DOJ Releases Report On Cleveland Police Department Investigation And It's Bad News All The Way Down

Legal Issues

from the no-restraint-and-no-accountability dept

The DOJ has just released the conclusions of its civil rights investigation of the Cleveland Police Department [pdf link]. What it’s uncovered is sadly unshocking. It’s the same sort of behavior that’s endemic in law enforcement agencies all over the nation: routine use of excessive force and discriminatory policing.

The Cleveland PD gained recent national notoriety after a police pursuit devolved into a department-wide free-for-all — a 23-minute chase involving nearly 100 officers and supervisors and over 50 vehicles. The pursuit began when two officers thought they heard a gunshot coming from a vehicle. It concluded in a middle school parking lot, with more than a dozen officers unloading 137 bullets into the stopped vehicle, most of them in a 20-second period. A single officer was responsible for 49 of those bullets, some of which were fired into the two “suspects” from the hood of their vehicle. In all, 47 bullets found their way into the victims’ bodies. No weapons or empty casings were found in the vehicle.

The PD is back in the news again, thanks to an officer’s killing of a 12-year-old boy, supposedly as he reached for his “weapon,” a toy gun with the orange tip removed. This claim held until video was released, which showed officers cutting across a park and stopping within feet of the boy. The officer on the passenger’s side — a reject from another police department — shot and killed the 12-year-old within two seconds of the officers’ arrival on the scene.

The DOJ’s report opens with the de rigueur statements about how dangerous policing is and how grateful the nation is that there are men and women willing to do this difficult job. But this is mercifully brief. The token belly rub doesn’t even last a full paragraph. The generic praise that makes up the two first sentences is swiftly tempered by these curt sentences.

The use of force by police should be guided by a respect for human life and human dignity, the need to protect public safety, and the duty to protect individuals from unreasonable seizures under the Fourth Amendment. A significant amount of the force used by CDP officers falls short of these standards.

The next page briefly summarizes how the CPD falls short.

The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;

The unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including tasers, chemical spray and fists;

Excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check; and

The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk.

That the CPD has shown a pattern of excessive force isn’t even open for debate, according to the DOJ. The agency points its fingers at several deficiencies, fortunately highlighting the fact that the department’s internal systems for reporting and investigating excessive force allegations are a large contributor to the problem.

If you like your police news depressing, the DOJ’s report is full of handy pull quotes. Some are mere sentences while others are multi-paragraph damnations. I’m tempted to post huge chunks of the report and let them speak for themselves, but I won’t. Read it for yourselves. But I don’t want to let these particular paragraphs slip by without highlighting them.

First, the problems:

The pattern or practice of unreasonable force we identified is reflected in use of both deadly and less lethal force. For example, we found incidents of GDP officers firing their guns at people who do not pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to officers or others and using guns in a careless and dangerous manner, including hitting people on the head with their guns, in circumstances where deadly force is not justified. Officers also use less lethal force that is significantly out of proportion to the resistance encountered and officers too often escalate incidents with citizens instead of using effective and accepted tactics to de-escalate tension. We reviewed incidents where officers used Tasers, oleoresin capsicum spray, or punched people who were already subdued, including people in handcuffs. Many of these people could have been controlled with a lesser application of force. At times, this force appears to have been applied as punishment for the person’s earlier verbal or physical resistance to an officer’s command, and is not based on a current threat posed by the person. This retaliatory use of force is not legally justified. Our review also revealed that officers use excessive force against individuals who are in mental health crisis or who may be unable to understand or comply with officers’ commands, including when the individual is not suspected of having committed any crime at all.

In addition to the pattern or practice of excessive force, we found that CDP officers commit tactical errors that endanger both themselves and others in the Cleveland community and, in some instances, may result in constitutional violations. They too often fire their weapons in a manner and in circumstances that place innocent bystanders in danger; and accidentally fire them, sometimes fortuitously hitting nothing and other times shooting people and seriously injuring them. CDP officers too often use dangerous and poor tactics to try to gain control of suspects, which results in the application of additional force or places others in danger. Critically, officers do not make effective use of de-escalation techniques, too often instead escalating encounters and employing force when it may not be needed and could be avoided. While these tactical errors may not always result in constitutional violations, they place officers, suspects, and other members of the Cleveland community at risk.

In short (the report spends 59 pages detailing what’s briefly summed up here), these are the symptoms. The next paragraphs address the disease.

Principal among the systemic deficiencies that have resulted in the pattern or practice we found is the Division’s failure to implement effective and rigorous accountability systems. The fact that we find that there are systemic failures in CDP, however, should not be interpreted as inconsistent with holding officers accountable in any particular incident. Individual CDP officers also bear responsibility for their own actions once afforded due process of law. Any effort to force a decision between systemic problems and individual accountability is nothing more than an effort to set up a false choice between two important aspects of the same broader issues that exist at CDP. Force incidents often are not properly reported, documented, investigated, or addressed with corrective measures. Supervisors throughout the chain of command endorse questionable and sometimes unlawful conduct by officers. We reviewed supervisory investigations of officers’ use of force that appear to be designed from the outset to justify the officers’ actions. Deeply troubling to us was that some of the specially-trained investigators who are charged with conducting unbiased reviews of officers’ use of deadly force admitted to us that they conduct their investigations with the goal of casting the accused officer in the most positive light possible. This admitted bias appears deeply rooted, cuts at the heart of the accountability system at CDP…

Another critical flaw we discovered is that many of the investigators in Internal Affairs Unit advised us that they will only find that an officer violated Division policy if the evidence against the officer proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that an officer engaged in misconduct — an unreasonably high standard reserved for criminal prosecutions and inappropriate in this context. This standard apparently has been applied, formally or informally, for years to these investigations and further supports the finding that the accountability systems regarding use of force at CDP are structurally flawed. In actuality, we found that during the time period we reviewed that officers were only suspended for any period of time on approximately six occasions for using improper force. Discipline is so rare that no more than 51 officers out of a sworn force of 1,500 were disciplined in any fashion in connection with a use of force incident over a three-and-a-half-year period. However, when we examined discipline numbers further, it was apparent that in most of those 51 cases the actual discipline imposed was for procedural violations such as failing to file a report, charges were dismissed or deemed unfounded, or the disciplinary process was suspended due to pending civil claims. A finding of excessive force by internal disciplinary system is exceedingly rare.

The DOJ’s report notes that it previously investigated the department in 2002. Remedies were set into motion at that point, but apparently lasted only long enough to remove the DOJ’s oversight in 2005. With the DOJ no longer looking over its shoulder, the CPD lapsed back into its bad habits.

In the intervening years, the CPD has allowed the problem to snowball by actively ignoring its own duty to ensure its police force is indeed “Cleveland’s finest,” rather than a loose consortium of passable officers and outright thugs — both granted the veneer of respectability (and a healthy dose of power) with the donning of a uniform and badge.

Other points of interest in the report:

• The investigation began after helicopter video caught police kicking a handcuffed suspect in the head. No reports filed mentioned this use of force.
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer performed its own investigation, uncovering the fact that officers deployed Tasers nearly 1,000 times in a 4-year period with only 5 instances being deemed “inappropriate” — a rate a use of force expert said “strained credibility.”
• In 2013, an officer fired at a hostage fleeing a hostage situation, later claiming that he thought the man pointed a weapon at him. No reports corroborated this version of the incident. Fortunately, the officer missed both shots.
• Despite being expressly forbidden to do so by multiple revisions to the Use of Force policy dating back to 2007, CPD officers have continued to fire weapons at suspects or vehicles moving away from them.
• In 2012, an officer’s weapon discharged (yes, this time the passive voice is appropriate) when he struck a suspect’s head with it. The suspect escaped while “bleeding from the face,” and reports filed by the officer left it unclear as to whether the suspect had been hit with the bullet as well.
• A 6’4″, 300-lb. officer sat on the legs of 5’8″, 150-lb. shoplifting suspect and “punched him three or four times in the face,” presumably as punishment for 13-year-old’s kicking of an officer and the cruiser door while being placed in the vehicle.
• Officers tasered a man strapped to a gurney in the back of an emergency vehicle for “threatening officers.”
• Five officers responding to a call concerning a suicidal man with a gun fired off 24 rounds during the incident. Four struck the suicidal man. Thirteen hit a nearby parked vehicles. And six bullets hit surrounding homes.

That the DOJ has handed down such a damning report could be viewed as encouraging, but considering it tangled with the CPD nine years ago, it’s not nearly as encouraging as it should be. Bad habits are tough to break, and the CPD’s habits are some of the worst. It is now on its second DOJ investigation in twelve years, and if the fixes didn’t take last time, there’s no logical reason to believe this time will be any different.

Filed Under: cleveland, doj, police