The Cleveland Community Police Commission voted unanimously to hire an outside attorney to help it fight for public records from the city. The commissioners say the city’s law department has a conflict of interest in the matter because it provides legal advice to the CPC and makes decisions about records requests on the city’s behalf.
“We’ve had some success with records, but we’re sort of having challenges again,” commission co-chair John Adams said at the CPC’s Wednesday meeting. He cited an example involving a request for records held by the Office of Professional Standards and the Civilian Police Review Board, records that some civilians had already obtained through their own requests. But CPC waited almost 80 days to receive them, Adams said.
That’s far longer than the 21 days set in a 2024 agreement between the CPC and city under an order from the federal court that oversees the city’s progress on its consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Cleveland’s consent decree
The consent decree is an agreement between Cleveland and the U.S. Department of Justice that requires police reforms. It came after a federal investigation that found a “pattern and practice” of police officers violating the rights of residents and using excessive force. The city and the federal government signed the agreement in 2015.
The same agreement gives the city seven days to object to a request or ask for clarification. But the city has done neither in response to the recent requests that are now overdue, Adams told Signal Cleveland.
A city spokesperson characterized the CPC‘s complaints as petty.
”The law department has produced thousands upon thousands of pages of documents in a timely fashion,” said Tyler Sinclair. “This is nothing more than the CPC nitpicking a handful of instances. The only thing this level of pettiness would do is cause unnecessary spending at the expense of taxpayers.”
Sinclair also “they can’t be trusted,” referring to the CPC releasing the names of people who had complained about police officers in a statement about the city failing to investigate those complaints.
The CPC shared an image of a spreadsheet that the city uses to track the commission’s records requests. The image showed that the status of five requests made in June and July is “pending,” and one from April is “partially complete.”
In other cases, the city has sent links to videos, “knowing that we don’t have access to the system that the videos are housed in,” Adams said. “And then they’ll say that the request is complete. … And then it becomes this whole thing of like, Well, who do you go to? Do you go to the [city’s] Police Accountability Team? Do you go directly to the police department?
“It’s getting really frustrating, because we really do have some accountability work that we’re trying to do,” Adams said.
The delays are causing the CPC to miss its own deadlines, Adams said. The commission’s recently approved rules for responding to complaints about police discipline cases set strict timelines for review and hearings.
The city’s law department assigns one of its attorneys to the CPC to provide legal advice. But the commission can seek outside counsel, at the city’s expense, when it determines that the attorney might have a conflict of interest, Adams said.
The CPC used this option once before, after Mayor Justin Bibb rejected the commissioners’ choice for executive director in 2023. The commission consulted an attorney who concluded that the mayor does have that power.
The resolution that the commissioners approved this week states that the law department’s “dual role in both defending the City and serving as one of the stakeholders responsible for compliance with the Court’s Order” regarding records requests is a conflict.
The resolution also authorized the commission’s interim executive director to retain the services of the law firm Flannery Georgalis, LLC immediately.
