“For what went on that day, what the officers were faced with that day, I think we did a pretty good job,” Williams said.īut what if the department, seeing what happened around the country, decided not to use the munitions at all? What if police brass decided not to give the troublemakers the spark they sought to ignite? Even if the department deployed all 1,600 of its officers to work the protest, the event would still have ended with clouds of pepper spray and property damage. Cleveland police officers and Cuyahoga County sheriff’s deputies did the same thing with similar results.Ĭhief Calvin Williams said during a virtual meeting with reporters and editors that he believed a certain amount of troublemakers who showed up to the protest would have found a way to wreak havoc no matter what police did. The police were at the Justice Center, and they responded with the choice that they had because they were under siege by a huge crowd of protesters.”īut the report failed to ask a fundamental question: did May 30 have to go the way it did?Īfter all, Cleveland’s protest followed days of news coverage showing demonstrations in other cities that turned violent and led to widespread looting after police launched munitions into crowds. They tore that stuff up because they wanted to tear it up. “But the reality is, in my opinion the police did not cause the riot because they were not on Euclid Avenue. “In today’s times, to say that the police caused the riot, that may fit some scenario of the moment in how people view these things,” Jackson said. Jackson told reporters and editors that protesters outnumbered officers by a 50-to-1 margin and once people began throwing items, they posed a risk not just to the police officers but also to other demonstrators, and police had to get the crowd under control. “I think they showed great restraint considering what they had to deal with.”

The police didn’t overreact,” Jackson said. Still, it was a much more thorough review than the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department’s after-action report, which spanned eight pages.Ĭleveland Mayor Frank Jackson rejected the notion that police played any role in instigating the riot. The report spent just two sentences to say that officers used munitions within their training and that they were effective. The report, released last week, found numerous flaws in the department’s deployment decisions, including its failure to train all officers in crowd control measures, its lack of foresight to anticipate that demonstrators in Cleveland would be as aggressive as protesters around the country and its lack of critical protective equipment for officers. The question of whether police could have done something other than shooting munitions at the crowd and risk sparking the rioting and looting downtown for the entire night is one that is absent from the police department’s long-awaited, 39-page report analyzing its handling of the protest. One metal canister of tear gas hit a woman, who had been protesting peacefully, in the back of the head, Quarles said. The police instead launched more munitions into the crowd.

“At that point, I feel like the police could have said ‘hey, this isn’t going to work,’ and they could have done something different,” Quarles said.

Latonys goldspy killed by police