commission, gave him credit for backing the ballot issue in 2021. Bibb has done more for police reform than his predecessor in the job, although City Hall could “do much better” to support the CPC, he said.
“Justin Bibb was the first and probably the only high-profile person that unilaterally supported the police commission,” the retired judge said. “But it’s easier to support something on the outside.”
Issue 24 leader says Bibb is ‘walking away from it slowly’
The 13-member Community Police Commission — with the power to overturn the disciplinary decisions of police leadership — stood as the key piece of Issue 24. Now it is a key battleground over police oversight in Cleveland.
Bibb and the commission have traded pointed words about its operations. Late last year, the commission said the Bibb administration was too slow to turn over records. A spokesman for the mayor shot back at the time that the CPC’s complaints were “nitpicking” and “pettiness.”
As far back as late 2023, Bibb said that he was “open to some amendments” to Issue 24 in the coming years. Over the last 14 months, he has been talking about consolidating and streamlining the system of police oversight that Issue 24 bolstered.
The ballot issue didn’t just strengthen the Community Police Commission. It also gave new force to a different group that hears citizen complaints about officers, the Civilian Police Review Board.
That’s not the only oversight in Cleveland. There is a police inspector general, an internal affairs unit and a group created by Bibb called the Police Accountability Team. Just before his reelection last year, Bibb said the layers of police oversight created “a lot of confusion and almost too much red tape.”
What’s his solution? The mayor has given hints.
“We have to find a way, I think, long term, to consolidate those oversight agencies, to make it make sense, not only for our residents, but also for the men and women of our police department,” he told Signal Cleveland in January 2025.
At a news conference last month, Bibb said he was looking to make the Police Accountability Team — which is housed in the mayor’s office — permanent.
The unresolved future of Issue 24 looms over Bibb’s other move to shake up Cleveland’s police oversight. He has joined the U.S. Justice Department in pushing to end the city’s consent decree — the 2015 deal to overhaul the police force and place it under the eye of a federal judge.
The mayor argues police have made enough reforms to merit a return to local control. If the consent decree ends, the weight of police oversight would fall more squarely on a local system that has taken time to get moving.
This has unsettled Issue 24 advocates who see Bibb as turning away from the police oversight he endorsed.
“I think he’s walking away from it slowly,” said Brenda Bickerstaff, a leader in the Issue 24 campaign whose brother was killed by a Cleveland police officer in 2002. “He’s trying to make us think that he’s not, but he is.”
Subodh Chandra, an attorney and one of the crafters of the Issue 24 amendment, put the criticism in harsher terms. “Bibb has effectively repudiated his support for police reform with his conduct,” he said.
Bibb walks the tightrope between reforming police and growing the ranks
Bibb ran for mayor in a political moment still charged by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Cleveland police needed a culture change to restore trust with residents, he said. The road map for that change was Issue 24.
“This isn’t about being anti-police,” Bibb said in the 2021 Ideastream Public Media interview, “but this is really about rooting out the racism and systemic bias that we see in our police department, and ensuring we have the right culture of accountability.”
But as “defund the police” attacks came in during that first election, Bibb felt the need to respond. Aiding police and insisting on oversight were two sides of the same coin, he said shortly after his 2021 victory.
“It was important for our campaign to really call out this notion of, you can be for law enforcement and supporting law enforcement and also support police accountability,” he said at the time.
His time as mayor illustrates the friction between those two ideas.
Bibb raised pay for a police force that was hemorrhaging officers and unhappy with the discipline handed down by the brass. He invested in new police technology and teamed up with state and federal law enforcement as he tried to bring down homicides.
As early as 2022, the mayor said he was “working as quickly as I possibly can to get out of” the consent decree. His law department filed a memo in federal court arguing that the city had made progress. (The judge did not end the decree.) Bibb set up the Police Accountability Team within his office to help the city comply with the DOJ agreement.
Conflict over the Community Police Commission followed. When Bibb convened a press conference to announce his CPC nominees, Bickerstaff and others disrupted it. Among other complaints, they said a lawyer should have been among the nominees.
“We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Bibb said, reflecting on the moment in a 2022 interview.
A mayor and ‘one of the most powerful’ police oversight boards flex muscles
City Council confirmed the first class of police commission members in late 2022. Bibb celebrated the news in a social media video, calling the CPC “one of the most powerful independent civilian oversight boards in the nation.”
Bibb has flexed his power when he and the CPC have disagreed. He rejected the CPC’s first executive director pick. When the CPC approved a drone policy restricting the monitoring of large crowds, Bibb issued a statement saying residents wanted drones “utilized to their fullest extent.”
Toward the end of 2024, after initial years of infighting on the CPC, Bibb shook up the commission’s membership. He named several new members to the commission, including Nelson, the retired judge.
Last year, the CPC said the city had failed to investigate dozens of internal complaints against police officers — “alarming gaps in accountability,” the commission said. The Bibb administration accused the commission of putting out “fundamentally misinformed” information.
The Police Accountability Team had already flagged the issue, Bibb’s office said. His administration publicly reprimanded the CPC for releasing records obtained from the city that included unredacted names.
In November, the CPC asked for an investigation after the city reached disciplinary settlements with three officers. The deals appeared to box the commission out revisiting the suspensions that the city handed down in those cases.
Michael Polensek, who chairs Cleveland City Council’s safety committee, is a critic of the police commission. But he believes Leigh Anderson, Bibb’s director of the Police Accountability Team, when she says Cleveland police have made progress, he said.
Polensek voted for Bibb in 2021 but opposed Issue 24. Did Bibb make a mistake by backing the ballot issue five years ago?
“I don’t think he read it,” the Collinwood council member said with a characteristic quip. “Because what mayor would give up his own authority?”
Police commission co-chair: ‘We need additional funding’
When commissioners have met with the mayor, “his biggest concern is progress,” CPC Co-Chair John Adams said. Adams has a concern of his own: the budget. The commission has a budget of $2.3 million this year, about half of it for grants.
Under the consent decree, a court-appointed monitoring team tracks Cleveland’s progress in such areas as how officers use force and conduct seizures. In a Cleveland without a decree, Adams sees local oversight bodies doing that sort of work. (Bibb has said he would ask the monitoring team to stay on for a year post-decree.)
“We all want progress, but we need additional funding,” Adams said. “We need the tools to be able to essentially pick up the work that the monitor does.”
The CPC got off to a slow start in its first few years. Commissioners had internal disputes. It took time to draw up rules for hearing discipline cases. The commission didn’t hold its first disciplinary hearing until October 2025 — nearly four years after voters passed Issue 24. Since then, the group hired a new executive director and approved a new discipline policy.
“They’ve made small, little baby steps, but it’s been years,” said Chandra, the attorney who helped write Issue 24. “And they just now hired their leadership?”
Adams said the CPC has done more than it gets credit for.
“We are a completely new body, a new, independent government body — and without a lot of support from the city,” he said. “I think we’ve done a lot.”
Despite the criticism, Bickerstaff believes the CPC is in better shape today than it was in its early years. It may take some time to get moving, but it has good people in place, she said.
“I’m not going to give up on them,” she said.
What is the future for police oversight in Cleveland?
So what do Cleveland police think about their mayor? If key Issue 24 advocates are disappointed by Bibb on police reform, are rank-and-file officers happy?
That’s a “loaded question,” Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association President Andrew Gasiewski said.
Police have made reforms, and the city and union are moving in the right direction in increasing officer pay, he said. But there’s still a feeling that discipline is “a little heavy handed,” he said.
And then there are the layers of oversight. There are internal investigations, investigations of citizen complaints by the Office of Professional Standards, reviews by the Civilian Police Review Board, disciplinary cases heard by the Community Police Commission, plus the oversight from the court and Justice Department.
“My concern is always to the community and the taxpayers,” Gasiewski said. “When is enough enough?”
At February’s news conference announcing the city’s effort to leave the consent decree, the Bibb administration again signaled it was looking at consolidation.
“Cleveland has some of the most oversight in the country,” said Anderson, the leader of the Police Accountability Team. “What we’re gearing for and what we are having as a goal of ours is most effective oversight.”
In the uncertainty over Issue 24’s future, some of its original backers aren’t budging from the charter amendment that Cleveland voters approved.
“If we were to go back and allow them to make any changes to this charter, they would water it down,” said LaTonya Goldsby, the leader of Citizens for a Safer Cleveland.
In the meantime, they’ll “stay in Bibb’s face and his ear,” Bickerstaff said. Another member of the group, Alicia Kirkman, wanted Bibb to include them in his decision.
“We all should be able to sit at the table and discuss these things instead of you just up and doing what you want to do,” she said. “We were part of you being voted in.”
Democrats should combat ‘weak on crime’ narrative, Bibb says
Bibb has continued building on the idea that mayors don’t have to choose between accountability and supporting the police. After Donald Trump surged back to the White House, Bibb argued that Democrats need to claim the mantle of public safety.
“It’s important for Democrats to be more aggressive in combating this narrative that Democrats are weak on crime, that we are not smart and thoughtful and tough on public safety,” he said in the January 2025 interview.
A few months later, in May or June, the Bibb administration approached Trump’s Justice Department about leaving the consent decree, Law Director Mark Griffin later told City Council. The city and DOJ filed their joint motion to terminate the decree in late February this year.
Nelson said the mayor received bad advice to file a motion so abruptly to end the consent decree — surprising even the federal judge who has long presided over the case.
“I don’t think the city wants to walk away from police reform,” Nelson said. “I just think that the city is premature in believing that they’ve gotten it to the point where they can manage it.”
Bickerstaff and other Issue 24 backers met with Bibb at the end of February. The mayor told them that he still supported the Issue 24 amendment, she said. Bickerstaff and the others were skeptical.
“It’s just more of the same trying to convince the public that they’re ready to self-govern when they know that they aren’t,” Goldsby said.
Bibb acknowledged that the meeting was a difficult one. At a panel hosted by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, the mayor said he had had a “hard conversation” with the family members of people killed by police.
Residents want their rights respected, he said. They also want “the bad guys to get locked up,” as he put it. The conversation turned to a related issue, police surveillance technology, he said.
“I was pushing back with some activists because they said, you know, ‘We don’t need all this technology,’” he said. “And I said, ‘Well, not only should we protect folks’ civil liberties, but I got to keep the streets safe.’”
This story was updated to note that Bibb raised the idea of amending Issue 24 as far back as late 2023.
