WASHINGTON (AP) — Cleveland officials and the U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday will announce their settlement over a pattern of excessive force and civil rights violations by the city’s police department.
An afternoon news conference will be held three days after a white policeman was acquitted of voluntary manslaughter charges for firing the final 15 rounds of a 137-shot police barrage through the windshield of a car carrying two unarmed black suspects.
The 2012 shooting helped prompt an 18-month investigation of the police department by the Justice Department. The reform-minded agreement must be approved by a judge and overseen by an independent monitor.
The Department of Justice in the last five years has launched broad investigations into the practices of more than 20 police forces, including in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, and in Baltimore, where another black man, Freddie Gray, suffered a spinal cord injury in police custody and later died. The Brown and Gray cases spawned protests that sometimes turned violent.
Saturday’s verdict in the voluntary manslaughter trial of Cleveland Patrolman Michael Brelo led to a day of mostly peaceful protests but also more than 70 arrests.
Two other high-profile police-involved deaths, which both occurred in November, still hang over Cleveland, a predominantly black and largely poor city. Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy holding a pellet gun, was fatally shot by a white rookie patrolman, and Tanisha Anderson, a 37-year-old mentally ill woman, died of positional asphyxiation after officers took her to the ground and handcuffed her.
The Department of Justice’s report, released in December, spared no one in the police chain of command. It included examples of excessive force by patrol officers who endangered lives by shooting at suspects and cars, hit people over the head with guns and used stun guns on handcuffed suspects.
Supervisors and police higher-ups received some of the report’s most searing criticism. The report said officers were poorly trained and some didn’t know how to implement use-of-force policies. It also said officers were ill-equipped.
Mobile computers that are supposed to be in patrol cars often don’t work, and, even when they do, officers don’t have access to essential databases, the report said.
Police Chief Calvin Williams said in December that while it wasn’t easy to have to share the federal government findings with his 1,500-member department, he was committed to change.
“The people of this city need to know we will work to make the police department better,” Williams said.
The investigation marked the second time in recent years the Department of Justice has taken the Cleveland police to task over the use of force. But unlike in 2004, when the department left it up to local police to clean up their act, federal authorities this time have been negotiating a consent decree designed to serve as a blueprint for lasting change among police. Several other police departments in the country now operate under federal consent decrees that involve independent oversight.
