Black community support forces consent decree monitor to ask Hardaway to return; situation remains in flux

Hassan Aden asked his deputy, Ayesha Bell Hardaway to resign; she did, but public outcry led him to ask her to return

Reports that Hassan Aden, the federal monitor charged with overseeing progress on the implementation of reforms in how the Cleveland police use force and otherwise interact with the citizens they have sworn to protect and serve, has asked Ayesha Hardaway to return as his chief deputy, could be seen as a victory for the community.

But there is danger in mistaking success in a skirmish as equivalent to winning a war.

The struggle to rein in our local police, and their counterparts in Minneapolis, New York City, Chicago, and all across the country, is generational. Carl Stokes tried to reform the department more than half a century ago; he confessed that his “greatest frustration as mayor of Cleveland came through my futile attempts to reform the Police Department.… I was forced into a defensive position and was not able to fully exercise the authority I had been elected to wield. When I left after four years, the Cleveland Police Department was as politically corrupt, … as brutal in its understanding of the sources of crime, as it was before I came.” [1]

Ayesha Hardaway resigned as deputy monitor because she would not allow herself to be placed in a position that negated her voice. A former assistant county prosecutor, as well as a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, Hardaway is nationally recognized as an expert on police misconduct and the use of force. After commenting as an expert on constitutional criminal law about the need for national police reform, Aden demanded that Hardaway either accept a demotion to the sideline or resign. Acting with both personal and professional integrity, she resigned, and did so publicly in a letter, since released to the public.

Ayesha Hardaway resigned rather than allow herself to be placed in a position that negated her voice.

Aden’s demand for Hardaway to shrink from or leave her role with the monitor team clearly reflects the pressure that is being applied to him to muzzle the most authoritative and authentic expert voice on the team. Hardaway speaks as an expert on behalf of the citizens of Cleveland, and most particularly its black residents — the ones who both today and historically, have most often felt the brunt of outrageous and overreaching police force and police misconduct.

Silencing authentic and expert black voices in Cleveland and the nation is neither new nor exceptional. Somewhere there is probably a playbook for how it’s done. [We can currently witness a whole new chapter being written programming the relentless assaults on Critical Race Theory.]

What is all too rare is what happened next as news spread of Hardaway’s departure.

The community, led by a coalition of organizations that cut across all manner of invisible but rigid lines, responded in unity and strength. At the forefront were a trio of organizations whose collective significance cannot be ignored: Black Lives Matter [BLM], the Norman S. Minor Bar Association, and the Cleveland branch of the NAACP.

These are not organizations used to working with one another in our siloed, stratified isolation. So when they stood in solidarity on the steps of  Cleveland City Hall and voiced their support for Professor Hardaway, the message reverberated throughout the town’s corridors of power: “This ain’t right!”

Again, recall Aden’s claim that his position was responsive to complaints from his colleagues at the city of Cleveland and the Department of Justice that the scholarly Hardaway was negatively impacting the monitoring of the reform effort by her bias.

the misguided assault on Professor Hardaway’s credibility has backfired: the spotlight is now on the credibility of the consent decree process itself, along with the credibility of the monitoring team, and the credibility of the Cleveland Police Department.

But Hardaway’s law school issued a timely rebuttal to any notion that she is some wild-eyed radical, affirming instead both her expertise and her professionalism. And the acting US attorney, Bridget Brennan, issued a statement of regret over the loss of Hardaway’s potential contribution to the ongoing work.

Without speculating on whether Hardaway’s will accept Aden’s invitation, her return to the team as deputy monitor may not necessarily be the best outcome for the community, especially if it allows people to be comfortable with a return to the status quo. The entire incident has shone light on the status of the consent decree process. As the Rev. Jawanza K. Colvin so aptly said on his radio program this past week, the misguided assault on Professor Hardaway’s credibility has backfired: the spotlight is now on the credibility of the consent decree process itself, along with the credibility of the monitoring team, and the credibility of the Cleveland Police Department.

The forces that pushed Aden to pressure Hardaway are fortunate that other members of the monitoring team did not immediately resign in a united show of support for Hardaway. Given my respect for those gentlemen — Tim Tramble, Victor Ruiz, and Charles See — I cannot imagine the thought did not occur to them. Perhaps they declined to do so as not to blow up the entire process. [The members of the team have all signed confidentiality agreements and will not speak with the media.]

So what conclusions should we draw now that Hardaway has been invited to return? I’d suggest three:

1. First, we need to recognize the power resident in collective community action. It was as much the breadth and diversity of the coalition as the size of the reaction that alerted Aden that he must reverse course quickly for the consent decree process and his monitoring team to maintain any community credibility.
2. We need to be mindful of the need for eternal vigilance, support those who have our back, and act with a sense of urgency. The speed with which the coalition formed was a vital ingredient in its success.
3. The third takeaway may be the most valuable. We can build our best community when we are proactive. Enforcement of the consent decree is a long way from completion. Other attacks are sure to come; some are undoubtedly already in the works. If we want this process to be successful, we cannot delegate all the responsibility to our representatives, even when they are as competent and committed as Ayesha Bell Hardaway.

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[1] Promises of Power: Then and Now, by Carl B. Stokes. 1989, p. 146.