by Nick Castele
The Cleveland NAACP and other civil rights groups have asked a judge to alter the city’s police reform agreement with the federal government.
The NAACP and a group called the Collaborative for a Safe, Fair and Just Cleveland weighed in on the consent decree when it was being drafted. But now they’re concerned about details of the finalized agreement.
"We acknowledge that this is a very good consent decree," said James Hardiman, a civil rights attorney who filed a friend-of-the-court brief requesting changes to the agreement. "However, we want better than good, we want perfection to the extent that it can be achieved."
In a court filing, the groups—along with the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild—say the new police inspector general can’t truly be independent if he or she reports to the police chief.
"No citizen should wind up having a job where their job is to criticize their boss in painstaking detail, and still expect that they're going to get a nice performance evaluation and salary adjustment at the end of the year," said Subodh Chandra, a former Cleveland law director who also filed the brief.
The brief argues that serious uses of force should be investigated by an outside group, not by fellow officers. It also calls for policies governing encounters between officers and young people and for giving more power to the planned community police commission.
Cleveland-Marshall College of Law professor Jonathan Witmer-Rich said while it’s possible to amend the consent agreement, it’s not guaranteed these suggestions would be adopted.
"It really still is an agreement between the two parties, the DOJ and the city of Cleveland," Witmer-Rich said. "And so if they don’t want to change things, and if the court is willing to adopt it as is, then these suggestions by other parties may not go anywhere."
Spokesmen for the city and the Justice Department declined to say whether they would take up these suggestions.
