After a decade of the Feds keeping tabs on its police department, and tens of millions of dollars spent bettering the force in pursuit of constitutional policing, Cleveland says it has made enough progress to carry out the oversight into the future on its own.
On Thursday morning, Mayor Justin Bibb announced from the Red Room that the city would be filing a joint motion with the Department of Justice in federal court seeking to end the Consent Decree that’s been in place since 2015, shortly after officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice at a park in Cudell.
If Judge Solomon Oliver okays the motion, then Bibb would likely try and codify his Police Accountability Team, City Hall’s own mediator between the federal checklist and the behavior of city’s 1,300 officers, he said.
“Accountability in Cleveland is now open. It is embedded. It is strong,” Bibb said from a podium. “We have one of the most effective oversight structures in the country.”
“The end of [that] federal oversight does not mean the work ends,” he added. “It means we now have the capacity and responsibilities to lead this work ourselves.”
The city’s motion follows a recent report that showed that use-of-force incidents in 2024 were largely justified and that discipline and review was handled according to policy. The Consent Decree monitor, Christine Cole, found CPD had improved in 74 notches of the Consent Decree first laid out in 2016. But both sides acknowledge that Cleveland has failed to achieve improvement in other areas.
Still, if removed, Cleveland would follow cities like Seattle, Baltimore, Louisville and Minneapolis, those where DOJ supervision through consent decrees was either scaled back or removed. As in each of these cities, Cleveland would then have to decide how to both keep pressure on its police force while figuring how to navigate its renewed independence.
Officials said 2026 is not 2024, or 2016, for that matter. The past decade has, several attested on Thursday, signaled some major plaudits due to the DOJ’s demands—a Community Police Commission and the recent passing of Tanisha’s Law being two.
“In the 26 years I’ve been a police officer, I can tell you this is a different Division of Police,” Chief Dorothy Todd said at the press conference Thursday.
“I was here when the Consent Decree started; I was here before the Consent Decree started,” she said. “What I see now is a completely different operation.”
Leigh Anderson, the director of the Mayor’s Police Accountability Team, agreed and begged to hear from any critics.
“We ask you to look at the data, attend the oversight meetings, speak to the monitors and hold us accountable,” she said. “Because now you can.”
If the Consent Decree does end, City Hall will look for a path for what Anderson called “self-sustained reform”: outfitting its Police Accountability Team with the recommendations still not accomplished from an original checklist from ten years ago at the start of the process.
But, as Mayor Bibb said, substantial progress has been made.
“We are not the same department that we were in 2015,” Bibb said. The decree “was a blessing in disguise, because it gave us the tools and the political will and the courage to do hard things.”
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