Akin to sharks attracted to the smell of blood in the water, human sharks are beginning to circle Cleveland, looking at the city as if it were a huge blue plate special; sizing up the opportunity to swim in via Lake Erie and make a real financial killing. One somewhat overlooked aspect of the consent decree the Jackson Administration and the Department of Justice (DOJ) are about to enter into is the vast sums of money that will be involved. The process of correcting police departments usually runs into tens of millions of dollars.
Writing in the August 14, 2012 edition of Gambit, a respected New Orleans online publication, Charles Maldonado, in an article entitled “Paying for the Consent Decree,” attempted to track the costs residents incurred via their tax dollars to enforce the agreement that city entered into with the DOJ.
At a press briefing held in 2012 at the outset of New Orleans consent decree, Mayor Mitch Landrieu answered a reporter’s question with a question of his own, “Is it going to cost more? Yes. About $11 million more per year for the next five years,” he stated. The city had already set aside $1 million in the 2012 budget for a yet-to-be-hired monitor.
Realizing that one definition of an “expert” is “someone who lives over 50 miles away,” individuals and firms are licking their chops, drooling over the prospect of fat paydays.
In Detroit, which was under a consent decree from 2002 until last year, early on in the process spent $10 million on a monitor who was later discovered to be having an affair with then-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Obviously some sharp operators see these types of agreements as an invitation to pick municipalities cleaner than city chickens.
There’s more. A confidential memorandum delivered to a number of Los Angeles City Council members before a scheduled vote to fund the consent decree the city would operate under from 2002-2009, estimated that the agreement would cost the city $28.6 million to $35.4 million over its 18-year life span. But the figures were off, by a lot.
According to Maldonado, a May 2012 memorandum from the city of Seattle, which was at the time negotiating its own DOJ consent decree read, “Los Angeles reports that it spent approximately $40 million in the first year to comply with the terms of a federal consent decree, and close to $50 million annually for several years thereafter.” Seattle’s consent decree was estimated to cost $40 million in its first year. Of course the population of Seattle is twice as large as Cleveland’s, but still, $20 million is a lot of money, provided the costs can be capped at that annual figure.
Some Cleveland officials are already quietly worrying that, with this kind of money on the table, what role will statewide politics play in the doling out of these funds. “The buzzards are already circling,” said one City Hall insider, “but we’re making plans to fight them off. We’re not about to get a bad outcome due to having the wrong people administer the consent agreement.
His remarks further raised the question as to why David M. Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, spoke at the first meeting of the governor’s Task Force on police/community relations last week. Kennedy is also a professor at John Jay, which would make him one of the few individuals in America to become a full professor with only a bachelor’s degree.
“The fact that someone at the state level brought him to Cleveland to address Clevelanders is troubling,” said my source. “There’s some real politics at play with this, but we’re just going to have to fight off any attempt to allow hired guns to come in and tell us how to fix the problem. We have a lot of bright people right here in Cleveland, and we’re fully capable of fixing anything that’s wrong with the Cleveland Division of Police using local experts.”
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.