Justice Department: Cleveland police use force too often, are poorly trained and reckless

CLEVELAND – The U.S. Justice Department and Cleveland, Ohio reached an agreement Thursday to overhaul the city’s police department after federal investigators concluded that officers use excessive and unnecessary force far too often and have endangered the public and their fellow officers with their recklessness.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and the department signed an agreement that says both sides will work toward the appointment of a court-appointed monitor to oversee reform.

“We understand the progress we seek will not come over night,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in announcing the findings.

The report comes amid inflamed tensions between police and residents in several cities where white officers have killed young blacks, including in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri. All those events have raised urgent national questions about the sense of trust between police and communities, Holder said.

Last week, hundreds of people blocked a Cleveland freeway at rush hour to protest those killings and the fatal shooting of a black 12-year-old boy by a white officer outside a Cleveland recreation centre. Police said the officer thought the boy was holding a firearm, but he actually had an airsoft gun that shoots nonlethal plastic pellets.

The Justice Department has opened civil rights investigations into the practices of some 20 police departments in the past five years, and it is reviewing both the Ferguson police department and the chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man in New York City. It’s also currently enforcing more than a dozen agreements to overhaul police department practices nationwide.

“We have seen in city after city where we have engaged that meaningful change is possible,” Holder said.

In Cleveland, the Justice Department found a systemic pattern of reckless and inappropriate use of force by officers and cited concerns about search-and-seizure practices. It also said officers frequently violated people’s civil rights because of faulty tactics, inadequate training and a lack of supervision and accountability.

Officers’ excessive use of force has created deep mistrust in Cleveland, especially in the black community, the report concluded.

“We saw too many incidents in which officers accidentally shot someone either because they fired their guns accidentally or because they shot the wrong person,” the report said.

The federal investigation was prompted by several highly publicized police encounters, chiefly the deaths of two unarmed people who were fatally wounded when police officers fired 137 shots into their car at the end of a high-speed pursuit in November 2012. Jackson was among those who asked the department to conduct the inquiry.

Cleveland and the Justice Department will begin negotiating an agreement that will be submitted to a federal judge outlining the scope of reforms, to include the appointment of an independent monitor. A joint statement signed by city and federal officials said Cleveland’s mayor, safety director and police chief “will always retain full authority” to run the police department.

The Justice Department began its investigation in March 2013 and reviewed nearly 600 use-of-force incidents — both lethal and not — that occurred between 2010 and 2013. The report notes that Cleveland police officials did not provide many of the documents sought by federal investigators.

The Justice Department found that officers are poorly trained on how to control people during arrests and that some officers don’t know how to safely handle firearms.

The 58-page report was especially critical of how the Cleveland police department investigates when officers use force.

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AP reporters Jennifer Smola in Cleveland and John Seewer in Toledo contributed to this report.