By Rich Weiss, NCMA-GC News Service
The Neighborhood and Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland is providing monthly reports on a series of community conversations about the 2015 Consent Decree negotiated between the US Department of Justice and the City of Cleveland regarding the policies and practices of the Cleveland Police Department.
The Cleveland Consent Decree mandates that the City of Cleveland Division of Police conduct all investigatory stops, searches, and arrests fairly and respectfully as part of an effective overall crime prevention strategy that considers community values.
How well they are discharging that mandate is the subject of the next community conversation in the series of discussions jointly sponsored by United Way of Greater Cleveland and the Cleveland NAACP.
The next meeting in the series is this Wednesday, August 11 at 6:00 p. The theme will be Search and Seizure. The conversation will be moderated by Lee Fisher, Dean at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University. Scheduled panelists include Gordon Friedman, Commissioner, Cleveland Community Police Commission; Ayesha Hardaway, Deputy Monitor, Cleveland Monitoring Team; and civil rights attorney James Hardiman.
The public is invited and encouraged to attend these sessions to help in the monitoring process. To attend, ask questions or voice your concerns, register for any of the four remaining Consent Decree public meetings by visiting unitedwaycleveland.org.
The meetings are conducted via Zoom on the second Wednesday of each month. The July meeting focused on “Bias-Free Policing and Racial Profiling,” Among the topics raised last month:
- “What does ‘trained, bias-free policing policies’ mean practically, and what does that training look like?
- How do we justify over-policing in communities of color and lower-income communities?
- How are we measuring success with these initiatives?
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Rich Weiss is vice president of the Neighborhood and Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland and publisher of The Tremonster.
