Two Finalists to be Cleveland’s Newest Consent Decree Monitor Make Their Case

Cleveland will soon be getting a new team to monitor the 2015 consent decree with the Department of Justice as the city continues to work toward revising staffing and operations.

The re-selection follows the departure of previous monitoring head, Hassan Aden, who left the role in October after two years, Ideastream reported, due to conflicting posts overseeing decrees in other U.S. cities, including Baltimore and Seattle.

“We appreciate the role that the Monitoring Team has played to help us get to where we are today,” Mayor Bibb said in a statement, “and we are looking forward to building on that progress.”

This week, after the Mayor’s Office narrowed down a list of applicants, two firms sold themselves to the public in public meetings —mostly including city officials—via a trio of panel-based speeches.

Both finalists, J.S. Held and Hogan Lovells, are based out of state.

There’s plenty of work to be done for whichever is selected: Solomon Oliver, the federal judge in charge of Cleveland’s consent decree, noted after Aden left his post that the department has only remedied 47 percent of the decree’s assessment phase items, which includes public transparency, limiting excessive force and how to correctly reprimand troubled officers. Only 1 percent of that improvement, Oliver determined, was during Mayor Bibb’s tenure.

Such gradual progress didn’t sway the finalists’ optimism. On Wednesday evening, in a half-empty cafeteria at Max Hayes High School in Clark-Fulton, leaders from J.S. Held and Hogan Lovells told the suited crowd of 25, including Law Director Mark Griffin, how exactly their past successes could move Cleveland’s decree to its next sustainability phase.

Karl Racine, a partner at Hogan Levells and former D.C. Attorney General, advertised his experience monitoring three consent decrees. Most of the language of the federal orders, the strictest which arose in 2001, concerned excessive use of force by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.

“These consent decrees are not seven years,” Racine said, referring to Cleveland’s, which came about shortly after the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. “They were 20, 30 and 40 years. They concerned agencies [that] were charged and responsible for providing necessary services to the District of Columbia’s most vulnerable residents.”

“I’m very proud to say that we exited all three of those consent decrees,” Racine said. “That’s the kind of experience that we bring here.”

Reneé Hall, leading monitor for J.S. Held and former chief of Dallas Police, delved into more of a personal account of department structuring and politics, highlighting her climb from a “rookie officer” of Detroit’s power-hungry department in the 1990s.

For the 20 years Hall spent in Detroit, 13 of those the police were under federal oversight.

But “we didn’t always get it right,” Hall told the crowd. “But I can tell you that I went from a police officer to supervisor to manager, to ultimately a deputy in an organization with a consent decree—where I learned what it looked like to constitutionally police a community.”

Hall was criticized by some members of Dallas city council for her department’s response to George Floyd protests in the city. Before her resignation to pursue other opportunities, the mayor defended her tenure and reforms made after an internal report on officer actions.

The city will make its final decision, and present it to Judge Oliver, by March 15, according to the original Request For Proposal.

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This article appears in Mar 8-21, 2023.