Police leaders, Mayor Justin Bibb and other city staff faced dozens of people in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood on Thursday to hear what they thought about ending almost 11 years of federal court oversight of the police.
The consent decree, the 2015 agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to reform city police, wasn’t meant to be permanent, Bibb told the crowd of 80 to 100 people at the Friendly Inn Settlement.
He acknowledged that residents weren’t all on board with his push to terminate court oversight, a push that the city is making with the Justice Department’s support.
“Over the last five years and over the last 11 years, we have made remarkable progress,” Bibb said. “But one of the biggest blind spots we have is some folks don’t feel that change. Some folks don’t feel that trust has been totally repaired.”
Bibb attended the gathering as a guest of Ward 5 Council Member Richard Starr, more than a month after the city and Justice Department filed their joint motion to end the decree in federal court.
The mayor took residents’ questions about issues ranging from police to power outages. His administration used the meeting to introduce a new listening tour on police-neighbor relations conducted with Kent State University.
A pop quiz on police reform
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City Hall has mustered statistics to make its case that police no longer need a federal judge to monitor how officers use force and conduct searches. But those numbers hadn’t hit home with those at Thursday’s meeting.
That became clear when the director of the mayor’s Police Accountability Team, Leigh Anderson, quizzed neighbors on Cleveland’s progress reforming the force.
“True or false?” she said. “Today, nearly all uses of force by Cleveland police are considered constitutional.”
“False,” came the reply from a few in the audience.
“That is actually true,” Anderson said.
Her evidence for that answer is a recent assessment of police use of force by the team that monitors Cleveland’s consent decree progress on behalf of the federal court. The report found that out of 272 non-lethal uses of force in 2023 and 2024, 97% were “necessary, proportional, and objectively reasonable.” (The monitoring team separately reviewed how police investigated 47 uses of higher-level force.)
The audience was split on the next question, whether most mental health crisis calls lead to arrests or uses of force. Only a small fraction of those calls do, the monitoring team found.
Bibb says he’s ‘still supportive’ of police commission, but wants less ‘red tape’
People voiced a variety of views about police and safety. They appreciated when officers responded to calls quickly. One woman said police in a different department — not Cleveland’s — had filed a false report involving a relative. Another said parents should be responsible for children who shoot guns or drag race. Another attendee asked about Cleveland’s plan for continuing to overseeing police.
One man pressed Bibb over City Hall’s conflicts with the Community Police Commission, the 13-member board created by the consent decree and given new power over officer discipline by a ballot initiative in 2021.
“I endorsed the CPC when I ran for mayor, and as the mayor, I am still supportive and committed to make sure the CPC is successful,” Bibb replied.
The commission had a “rocky start,” the mayor said, referencing the body’s internal conflicts and his rejection of the commission’s first pick to be executive director. Bibb reiterated a point he has made several times before, that he is interested in changing the system of police oversight.
“In hindsight,” he said, “there are some things we need to do as an administration, working with city council and working with these oversight bodies, to make sure there’s not a lot of red tape, not too much bureaucracy, that undermines the ability of police to do their job. Because it’s always a balancing act.”
The mayor’s words didn’t convince Brenda Bickerstaff, a leader in the 2021 campaign to empower the police commission. She took the microphone later in the meeting and rebutted Bibb.
“I’m here to tell you I disagree with the mayor,” she said. “The mayor did back it from the very beginning, but he’s not backing it now.”
‘We need to make more changes’ before consent decree ends, attendee says
Another attendee, Tanya Holmes, gave a positive review to the police in the Third District, which covers Downtown and a chunk of the East Side.
“If I call them, they come, they take care of the problem,” she said. “I go to all the meetings.”
Holmes, who is almost 63, runs an urban farm in Ward 5 called Ka-La Healing Garden Center. It’s in the Fairfax neighborhood not far from the edge of Central.
Third District police interact with the community, she said. She said she introduces officers to kids in the neighborhood when police visit her garden center. Holmes said she believes the attentiveness helps people in the area feel safer.
But she didn’t agree with the city’s effort to end the consent decree now. The work isn’t finished, she said.
“I’m all for the decree going away, but before it goes away, we need to make more changes,” she said.
Not every police district is like the Third District, in Holmes’ view. She described receiving an icy response after saying hello to police on the West Side.
“I’m so involved in the community, I know how people are feeling,” she said. “That’s why you got so much pushback in here. Because not every neighborhood gets the love.”
