Cleveland reached a settlement with the US Department of Justice over excessive force and civil rights violations by its police department that was due to be revealed yesterday, a senior federal law enforcement official said.
The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the deal ahead of the announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity.
News of the settlement comes two days after a white police officer was acquitted of manslaughter for firing the final 15 rounds of a 137-shot police barrage through the windshield of a car carrying two unarmed black suspects in 2012.
The suspects’ backfiring vehicle had been mistaken for a gunshot, leading to a high-speed chase involving 62 police cruisers. Once the suspects were cornered, 13 officers fired at the car.
The chase prompted an 18-month justice department investigation. In a report released in December last year, the department required the city to work with community leaders and other officials to devise a plan to reform the police department, which a judge must approve and an independent monitor would oversee.
The specifics of the settlement, first reported by the New York Times, were not available on Monday.
The US report included the police chain of command. The worst examples of excessive force involved patrol officers who endangered lives by shooting at suspects and cars, hit people in the head with guns and used stun guns on handcuffed suspects.
Supervisors and senior police officers received some of the report’s most searing criticism. The federal agency said officers were poorly trained and some did not know how to implement use-of-force policies. The report also said officers are ill-equipped.
In December last year, Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said that while it was not easy to have to share the findings with his 1,500-member department, he was committed to change.
“The people of this city need to know we will work to make the police department better,” Williams said.
The agency said supervisors encouraged some of the bad behavior and rarely investigated it. Some said they wrote their reports to make officers look as good as possible, the federal agency said.
The department found that just six officers had been suspended for improper use of force over a three-year period.
Saturday’s manslaughter verdict against patrolman Michael Brelo led to a day of mostly peaceful protests, but also more than 70 arrests.
Two other police-involved deaths still hang over the city: a boy holding a pellet gun fatally shot by an officer and a woman who died after officers took her down and handcuffed her.
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
The Vatican Museums on Thursday unveiled the last and most important of the restored Raphael Rooms, the spectacularly frescoed reception rooms of the Apostolic Palace that in some ways rival the Sistine Chapel as the peak of high Renaissance artistry. A decade-long project to clean and restore the largest of the four Raphael Rooms uncovered a novel mural painting technique that Renaissance painter and architect Raphael began, but never completed. He used oil paint directly on the wall, and arranged a grid of nails embedded in the walls to hold in place the resin surface onto which he painted. Vatican Museums officials
RSS