![New Cleveland police officers wait to greet city officials in this file photo from 2015. [Nick Castele / ideastream]](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/6d31b78/2147483647/strip/true/crop/980x520+0+0/resize/840x446!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Flegacy%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F8%2F31%2F2015clepolice.jpg)
Cleveland City Council on Monday night approved a new contract for the city’s approximately 1,200 rank-and-file police officers.
Officers receive raises in the second two years of the three-year collective bargaining agreement with the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association. The contract is retroactive to 2016.
The deal also makes changes to the civilian complaint and disciplinary processes. The police reform consent decree signed in 2015 with the U.S. Department of Justice urged the city to focus on those two areas of the contract.
The agreement removes provisions from the contract requiring citizen complaints to be handwritten and signed. The consent decree called for the city to allow anonymous complaints.
The contract also allows the city to take three years’ worth of past suspensions into account when disciplining officers. The previous contract removed discipline from officers’ files after two years. The consent decree instructed the city to work with the unions to keep discipline in files for 10 years.
CPPA members voted down a prior version of the contract in December 2017. City and union officials met with an arbitrator in March this year, according to an arbitration decision included with the legislation.
After the March meeting, the arbitrator resolved the final issues in contention, siding with the city over hazardous duty injury leave.
