The consent decree hammered out between the city of Cleveland and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will stand the test of time as a comprehensive, inclusive and well-written document that other cities around the country will soon attempt to replicate. As mayor of Cleveland and U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, respectively, both of you demonstrated an exemplary spirit of cooperation in this difficult process, and are to be sincerely commended.
Now it’s up to us, the citizens of Cleveland — from all neighborhoods, walks of life and economic station (including the corporate sector, media and especially the police unions) — to work tirelessly to turn the words on paper into reality, to make them corporeal in terms of deeds. This will require a Herculean effort on everyone’s part to make Cleveland into the city we know it can be.
The paradox in our beloved city is almost of Shakespearean proportions: On one hand we’re poised for a grand resurgence as evidenced by downtown development that’s moving apace and attracting new residents, but those gains are in juxtaposition to too many failing neighborhoods where crime rates and gun violence remain stubbornly high, despite our best efforts.
As study after study has established with an undeniable clarity, poverty and inequality are the root causes of crime, which, in turn, leads to sometime deadly encounters between law enforcement and citizens of all races. And until we as a nation come to grips with income disparities driven by unmitigated Wall Street greed, and change our substandard public education system that allows too many disadvantaged children to fall through the cracks and eventually end up adopting the codes of our mean urban streets, all of the consent decrees we come up with — no matter how well-prepared, articulated, detailed and nuanced — will matter little in the long-term.
Here’s why: Consent decrees are designed to setup a framework of accountability, to hold the city responsible for better training and equipping of police officers, and then requiring those officers to do their jobs in a professional manner. Much of the consent decree is designed to assure that justice is served when (and if) a cop engages in rouge behavior — in other words, once something has gone horribly wrong. Our goal should be focused laser-like on preventing something from going wrong in the first place, and this is going to require more females and minorities on police departments. Too many of the old-dog cops are not amenable to learning new, less trigger-happy tricks.
Reducing the incidents of police brutality and deadly encounters between citizens and law enforcement is a problem of national proportions, and will eventually require a national — i.e., federal government — response. The results from cities that have been placed under consent decrees over the last two or three decades are mixed, and even when they initially work to reduce incidents of violence against suspects and tensions between cops and the citizenry, regression oftentimes occurs. National standards on policing have to be put in place if we are to forever resolve the conflict between what essentially have become two Americas.
Until the issue of national police culture is placed squarely on the radar of American political debate, and Congress is forced to address the antiquated Federal Arbitration Act (which allows federal arbitrators to always rule in favor of cops, and therefore subvert any accountability efforts by police superiors), there is little that any consent decree can accomplish, no matter how well-written or intentioned. Police union officials simply sit up nights devising ways to get around any common-sense changes that are put in place.
Nonetheless, Cleveland’s consent decree is a masterwork of good, reasonable and fair intentions, crafted by professionals on both sides of the negotiating table. It’s the best — and only — document we have to work with, at least for the nonce, and every resident and employee of Cleveland should feel duty-bound to try to make it work.
[Photo: Ruffino/Creative Commons]
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.