Cleveland’s Blame Game Before the Trumpocalypse
Instead of planning properly for a raucous RNC, the city and its police are bracing for catastrophe—and fighting over who will shoulder the blame.
A gunned-down 12-year-old whose name none of us can—or should—shake off will likely be the most important factor in whether or not the Republican National Convention runs smoothly next week. From 10,000 feet above, that might seem like a lot to lay on a single bit of tragic gunplay. But in Cleveland, there’s no doubt that a massive shake-up to civic life in this city arrived in late 2014 with a one-two punch: the November shooting of Tamir Rice and, less than two weeks later, the announcement of a Department of Justice consent decree with the city, ordering it to take dramatic steps to address chronic police misconduct.
Many have noted that Cleveland will be the first city to host a national political convention while its police force is under federal oversight for past bad acts. But that observation alone undersells how radically your world has been pulled inside-out if you wear a blue uniform. The Rice shooting and consent decree triggered a complete rewiring of a police department that’s operated with little oversight and few consequences for more than 50 years. Under the federal decree, the Cleveland PD is gradually changing its policies and practices after generations of engaging in racist behavior, producing sloppy internal investigations, and escalating routine police work into matters of life and death. It’s slow, painful surgery that will continue into the 2020s. And now, with its hoped-for transformation far from complete, the Cleveland PD is about to come under the hot lights of intense national media scrutiny.
The stakes and pressure couldn’t be cranked higher for the city’s troubled cops as they face the ultimate daunting task—refereeing a roughhouse political melee featuring a polarizing candidate, potential convention floor drama, guerilla clown protestors, Brexit anti-heroes, gun-toting white supremacists, gun-toting black militants, “patriotic” bikers, and an estimated 50,000 more. And we don’t know which Cleveland Police Department we’ll be getting if the 2016 RNC becomes a black-eye ideological thunderdome a la Chicago in 1968—the old, or the new?
“A lot of the pieces in the consent decree are not in place until later,” says Jacqueline Greene, a local civil rights attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who’s working to monitor the convention. “So do we have the same police force that we had before? Because that one obviously had a pattern and practice of unconstitutional use of force.”
