Complaints about being “handcuffed” appear designed attack on new policies resulting from Consent Decree implementation

Cleveland City Council members discuss carjackings at press conference held in Lincoln Park in Tremont on March 12, 2021. L-R, Kerry McCormick, Kevin Kelley, Blaine Griffin, Kevin Bishop, Charles Slife. 

The law enforcement personnel and military veterans among the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6 in flagrant disregard of the rule of law could likely find emotional sanctuary in the ranks of the Cleveland Police Department.

This is clear in the wake of the response currently being orchestrated by local police in relation to the city’s recent surge in carjackings.

Propaganda leaking out of the department says that criminals are running amok through the streets because law enforcement is handcuffed, that police are not being allowed to go after the bad guys because [desk cops?] are pushing policies that don’t permit pursuit.

Figures cited in a local television news report appear to back them up. The police in Newburgh Heights, a first ring community of some 2200 people, were reported to have conducted more than a dozen high speed chases this year already while the number in Cleveland is exactly one.

This situation does not pass the smell test. There is something rotten in the ranks of the Department and it is not policies being handed down from the top. It is in the practices of the department that have actually stunk for years, practices rooted in a culture so misbegotten and vile as to burst in all its ugliness one all too recent November night.

Have we forgotten that more than 100 police officers and supervisors joined in hot pursuit of two marginalized, unfortunate, and unarmed citizens in a high speed chase all across town, eventually surrounding them in a public school parking lot and riddling their bodies and their car with 137 bullets?

It was the scale of that police misconduct, the culmination of decades of excessive force, vigilantism in uniform, by those sworn to protect and help us, that brought the US Department of Justice to town to investigate.

The findings of that report led to a Consent Decree, an agreement between the city of Cleveland and the USDOJ, approved by the local federal court, mandating the reform of the most egregious police practices and policies that have wreaked so much misery and havoc upon Clevelanders, especially but by no means exclusively those who are poor, black and residents of the east side of town.

“My greatest frustration as mayor of Cleveland came through my futile attempts to reform the Police Department … When I left after four years, the Cleveland Police Department was as politically corrupt, as Byzantine in its organization, as brutal in its understanding of the sources of crime, as it was before I came.” — Carl B. Stokes, from Promises of Power — Then and Now [1989].

It is perhaps the case that the police officers who gather in their places of refuge — fraternal halls, watering holes, basement rec rooms — to decompress after work by putting down the criminal culture of black and brown neighborhoods that breed crime, do not understand either their own history or the culture it has produced.

Instead they chafe at having to follow process, to secure approval before embarking on what could result in another reckless pursuit that might result in the death of a Tamia Chappman, 13, a bright and innocent child who died on a neighborhood sidewalk when she was struck by a car driven by teenage carjacking suspects after it jumped a curb while being pursued by police in mid-afternoon at reported speeds up to 85 MPH. Nearly two dozen police officers may have participated in that chase.

It is hard not to see the complaints of rank and file police officers — that they are prohibited by departmental policy from hot pursuit of aggravated felons roaming the streets and terrorizing civilians — as some viral strain of the “blue flu”, the ailment that appears mysteriously when cops are unhappy.

From this vantage it seems that the police are perpetrating. By claiming they cannot pursue — a false notion their commanders may be secretly reinforcing — the police are pushing back against civilian authority, undermining their chief, Calvin Williams, and challenging the authority of the US District Court, and thereby, the rule of law and the Constitution.

Timid and clueless public officials are accomplices in this perpetration.  Last Friday, in a press conference hastily arranged by him and council president Kevin Kelley, Tremont area councilman Kerry McCormick feverishly parroted without context that “multiple times on Saturday the police were not even allowed to attempt to apprehend the violent criminals that were wreaking havoc.”

McCormick spoke after Kelley manifested righteous indignation at the “heinous crimes” being committed these days. Kelley assured the villains that the city will pursue, capture and prosecute them.

The crooks were undoubtedly not watching, but Kelley, who is expected to declare his mayoral candidacy sometime this spring, clearly hoped that the electorate and the police understood that he had their backs.

Carjackings are no doubt a serious issue in Greater Cleveland these days. Activist Jerry Primm has been among the most vocal on this topic. Asked to comment about alleged restraints on police pursuit authority, Primm  retorted, “The police position is absolutely ridiculous. Carjacking is a violent crime. Department policy allows the police to pursue suspects in violent crimes.”

Ward Six councilman Blaine Griffin announced at the press conference that the public safety committee he chairs,  and which comprises seven of council’s 17 members, will convene today to get clarity on the Department’s chase policy. That hearing will be live streamed beginning at 10am and available via the city’s YouTube and Facebook channels.

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