Cleveland police searched Black people more than three times as often as White people during stops in 2023 — despite finding contraband at similar rates, a Marshall Project - Cleveland and WEWS News 5 analysis found.
A review of 17,000 Cleveland police stops shows Black people are searched three times as often, yet White people have contraband at near equal rates.Collage by Aaron Marin for The Marshall Project; photographs and stills by Daniel Lozada for The Marshall Project and News 5 Cleveland
Black Clevelanders have had a simmering distrust of police that first emerged in the 1960s with the Hough Riots. The city has experienced several high-profile, fatal encounters involving White officers in the past decade, leading to the federal intervention and oversight. The news outlets analyzed nearly 17,000 encounters, defined by Cleveland Division of Police policy as any interaction between officers and people stopped for traffic violations or suspected criminal activity.
Civil rights advocates and legal scholars say the practice gives too much power to police, often leading to racial profiling while fomenting community distrust. Mayor Justin M. Bibb said it’s too early to draw conclusions from the data until federal monitors offer their analysis. The city never collected police encounter data until 2022, when it was required under the consent decree. The city will now use it as a baseline in future years, she said.
Demographics, including population and race data, and the high volume of complaints in problem areas of the city, must be factored into any breakdown of the data, Anderson said. For example, Black people will likely be stopped more often in neighborhoods with higher numbers of Black residents, she said.
“The men and women on the streets are doing their job,” said Gasiewski, who spent 16 years making thousands of stops as a motorcycle officer in the department’s Traffic Unit. “They're taking the training and using it on the street. They're not out there as this nasty myth to violate anyone's rights.”
As the national debate continues around these stops, the stop-and-search statistics are often used to gauge the disparate racial impacts of policing in cities with histories of civil rights abuses by police. Nursing student Asia Barton, 26, remembered the June 2023 day when police stopped her for speeding on St. Clair Avenue inside her 2015 Chevrolet Impala — with tinted windows.
Cornelius Love, a 65-year-old East Side retiree, recalled the day he bought a used Volvo convertible and headed down St. Clair Avenue to get an emissions test.But he thinks the stop had more to do with a pricey car in a high-crime area. The officer cited him for not having license plates, driving an unsafe vehicle and for not wearing a seatbelt, court records show.
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