Complaints prompts hiring

City says company to investigate criticisms of police.

The city CLEVELAND, OHIO — of Cleveland plans to hire a private company to complete a backlog of unfinished investigations into citizen complaints filed against police officers.

The new measure was detailed in a court filing the city filed Friday that outlines its plans to prop up the beleaguered Office of Professional Standards, which has struggled for years to either complete investigations or conduct them in a proper fashion.

In general, the city’s plan calls for the six full-time investigators and six temporary ones to eventually focus solely on completing investigations into complaints filed in 2018. Employees from an outside investigative company, once hired and trained, would address the backlog of cases filed between 2015 and 2017, according to the court filing.

There were 378 open investigations as of Nov. 30, with 218 of those coming from complaints filed in 2015 and 2016, the filing says. The city anticipates it will receive between 200 and 240 complaints in the coming year.

A federal monitor hired in 2015 as part of a settlement the city reached with the Justice Department found hundreds of cases stretching back to 2014 were in various stages of completion and has also been critical of the investigations OPS has completed.

The city has worked closely with the monitor to try to fix the issues within OPS. The monitor helped draft a new OPS manual that was implemented in April, and the city hired more permanent investigators and additional temporary ones. The city and monitor even drafted an aggressive plan to cut the backlog of cases in half by the end of the year.

None of those steps worked and head monitor Matthew Barge has said he doesn’t know what else to do to fix the OPS issues. He said at a hearing in November that at least some of OPS’ problems stem from a lack of urgency on the city’s part.

U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. said at that hearing that “more intrusive” measures are possible if he doesn’t see improvements at OPS.

The city plans to beef up the OPS staff in 2018, according to the court filing. Its administrator position is unfilled, as the previous one was moved to another job in the city’s Public Utilities department. The city is soliciting applications to fill the job.

OPS also plans to hire two more investigators, a senior investigator and a community engagement coordinator that “will assist in keeping the public directly informed on OPS activities,” the filing states.

At first, two teams of investigators will work solely on cases filed in 2018, while a third team will work on the backlog while helping on current cases.

The city says it will take between three and four months to hire and train the outside company.