Attorney: Collaborative Agreement has helped city, deserves consideration for being extended

by Al Gerhardstein

June 4, 2007 | Cincinnati Enquirer | Cincinnati, Ohio

Originally published on May 23, 2006

I still have the jacket Timothy Thomas was wearing when he was fatally shot by a Cincinnati police officer in 2001. I also have the Cincinnati Police Department foot pursuit policy that was implemented through the Collaborative Agreement later that year. It is a simple document that requires a risk assessment and teamwork. Under this policy it is unlikely that an officer, gun out, will rush alone down a dark alley to confront a young man wanted for traffic and other nonviolent misdemeanors.

Timothy Thomas is dead. But this new policy has prevented other deaths and injuries. In fact, under the use of force reforms implemented during the Collaborative Agreement, including expanded mental health training, injuries to officers and injuries to citizens during arrests are dramatically reduced. And we have had no recurring civil disturbances. We are making progress in Cincinnati.

The main goal of the Collaborative Agreement is to increase trust between the African-American community and the Cincinnati Police Department.

 

During a November 2001 study circle action forum in Cincinnati, Ohio, residents and police officers share their ideas to build better community-police relations.

The Collaborative drew heavily from the community conversations sponsored by The Enquirer in its citywide Neighbor to Neighbor dialogues; the Collaborative surveys and large group meetings among the eight stakeholder groups assembled during the Collaborative process; and the lessons learned from the excellent Study Circle sessions sponsored by the Cincinnati Human Resources Commission that were ongoing at this time.

The Collaborative Agreement - negotiated by the police union, the city administration and the community - was the product.

How does implementation of the Collaborative Agreement seek to build trust?

Use of force reform. Under the agreement use of force policies were rewritten and officers have been trained officers consistent with those policies. That piece has been in place for two years. It is not perfect but it is having a very positive impact.

Accountability. Good policies require a system for holding those who violate policies accountable. That is why the Citizens Complaint Authority was established. With an independent professional staff, its investigations provide an informed community perspective on individual cases, and their decisions are presented to the city manager before he decides on officer discipline.

Bias-free policing. The Cincinnati Police Department collects data on every traffic stop. The Rand Corp. studies the data, surveys citizens and officers, and studies hundreds of mobile video recorder tapes. They have issued two comprehensive reports detailing the challenges we face. Rand reports that African-American citizen attitudes toward the police have not significantly improved.

Community Problem Oriented Policing (CPOP). This is the most far-reaching aspect of the agreement. The city agreed to adopt problem solving as the "principal strategy for addressing crime and disorder problems." This has two aspects: community engagement and Police Department adoption of problem solving. In a nutshell, CPOP is evidence-based policing. It requires that we approach crime and disorder as problems defined through careful analysis of data. When we do this we find that that much disorder is traceable to repeat offenders, repeat victims and repeat locations. Strategies are then tailored to solve those problems by enlisting the resources and stakeholders appropriate to the problem. Sometimes these are police resources only; sometimes other government agencies are needed; sometime the community is needed.

The main problem with CPOP is the failure of the Police Department itself to implement the problem-solving internally within the department. Eighteen reports from the court-appointed monitor repeatedly trace the Police Department failure to modify job descriptions, daily activity reports, and performance evaluations to reflect problem-solving standards. The monitor reports also repeatedly show that the command staff is not deploying the officers consistent with problem-solving principles. Proper data analysis is lacking. Problems are not well defined. Effective outreach to the community is lacking. Creative solutions are missed.

What does it matter if the Police Department fails to implement problem solving internally? The answer takes us to the core goal of the Collaborative: trust. If policing is evidence-based, then deployment will have a solid foundation in the analysis of the facts of a problem. The Police Department can explain to the community how the effort is tailored to the problem.

Many of us are very supportive of the violent crime initiatives, the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence (Boston Plan), CeaseFire and Out of the Cross Fire, which City Council recently included in the city budget. These efforts are a good example of problem-solving as they are based on careful study and application of resources to those identified as most at risk for violence. They are easily defensible as fair and rely on best practices, proven to be effective.

Contrast this with Vortex, a unit of 50 officers that travels to "hot spots" and sweeps up all law violators no matter how small, clogging the Justice Center with folks who jay-walked or loitered. The Rand studies confirm that "proactive police" strategies like Vortex cause many people in the African-American community to feel harassed rather than protected. The court-appointed monitor says Vortex does not appear to be based on problem-solving principles.

We are meeting regularly with the city, the Fraternal Order of Police and court and having many conversations in the community to see if we should finish what we started and insist that problem solving be fully implemented inside the Police Department. The NAACP has voted to support an extension past the Aug. 5 expiration date if one is needed to finish this task. We need only remember Timothy Thomas' tragic death to see the importance of this work. Let us know what you think.

Al Gerhardstein is a Cincinnati attorney who represented the American Civil Liberties Union in the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement.

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