Rachel Dissell, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio — An optimistic citizen committee appointed to track improvements in the way Cleveland handles sex crimes and missing person cases said Wednesday the city has made progress on more than half of the promises it made four months ago. The six-person committee appointed by Mayor Frank Jackson updated the public on what they deemed ambitious and nimble movement for such a large and layered organization as the Cleveland Police Department .
But they also acknowledged that implementing lasting and systematic change that translates to the whole department and the wider community.
Committee Member Rosemary Creeden, who works with victims of trauma, said it was clear that Police Chief Michael McGrath meant business when he came to his first meeting with 26 folders — one for each of the recommendations that the city and department had promised to accomplish.
He had assigned each task to high-level personnel to work with the committee.
Committee members said their work will concentrate on making sure that policy and procedural changes get made. They are using a complex spreadsheet to methodically track each change and have asked the city for firm dates of completion for each one.
But determining how the bureaucratic shifts trickle down within the more than 1,500-member department and eventually are felt by victims and their families is something the committee is still grappling with.
“It’s a culture change,” Megan O’Bryan, committee member and President and CEO of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center said. “The commitment for change is certainly there at the top.”
For now, those long-term measurements of success will be left to future expert consultants the city has promised to hire. And another citizen panel, the city’s Civilian Review Board, which has been asked to review police response to missing persons and sexual assault on a more microscopic case level.
The committee’s job is an extension of work done by a three-person commission also appointed by Jackson in the wake of the serial murders of 11 women on Imperial Avenue last year and the arrest of their suspected killer Anthony Sowell.
Story Compliments Of The Plain Dealer
