On December 4, 2014, Cleveland was in turmoil. Just days before, a white police officer had killed a 12-year-old boy playing in a park with a toy gun. The city was outraged at its police department, which many said was ill-trained, poorly supervised, and deeply troubled. On that day, Attorney General Eric Holder arrived in town with a report that seemed to bear out those complaints.

“In recent days, millions of people throughout our nation have come together, bound by grief and bound by anguish,” Holder said, mentioning Tamir Rice’s death and the killings earlier that year of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

With that, Holder announced the results of the Justice Department’s 1½-year investigation in Cleveland. “There is reasonable cause to believe that the Cleveland Division of Police engages in a pattern and practice of using excessive force,” he declared. The report Holder delivered was a scathing indictment of Cleveland police for “poor and dangerous tactics,” pistol-whippings, guns fired at “unarmed or fleeing suspects,” and of supervisors “all […]