CLEVELAND — Black drivers were more than three times as likely as White drivers to be stopped by Cleveland police in 2024, according to a new report by the Cleveland Division of Police Monitoring Team.
The report said the team's analysis found racial and gender disparities persist, despite "considerable progress" in key areas related to traffic stops, searches, and seizures.
The monitoring team said the findings indicate the need for further analysis, sustained oversight, and targeted training, as well as corrective actions and further structural reforms.
Search & Seizure Assessment
The report said Black drivers in Cleveland accounted for 62.7% of traffic stops in 2024, but only 31.8% of drivers.
On the other hand, the report said White drivers accounted for only 30.9% of stops, despite being 58.8% of the driving population.
The report said this means Black drivers are 3.7 times as likely as White drivers to be stopped by Cleveland police.
The team also noted upgrades related to stops and searches. It found that 95% of investigatory stops were supported by reasonable suspicion and 90.8% of arrests were backed by probable cause.
Read the report below:
News 5 - The Marshall Project - Cleveland investigation
The team's findings are similar to what a News 5 and The Marshall Project - Cleveland investigation uncovered when they analyzed nearly 17,000 traffic stops made by Cleveland police in 2023.
Our analysis found Cleveland searched Black people more than three times as often as white people during traffic stops — despite finding contraband at similar rates.
Black people accounted for nearly 63% of the encounters and were searched at least three times more than white individuals. 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.
Watch our analysis:
READ MORE: Cleveland Police Stop and Search Black Drivers at Higher Rates Despite DOJ Oversight
Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia Law School professor, has studied police reforms for decades. He reviewed the 2023 Cleveland police data at the request of News 5 Cleveland and The Marshall Project - Cleveland.
"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's response
Cleveland commissioned its own report on traffic stops, which was released in October. The city's report concluded there was no evidence of racial bias in police traffic stops.
READ MORE: Cleveland: 'No evidence" of racial bias in Cleveland police traffic stops in 2024
The city hired Sigma Squared to analyze investigatory traffic stops and searches from 2024, the same data analyzed by the monitoring team.
Sigma Squared's team, led by Dr. Roland Fryer, a professor of Economics at Harvard University, said he used a "threshold test" in his analysis and concluded there was no bias in the stops.
"Is there statistical evidence that you are using the same threshold to stop minority drivers that you are non-minority drivers? We did both of those tests for all of 2024. And what we found in 2024 was that yes, there is a larger fraction of minorities stopped in Cleveland than non-minorities, but when it comes to the actual efficiency of those stops, they're statistically the same," he said. "That tells us no bias."
Cleveland police have been under federal oversight since 2015 after a U.S. Department of Justice investigation found officers engaged in a "pattern or practice" of excessive force, among other unconstitutional policing practices.
