‘We wanted to come out as a better city’: Cincinnati’s Collaborative Agreement marks 20th anniversary
By Monique John: Posted at 8:00 AM, Apr 11, 2022 — WCPO, Channel Nine, Cincinnati.
CINCINNATI — Monday, April 11 marks the 20th anniversary of the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement, a revolutionary agenda devised by activists, lawyers, police and city officials to reform police-community relations.
The agreement is upheld nationwide as an exemplary model for combatting discriminatory, excessive law enforcement. It is also applauded for its inventive ideas on how policing should be conducted to prioritize problem-solving over arrests, and to optimize safety and relationships between officers and the marginalized communities they serve.
“The largest milestone of this agreement is that the Black community was asked, ‘How did it feel about its policing?’ And that had never been done before,” said Iris Roley, an adviser to the city manager’s office focusing on issues related to the Collaborative Agreement and the city’s process to identify a new police chief.
Roley was one of the central organizers of the Collaborative Agreement. She has been a prominent, longtime organizer with the Cincinnati Black United Front, a social justice collective whose activism helped serve as a catalyst for the agreement.
“That in itself was a huge milestone because people needed to hear from Black people in the city of Cincinnati,” Roley said.
The agreement, which would ultimately be ratified in federal court, came after the Black United Front joined forces with lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union to file a class-action lawsuit. The 2001 lawsuit alleging racial profiling and biased policing was in response to over a dozen high-profile police brutality cases involving Black men in the city in the years prior.
“The largest milestone of this agreement is that the Black community was asked, ‘How did it feel about its policing?’ And that had never been done before,” said Iris Roley, an adviser to the city manager’s office focusing on issues related to the Collaborative Agreement and the city’s process to identify a new police chief.
Roley was one of the central organizers of the Collaborative Agreement. She has been a prominent, longtime organizer with the Cincinnati Black United Front, a social justice collective whose activism helped serve as a catalyst for the agreement.
“That in itself was a huge milestone because people needed to hear from Black people in the city of Cincinnati,” Roley said.
The agreement, which would ultimately be ratified in federal court, came after the Black United Front joined forces with lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union to file a class-action lawsuit. The 2001 lawsuit alleging racial profiling and biased policing was in response to over a dozen high-profile police brutality cases involving Black men in the city in the years prior.
“There was really a need to bring light to the situation Cincinnati. But we did it through the Collaborative Agreement, which means that, at the end, we were going to come out with changes,” said New Prospect Baptist Church Rev. Damon Lynch III, another prominent organizer and member of the Black United Front. “We were going to come out with reforms, but we wanted to come out as a better city.”
The plan reinvented Cincinnati’s philosophy of conducting law enforcement. In addition to identifying police officers and residents as change agents who could provide solutions to conflict, it codified goals to build more trust and respect between the two groups. It also enhanced officers’ education, oversight, monitoring, recruitment and accountability, pushed back on biased policing, and better informed the public on law enforcement operations…
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