The Cleveland Community Police Commission (CPC) will launch a new search for a permanent executive director. The last attempt collapsed after several months in part because finalists withdrew from the process, Commission Co-Chair John Adams said at a special meeting Wednesday night.
The commission appointed its current lawyer to the post temporarily.
“I think we went into this outside search a little naïve,” Adams said during the meeting as he recounted the process for the rest of the commissioners, most of whom joined the group in late March.
Since the commission was seated in 2023, it has wrestled with the position. By law, it is supposed to be independent, but the mayor has a say over who is hired as executive director. Mayor Justin Bibb rejected permanently appointing the commission’s first chosen director, Jason Goodrick, to the job. Goodrick served as interim director until last week, when he announced he was taking another city job.
The executive director leads the staff that serves the commissioners and oversees day-to-day operations of the CPC, which is the final authority on police policy in Cleveland.
Adams said that the search began late last year with a panel made up of him; two people from the city’s Department of Human Resources; Delante Spencer Thomas, the city’s chief ethics officer; and someone from MGT, a search firm that has helped the city with a dozen searches since 2021. The commission had considered hiring its own search consultant, Adams said, but the cost — which he estimated at $50,000 — was more than the commission could afford.
Adams’ remark about being “naïve” referred to his expectation that MGT would take the job description that the panel created and handle everything “independent of us, independent of the city,” he said. “I was very stubborn” about staying out of the process, he said.
But after learning that MGT had gone to the city for guidance, he “re-inserted” himself into the process “and took it back.”
The CPC is supposed to operate independently of Cleveland’s government.
About 30 people applied for the position, and MGT winnowed the list to nine. The panel rejected some of those applicants, and others withdrew from consideration, leaving three, Adams said. One was eliminated based on information the panel learned that Adams would not divulge. Another withdrew an hour before a scheduled interview. The remaining candidate wasn’t “strong enough” for the role, he said.
“Clearly I was frustrated,” Adams said. “We’re in April [at that point], I was like, I can’t believe we just did all of this and we don’t have a candidate strong enough for the commission. … Talking with other commissioners, we felt like the best decision was to re-open up that search.”
Still to be determined, Adams said, is whether to work again with MGT or hire another search partner. According to Adams, the city’s finance director said that money in CPC’s budget could be “moved around” to make hiring a new search firm possible.
At the meeting, Adams described the last candidate to withdraw as someone with police oversight experience in Cleveland, Phoenix and Oakland, California. In an interview on Thursday, Adams confirmed that the candidate was Roger Smith, who served as the administrator of Cleveland’s Office of Professional Standards from 2018 through 2021 then left for Phoenix.
Signal Cleveland reached Smith in Oakland. He said bowing out had “nothing to do with the commission, more things having to do with my situation.”
Near the end of the meeting, the commissioners voted to hire Alix Noureddine, the commission’s attorney, as interim executive director while it tries again to fill the role permanently.
As the new interim executive director, Noureddine will no longer serve as the commission’s legal counsel, Adams said. Noureddine is employed by Cleveland as an assistant law director, but part of his time was paid for by the CPC. Adams said it would be up to the city’s law director whether that arrangement changes.
The commission meets again on May 28, at 6 p.m., in its office on the fourth floor of 3631 Perkins Ave. CPC meetings are open to the public and are also livestreamed on YouTube.
