CLEVELAND — The city agreed to overhaul its police department under the supervision of an independent monitor in a settlement announced Tuesday with the U.S. Justice Department over a pattern of excessive force and other abuses by officers.
The announcement comes three days after a white patrolman was acquitted of manslaughter for his role in a 137-shot barrage of police gunfire that left two unarmed black suspects dead. That case helped prompt an 18-month investigation by the Justice Department, which issued its findings in a scathing report in December.
The settlement — outlined in a 105-page consent decree — calls for:
• New guidelines and training in the use of force.
• A switch to community policing, in which officers work closely with their neighborhoods.
• An overhaul of the machinery for investigating misconduct allegations.
• Modernization of police computer technology.
• New training in avoiding racial stereotyping and dealing with the mentally ill.
“As we move forward, it is my strong belief that as other cities across this country address and look at their police issues in their communities, they will be able to say, ‘Let’s look at Cleveland because Cleveland has done it right,’ ” Mayor Frank Jackson said.
He said that when the reforms take hold, community policing will become “part of our DNA.”
The plan is subject to approval by a judge, and an independent monitor will oversee it.
Several other police departments around the country, including those in Seattle and New Orleans, are operating under federal consent decrees that involve independent oversight.
The worst examples of excessive force in the Justice Department report involved officers who endangered lives by shooting at suspects and cars, hit people over the head with guns and used stun guns on handcuffed suspects. Only six officers had been suspended for improper use of force over a three-year period.
Two other high-profile police-involved deaths still hang over the city: that of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy who was killed by a white rookie patrolman last November while playing with what turned out to be a pellet gun, and that of 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson, a mentally ill woman who suffocated last fall after she was subdued on the ground and handcuffed.
