The Cleveland branch of the NAACP is calling on the Cleveland Clinic to pause and reverse its police department’s policy of detaining people accompanying gunshot wound victims at the emergency room.
It’s also asking the hospital to establish safeguards to protect the civil rights of people seeking care or assisting others in emergency situations.
In an article published last week, Signal Cleveland reported on the policy and shared the story of one man detained after driving his friend, who had been shot, to the emergency room on the Clinic’s main campus. When asked what the Cleveland Clinic police officers’ reasonable suspicion was in the man’s case, a spokesperson for the hospital wrote that “he was dropping off a gunshot victim at the emergency department.”
The Cleveland NAACP called the police department’s policy of detention “ethically indefensible” and dangerous.
“Policies that treat community members as suspects simply for attempting to save a life undermine public safety and violate fundamental civil rights,” the statement read. “Hospitals are a center of healing, not places for overaggressive law enforcement.”
In a statement shared via email, William Tarter Jr., the president of the Cleveland NAACP, wrote that the organization will seek to identify policy solutions that ensure that trauma is not compounded and civil rights are protected.
Three criminal legal experts told Signal Cleveland in previous reporting that they had concerns that the Cleveland Clinic police department’s policy infringes on the constitutional rights of those who bring gunshot wound victims to the emergency room.
The branch wrote that the incident Signal Cleveland shared raised broader concerns about law enforcement involvement in health care, which disproportionately impacts Black residents. (In 2020, a ProPublica analysis found that the private police departments for Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and University Circle charged and cited Black residents more often than all others.)
Health care is already fraught with concerns about racial inequities, several studies the Cleveland NAACP branch cited found. One study found that African-American men with higher levels of medical mistrust were more likely to delay blood pressure screenings. African-American men with more frequent exposure to everyday racism were more likely to delay routine check-ups. And a 2020 survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found Black adults report being discriminated against or unfairly judged by health care providers and their staff at a rate almost three times higher than white adults.
The Cleveland Clinic wrote that it had no comment in response to the NAACP’s statement, which called for a moratorium on the gunshot wound policy. Previously, a spokesperson for the Clinic told Signal Cleveland that its protocols around responding to security threats are designed to uphold a safe environment for patients, visitors and caregivers. The spokesperson also said at the time that the hospital’s police department follows constitutional standards.
“It’s important to ensure our emergency departments remain safe and operational during potential high-risk events, patients get immediate care, and law enforcement can do their job without risking patient safety or public trust,” Clinic spokesperson Angela Smith wrote in October.
The Clinic’s approach differs from Cleveland’s two highest-level trauma hospitals, MetroHealth and University Hospitals. Both routinely treat shooting victims but said their police departments don’t have policies directing officers to detain anyone who brings a gunshot wound victim for treatment. Instead, officers decide whether to detain a person on a case-by-case basis.
The Cleveland NAACP wrote that local government leaders and public health authorities also have a duty to intervene when a “healthcare policy deepens racial inequity or creates new pathways for discriminatory enforcement.”
Ohio Rep. Darnell Brewer, who witnessed Ibrahim Alim’s detention at the Cleveland Clinic, said he agreed with the NAACP’s call to put a moratorium on the policy and asked for an independent review of the policy. And New Sardis Primitive Baptist Church, a historically Black church in Mt. Pleasant, called for a “full and immediate investigation” into the policy of detention.
This story was updated to add a statement from William Tarter Jr., president of the Cleveland NAACP.