CLEVELAND — One week after the release of a surveillance video showing a Cleveland police officer fatally shooting a 12-year-old African-American boy who was holding a pellet gun, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. flew here Thursday to announce that a lengthy Justice Department civil rights investigation had found “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force” by the Police Department.
The Cleveland abuses highlighted by Holder included many that have caused friction with the police in minority communities around the country. Those include excessive use of deadly force like shootings and using weapons to hit suspects on the head; the “unnecessary, excessive, or retaliatory use of less lethal force” involving Tasers, chemical spray, and fists; excessive force against mentally ill people; and tactics that have escalated encounters into confrontations where use of force became inevitable.
As a result of the investigation, the city has agreed to work toward a settlement, or consent decree, with the Justice Department that would tighten and govern policies on use of force and subject police to oversight by an independent monitor. Consent decrees in other cities, including Seattle, Detroit, New Orleans, and Albuquerque, were put into effect after investigations into questionable police violence and other abusive practices.
“Accountability and legitimacy are essential for communities to trust their police departments, and for there to be genuine collaboration between police and the citizens they serve,” Holder said in a statement. “Although the issues in Cleveland are complex, and the problems longstanding, we have seen in city after city where we have been engaged that meaningful change is possible.”
While some police departments have resisted the Justice Department inquiries, Cleveland officials have generally supported the review amid concerns about high-profile police killings that have outraged the city’s majority black population and drawn criticism from police specialists.
The Justice Department had been investigating the Cleveland police for nearly two years; the mayor, Frank G. Jackson, a Democrat, had asked the government to review the city’s policing policies following a controversial 2012 killing of two unarmed black people.
Justice Department officials had been saying for weeks that the Cleveland inquiry was coming to a close. On Thursday, Steven M. Dettelbach, US attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, said the department’s review did not include the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was killed by a Cleveland police officer on Nov. 22.
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