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.

From [HERE] 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.

The analysis examined the race of people stopped by Cleveland officers and was developed using data the city was required to provide under a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2015, following years of excessive force complaints and paying millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements and judgments for police misconduct.

Using records of nearly 17,000 police encounters, the analysis shows officers often used low-level offenses like broken tail lights or tinted windows to search Black people, who were stopped overall at twice the rate of white people.

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.

More than a dozen Black people told The Marshall Project - Cleveland and WEWS News 5 that they believed police targeted them for minor violations to look for larger crimes.

“It has something to do with the color of our skin,” said Vanika Burks, who was stopped four times in 2023. “I can't see it any other way. I should get treated just the way everybody else should.”

The consent decree created a blueprint for Cleveland police to repair community relationships and overhaul its use-of-force policies. It also required the police to record detailed information on every stop.

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.

Black people accounted for nearly 63% of the encounters and were searched at least three times more than white individuals. But when it came to finding illegal items during those searches, contraband was recovered 37% of the time from Black people versus 32% from white individuals.

Stops for low-level infractions have long been the common driver of police-citizen encounters. But stops for minor infractions across the country have led to numerous deadly encounters after escalating into violent and sometimes fatal struggles.

Pretextual stops, the practice of enforcing minor infractions with the intent to look for more serious offenses, have been criticized but have withstood constitutional challenges.

Civil rights advocates and legal scholars say the practice gives too much power to police, often leading to racial profiling while fomenting community distrust.

Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia Law School professor, has studied police reforms and consent decrees for decades. He reviewed the 2023 Cleveland police data at the request of The Marshall Project - Cleveland and WEWS News 5.

If officers are searching Black residents more often than white people and not finding a disproportionately greater level of contraband, “that suggests they’re exercising some kind of racial discrimination,” Fagan said.

“They're using race as a pretext for making a stop,” he said. “The practice itself is leading to disparities which present constitutional problems.”

Cleveland came under federal oversight after it made national headlines when officers shot Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams 137 times during a car chase in 2012 and an officer shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he played with a toy gun outside a city rec center in 2014.