Evan Vitale Consulting: Los Angeles consulting firm to monitor Cleveland's progress under consent decree

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CLEVELAND, Ohio — A Los Angeles-based police consulting firm will track the city of Cleveland’s progress under a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department to curb the use of excessive force by city police officers.

The nonprofit Police Assessment Resource Center, whose executive director is the monitor for the Seattle Police Department, will be paid $4.9 million by the city, the city and Justice Department announced Thursday.

The head of the Cleveland monitoring team will be use-of-force expert Matthew Barge, who is also the firm’s vice president and deputy director.

Barge will work with a team of experts, who come from Cleveland and around the country, to track progress and offer guidance in several areas, including community engagement, community-oriented policing, use of force and crisis intervention.

“The implementation of the consent decree is going to change some ways that things are done at the Cleveland Division of Police,” Barge said at a news conference Thursday. “But one thing that will not change in this process is the commitment of all of us involved to ensure that officers are safe, and that officers, in turn, keep Cleveland’s community safe.”

Mayor Frank Jackson and police Chief Calvin Williams said they look forward to working with Barge and his team. U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach referred to PARC as “by far the best qualified” of all the applicants.

Chief U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr., who is overseeing the settlement, issued an order Thursday that says he “is satisfied that the … team, as currently constituted, has the experience, qualifications, and diversity needed to be an effective Monitor with respect to this forward-looking Consent Decree entered into by the Parties.”

The firm’s executive director, Merrick Bobb, is the monitor for a settlement reached between the Justice Department and the city of Seattle in 2013. However, Bobb will not be involved in monitoring Cleveland, officials said.

Barge is the Seattle monitoring team’s deputy director.

“PARC does not merely audit police agencies,” the firm wrote in its proposal. “Nor does it only impassively measure what agencies are doing . . . The Monitoring Team knows that no monitoring can succeed without establishing open, trustworthy relationships with CDP, the Division’s officers and unions, Cleveland’s elected officials, community organizations, and the public.”

(You can read PARC’s proposal here or at the bottom of this story.)

The city of Cleveland and Justice Department reached its settlement, known as a consent decree, in May. It followed a Justice Department investigation that found city police too often use excessive force during encounters with residents.

Twenty-three firms and people applied to be the monitor and proposed costs of between $3.4 million and $13 million. The city and Justice Department have been in negotiations since July with each other and prospective monitors to find what they say is the best candidate at a fair price.

Barge is expected to serve for at least five years, but could stay longer, depending on how long the city takes to come into compliance with the consent decree. The cost of monitoring will be a large part of the $45 million the city is expected to pay to come into compliance.

The selection of a monitor is one of the first deadlines the city and Justice Department needed to meet as the consent decree is implemented and progress is tracked. The original deadline was Sept. 10.

Interviewing firms and negotiating between both the city, Justice Department and the candidates took longer than expected, though, and both sides had to twice ask a federal judge for more time.

In the process, the monitoring team that PARC put forward was altered, as the city and Justice Department replaced some members with others. The team now includes three Cleveland-based members, though most of the team members are from out of town.

According to the PARC proposal, which was released in July along with the others, Barge also has experience consulting for departments in Arizona, California and Colorado, among other states.

Other notable members of the team include:

– Noble Wray, who retired as chief of the Madison, Wisconsin police department in 2013.

– Randall Dupont, a professor at the University of Memphis who helped develop the nation’s first crisis-intervention team at the Memphis Police Department.

– Charles See, head of Lutheran Metropolitan Ministries’ Community Re-Entry program in Cleveland.

– Timothy Tramble, executive director of the Burten, Bell, Carr Development Inc. and a member of the panel who chose the city’s new Community Police Commission.

Barge said Cleveland’s consent decree is “among the most far-reaching and specific that I have seen.” He said he and his team will work in the coming weeks to assess the department for itself.

“This city cares very deeply that policing here be effective and keep them safe, while at the same respecting their constitutional rights,” he said.

Updated with quotes throughout.

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