Over the last eight years, hospital police departments in Cleveland have set up review boards to hear complaints about how officers treated people — a move that initially came at the request of the city and council members. But the process can be opaque, with reviews that happen largely behind closed doors without community input.

The effort to set up review boards for hospital police began in 2018 after the City of Cleveland made it a requirement to bring the departments in line with the federal consent decree.

The issue snowballed two years later, when a report from ProPublica found that Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and a nearby entity that patrols University Circle disproportionately charged or cited Black people.

That reignited calls for the institutions to examine complaints from residents who felt officers mistreated them.

Now, all three hospitals have a required process. Unlike Cleveland’s review board, though, the meetings are not public, and the board’s decisions are not posted online.

Signal Cleveland looked into how Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and MetroHealth Medical Center respond to complaints filed by patients, visitors and residents. 

We found that:

• None of the three hospitals publish information on their website telling residents they can file a complaint with the review board, how to do so or explaining the process.
• All three review boards are staffed only by hospital employees. 
• None of the review boards’ meetings are open to the public. 
• None of the hospitals report the number of complaints or the results of the reviews publicly. 

Signal Cleveland’s efforts to gather information on the three hospitals’ review boards — how they work and how many complaints they received — took about two months.

Through public records requests, Signal Cleveland learned how many complaints each board heard. Cleveland Clinic’s review board received about 25 complaints in the last five years. University Hospitals heard 26 in the last three years. MetroHealth received 12 in the last two years. Information before 2024 was not complete, according to a spokesperson for MetroHealth. 

Residents, elected officials ask for more transparency in hospital police oversight 

Three residents, all of whom had complaints heard by the Cleveland Clinics’ review board, said that the process needs to be more transparent and better involve complainants. (The Cleveland Clinic was the only hospital that provided documents with the names of some complainants. MetroHealth redacted complainants’ names, while University Hospitals’ annual review board reports did not include complainants’ names.)  

Marquis Wise visited the Cleveland Clinic main campus emergency room several years ago with his son and daughter, who had been having stomach issues. After an hours-long wait, a disagreement ballooned with a receptionist whom he and his daughter felt was acting rudely. The hospital’s police eventually arrived. According to police reports and statements, it appears they were called to escort Wise out of the hospital for being belligerent and disruptive to medical staff, patients and visitors. 

From Wise’s perspective, one of the officers treated him aggressively, including verbally intimidating him and putting her hands on him. After taking his kids home, he said he returned to the hospital and spoke with a Cleveland Clinic police officer, who told him to write down a complaint. Wise took it to the hospital’s ombudsman and then called the Cleveland Clinic police back. 

“They said they’d get back with me. And I never heard nothing back from them,” Wise said. “ …They never sent me a letter. They never sent me a disposition. They never sent me a hearing date.” 

The incident happened in September 2023. Wise didn’t learn until this February, from a Signal Cleveland reporter, that the board reviewed his complaint and declared it “unfounded” — that the alleged conduct didn’t occur.  

The Clinic said they tried to reach out to Wise after the board heard his case. 

“Attempts were made to contact Mr. Wise using the two phone numbers provided in his complaint. Those efforts were unsuccessful,” wrote Angela Smith, senior director of corporate communications for the Cleveland Clinic, in an email. Because no mailing address was included, a letter could not be sent, she added. 

Wise said he didn’t receive any calls. He added that he receives mail from the Cleveland Clinic as a patient, so he did not understand why the hospital didn’t have his address. 

Others are similarly frustrated. Darnell Brewer, a state representative who had a complaint heard by the Cleveland Clinic’s review board last year, wrote a letter to the hospital’s CEO earlier in January asking him to give complainants participation rights and add independently selected civilian members to the board. 

“A civilian review board must meet basic transparency standards to gain the public’s trust — especially when overseeing a private police force that exercises state-delegated powers, including detention, searches, use of force, and arrests,” Brewer wrote. 

In late January, Cleveland Clinic Police Chief Deon McCaulley responded to Brewer’s letter. He acknowledged Brewer’s concerns around communication and clarity in the review board’s procedures and said the department’s processes are continually reviewed for fairness and transparency. He added that the representative’s feedback would be considered going forward.

Why Cleveland’s hospitals have boards to complain about police 

Each of the city’s three major hospitals has its own police department, whose officers have arrest powers like municipal police. The officers are paid through the hospital but certified with the state. 

The City of Cleveland has some authority over these agencies’ policing powers, via an agreement both parties sign.

In 2018, Cleveland added a rule that each department would have to form a civilian-led complaint board. The move came after the federal government put the city under a federal consent decree, forcing it to improve and reform local policing.  

The Community Police Commission reported that the Cleveland Clinic formed its police review board in 2020. MetroHealth and University Hospitals formed their boards in 2021. The agreements with Cleveland set some rules for how to run the boards. Largely, though, each hospital constructed the oversight body on their own – from how residents submit complaints to who and how many people sit on it.

The City of Cleveland has had a review board in place for decades, though in recent years the process for investigating and deciding on complaints and discipline has been significantly revamped. The city’s website clearly lays out how to file a complaint and the complex process by which issues are investigated and heard. The board members who ultimately vote on whether to recommend police discipline can’t be current employees of the city. 

Decisions by the city’s review board about whether or not to recommend officer discipline take place in public meetings. The board is supposed to “promptly” notify complaining residents of the status, progress and result of their complaint. The city’s website encourages complainants to attend the hearing of their case, where they can have three minutes to speak. 

How can residents submit complaints about hospital police? It’s often unclear 

Residents such as Wise said they didn’t know the Cleveland Clinic police review board existed, despite having his complaint heard by it. He wasn’t the only one. Brewer said that, after he raised concerns last summer about how police treated a man who brought a gunshot victim to the Cleveland Clinic, police verbally gave him the option to file a complaint. Brewer said he didn’t know that doing so meant his concerns would be heard by the review board, so he never filed a complaint formally. The chief voluntarily decided to have the board review the situation, Smith said, which surprised Brewer when he learned about it last December. 

Alexander Bodiford had a similar experience. Bodiford is currently suing the Cleveland Clinic Police department for wrongful arrest, claiming in a lawsuit that officers unfairly handcuffed and detained him when he was trying to pick up his car from the valet at the hospital’s main campus in 2024. Bodiford was at the hospital with his mother, who was having surgery, and shared his business card with police, according to the complaint. (In a court response, the Clinic denied Bodiford’s claims and said he was trespassing after the building closed. Police reports from the incident said Bodiford was placed in handcuffs for failing to properly identify himself with his ID and aggression he showed towards officers.)

Bodiford said in an interview that he went to the police station the next day because he wanted to complain about the incident. Police gave him a form to fill out, but he said they did not mention the option for it to be heard by a citizen review board. Unbeknownst to Bodiford, the board heard his case anyway.

When asked about the confusion, Smith, with the Cleveland Clinic, wrote in an email that when complaints are first taken, it’s not always clear where they’ll end up. Complainants are told at the onset that their allegation will be reviewed, Smith wrote. The police chief then decides the path of the complaint.

“At intake, it is not always possible to determine whether a matter will proceed as an internal department review, a CRB [Civilian Review Board] review, or a potential criminal investigation,” Smith wrote.

Clarity around how to file a complaint with the review board and what happens next is an important part of an effective review board, said Cameron McEllhiney, executive director of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Formal complaints typically involve filling out a form about the incident, she added. 

“In order to have a well-functioning, consistent process, all of those things need to be put in place: the forms, the process, a place where all of that lives so that anyone in the public can see what the process is,” McEllhiney said.

Signal Cleveland could not find information on any of the three hospitals’ websites about how  patients or visitors could file complaints about police treatment with the review boards, or any information outlining the steps in the boards’ processes.

Two of the hospitals said that concerns about police conduct can be filed in the same place as general patient complaints. At MetroHealth, that’s the hospital’s Patient Experience portal. The patient experience team refers any complaints about police conduct to the review board, wrote Tim Magaw, a spokesperson for MetroHealth, in an email statement.   

At the Cleveland Clinic, internal operating procedures for the civilian review board outline that police complaints can be filed with the ombudsman’s office. That office should forward those complaints to the Clinic’s deputy police chief. 

Neither MetroHealth’s patient experience portal nor Cleveland Clinic’s ombudsman website say that submitted complaints may be heard by the hospitals’ respective police review boards. 

At University Hospitals, police officers are supposed to provide a form to anyone who has a complaint, according to a statement from LaVonne E. Pulliam, the chair of the hospital’s police complaint review committee and the hospital’s chief compliance officer.

Who sits on the boards that review misconduct complaints for hospital police

When Bodiford, Brewer and Wise learned that a board heard their complaints, a central question they asked was: Who’s on it?

The hospitals’ agreements with the Cleveland Police prohibit staffing the civilian review boards with police but didn’t go any further in dictating who should sit on them. 

All three staff their boards with hospital employees.

At the Cleveland Clinic, as of December, the 11-person board included a medical director of anesthesiology, associate chief of nursing, human resources directors and a patient experience manager.  

Brewer, Wise and Bodiford expressed concern that Clinic employees may struggle to remain unbiased in their assessment. 

“What are they going to do, rule against their employer?” Bodiford said. 

The practice is similar at two other hospitals in town: 

• The bylaws for MetroHealth’s review board say that a “community member” should sit on the board. But the board is currently staffed by one doctor and six employees from the hospital’s departments of human resources, law and patient experience.
• University Hospitals explicitly require review board members to be employees. If board members cease to work at the hospital, they can no longer serve on the board, according to the board’s charter. The document lays out a list of who should be included in the board — like a physician with training in trauma or emergency medicine and a nurse designated by the Cleveland hospital’s chief nursing officer. The hospital said it would not share board members’ names because they are employees who serve on a voluntary basis, Pulliam wrote in an email.  

All three hospitals wrote that boards are staffed by hospital employees and meetings are not held in public to protect patient privacy. Pulliam, with University Hospitals, wrote that almost all the boards’ reviews include confidential patient information and body camera footage of patients.  

Staffing hospital civilian review boards with hospital employees is not inherently an issue, according to McEllhiney and Anthony Finnell, a former president of the same organization and current independent police auditor for the City of Akron. Both said that civilian review boards should be made up of the community of people who are served by the police department in question. That includes hospital staff.

“In fact, having that perspective can be helpful, because they see that law enforcement agency in action every day,” McEllhiney said. 

The two differed on whether or not a board should also include patients or their family members. McEllhiney said patients make up a part of the community that is policed. Finnell, though, compared patients in hospitals to tourists in a city. It wouldn’t make sense to put them on a board conducting long-term police oversight, he said. It could be important to add nearby community members to the board, if they are frequently policed by the hospital departments, he added.

How are complainants involved?  

One more experience that Wise, Brewer and Bodiford had in common: The board found all three of their complaints to be “unfounded.” That means the board found that the alleged misconduct didn’t happen. 

That’s fairly standard for complaints reviewed by all three hospital’s review boards. The three boards did not “substantiate” or “sustain” most complaints, meaning they didn’t find officer misconduct. Across all three hospitals for the years data was provided, about 14% of complaints were sustained, substantiated or partially substantiated.

Like Wise, both Brewer and Bodiford were frustrated and confused that no one from the hospital or its police department technically informed them of this outcome. Instead, they learned the result from Signal Cleveland. 

“That’s shocking to hear,” Bodiford said, when he learned the board had heard his complaint. “It seems like I didn’t have a chance to tell my side of the story.” 

Smith, with the Cleveland Clinic, wrote that communications with Bodiford “shifted to legal counsel” once he began litigation with the hospital, and no response letter was issued. (Bodiford’s case was heard by the review board in January 2025. Bodiford’s lawyer, Dan Smith, said he didn’t begin working on the case until fall 2025.) 

Smith with the Cleveland Clinic said that Brewer did not receive a letter about the review board’s results because he did not initially make a formal complaint. After Brewer complained via letter earlier this year, McCaulley responded that an inspector would interview him to see whether any new information came to light that needed to be heard again by the review board. None did, the chief determined in March, and he sent Brewer a letter informing him of the review board’s initial results. 

Each hospitals’ agreement with the Cleveland Police requires the civilian review boards to provide timely written notification to residents about the outcome of their complaint. 

Pulliam, with University Hospitals, wrote that its practice is to inform complainants of the outcome by letter — but an ongoing review determined that hasn’t always happened due to incomplete complainant information or patient privacy regulations. The hospital is revising its complaint form to improve this, Pulliam said. 

MetroHealth doesn’t notify patients about the outcome of their complaint. Magaw wrote in an email that patients receive “a notice thanking them for raising the issue and letting them know it will be addressed through our quality assurance processes, but they generally do not receive additional substantive follow-up after that communication.”

Future of hospital police oversight 

Kevin Conwell is one of the two Cleveland City Council members who called for change in 2020, following ProPublica’s report about private police departments on the city’s East Side, including Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and University Circle.

Since then, Conwell said he has worked closely with University Circle’s police department and review board. The nonprofit has a public-facing process to file complaints, and its board includes current and former neighborhood residents and employees of neighborhood businesses.  

But the hospitals have flown further under the radar. 

“I didn’t think about them,” Conwell said.

Conwell said he’d like to see the Cleveland Clinic add neighborhood residents to its review board.

“If you staff it by employees, a lot of their employees live in the suburbs or the outer ring suburbs,” Conwell said. “So they don’t know our issues and concerns, and they don’t know our culture in Hough as well as Glenville and Fairfax. They need to have people from the community.”

Council President Blaine Griffin advocated, alongside Conwell in 2020, to create a review board of residents to monitor private police in the zone with hospital and University Circle police. He did not respond to requests for comments.  

Signal Cleveland asked spokespeople with the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and MetroHealth if there are any improvements the hospitals would make to their review board process. 

A spokesperson with MetroHealth said that the hospital did not have anything to add. A spokesperson with the Cleveland Clinic said she was not aware of any changes.   

A spokesperson for University Hospitals did not respond. In a previous comment, Pulliam, with University Hospitals, wrote that she is proud of the board’s work.

“Our leaders view it as an important tool we use to improve as a healthcare system – not just the officers responding to a call, but at the various points when caregivers come into contact with patients or visitors,” Pulliam wrote. “Reviewing these interactions provides valuable lessons throughout our organization.”

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