8 things every Ohioan should know about Cleveland politics
Introducing Parma Sean, a Cleveland Politics Knower here to pull the curtain back on one of Ohio's most fascinating political cultures.
Cleveland, Ohio.
Once the crown jewel of American industrial splendor, the playground of legendary titans like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Lebron James—it is now known colloquially as “the mistake by the lake” and was once even referred to by our former mayor as “the asshole of the universe.”
Really, Cleveland’s not so bad. In truth, for about five months between May and October, when the austere sun deigns to briefly shine upon us, Cleveland is almost a wonderful place to live.
Traffic is a breeze; we have first-class parks and museums, great restaurants and bars, a seemingly endless array of little street fairs in the summer, and a lower murder rate than Baltimore, NOLA, St. Louis, and Detroit!
But when walking down Lorain Avenue or St. Clair, and dozens of boulevards like them, one catches glimpses of the city’s former art deco splendor, the lines of boarded-up storefronts where thriving neighborhood centers used to be.
Now, there’s a dollar store here, a gas station that serves empanadas there, and save for the handful of gentrified neighborhoods that have received attention, a profound sense of malaise and visible decay.
Something beautiful died here, and we’re now living in its corpse.
The killers of Cleveland are legion and familiar to anyone who has followed the decline of cities all over the country: Deindustrialization, redlining and white flight, the foreclosure crisis, and COVID-19.
But Cleveland has also suffered from a profound lack of good leadership for generations. As economic misfortunes threw up curves in the road, a succession of two-bit crooks and bloodless corporate ghouls has repeatedly steered the city into the skid.
By contrast, the people of Cleveland—and I mean this sincerely—are wonderful. They are diverse, creative, and indomitable.
They constantly try to improve this place and fight for their communities to bloom again. They deserve better from their leaders.
Here are eight things every Ohioan should know about Cleveland politics…
#1. Cleveland is a one-party state
The Rooster has exhaustively discussed the wretched Republican liches who run the Statehouse, corpses and wooden men animated only by racism and FirstEnergy bribes.
However, his more right-leaning readers will no doubt be giddy to learn that Cleveland is proof positive that Democrats can also be corrupt, sociopathic, and even racist themselves!
While state hostility towards the city doesn’t help, as Columbus is not above putting its thumb on the scale when it comes to Cleveland, the city’s biggest problems are very much its own, and its leadership is all blue, baby.
Cleveland has 17 Democratic council members, which is arguably way, way too many for fewer than 400,000 people and, legally speaking, exactly two too many.
Nine of Cuyahoga County’s 11 council people are also Democrats. Our jetsetting boy mayor, Justin Bibb, is a Democrat, as is our “aw-shucks, me?” County Executive Chris Ronayne.
There have been no Republicans in city office since the late ‘80s, and they’ve been scarce going back as far as the New Deal. Don’t mistake this for an invitation; the streets here are teeming with Antifa and BLM gender-terrorists, and it’s far too dangerous for you.
But to a profound degree, the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party is the government of Cleveland. Their endorsement is a kingmaker even in “nonpartisan races” like those for mayor and judge. City and county officials are often appointed directly from party precinct committees, and joining those committees is seen by many as the first rung to climb toward real political power.
If you’re not voting in party primaries, you’re basically not voting at all. Republicans rarely put up candidates and the ones they do get creamed.
So all the heat is really in March elections when people generally aren’t paying attention unless they’re wretched politics-heads like me, refreshing the BOE website over and over alone in the dark to get my next fix.
Turnout in Cleveland is low at the best of times, capping out at about 25% when there isn’t a presidential race on the ballot. By the time the general elections roll around, most local races will have been effectively settled.
Take advantage of the open primary system before the Statehouse makes it illegal and vote in March and November.
But one-party rule manifests most obviously in how the city council conducts itself…
#2. City Council is not a beacon of democracy
The alleged YMCA masturbator is a staple at Cleveland City Council meetings.
Cleveland City Council typically operates by something called “the Unit rule,” whereby all Democratic party members (aka the whole council) always vote together. In practice, this makes the meetings surreal affairs resembling something from the late period USSR.
After dealing with a heavy-handed security check, you enter a palatial room of extravagant gilded age splendor, where sixteen stone-faced council people sit turned away from the audience. A clerk briskly reads a list of ordinances that have already received a unanimous “Yes” vote behind the scenes.
City Council President Blaine Griffin sits at a big boy high chair towering 20 feet over everyone else. He occasionally bangs his gavel and motions to “suspend the rules” to fast-track legislation.
There is no discussion and little context given other than the titles of each bill.
Committees, where sometimes actual debate happens, have no venue for public input and generally happen on weekday mornings when it’s difficult for working people to attend.
City Council meetings did not even have a public comment period until 2022, after residents waged a pressure campaign.
Ten speaking slots are allotted three minutes each. To claim a spot, you must sign up online within a brief window a week in advance.
Until a resident sued in federal court this year, you were not allowed to directly address any council people while giving comments.
President Griffin will yell at you to stop promptly at three minutes, and you will be completely ignored for the rest of the meeting.
They have already this year tried to impose even further limitations on public comment after it became a venue for Cleveland’s Palestinian community to ask their elected representatives to end their silence on the relentless slaughter of their family members, which many council people seemingly found annoying.
Chris Martin, the community activist who filed the lawsuit, had his mic cut last September while calling out a particularly nefarious city institution: the Council Leadership Fund.
Discipline on the council is partly maintained through this fund, a mysterious PAC maintained by the council president. The fund distributes money to incumbent members’ campaign war chests if they’re in good favor and withholds the funds if they’re not.
The fund is small in terms of political slush funds—only $2 million has been dispensed in total over the last 20 years. But in a small, low-turnout city like Cleveland, where hundreds of votes often win council races, that money can buy a decisive number of yard signs and mailers.
The city council also has a long history of using appointments to fill vacated seats. Five current members received their positions through appointment before winning reelection with the help of CLF money.
On top of all that, the council just voted to double their own campaign donation limits, which is sure to bring them closer to the people.
Some of the council’s members, like Stephanie Howse-Jones and Rebecca Maurer, have still shown tremendous backbone fighting for progressive issues.
Others, like Mike Polensek, who has been on the council since the Carter Administration, can be charitably said to “march to the beat of his own drum.”
But most of the time, the city prefers to appear as though they’re moving in lockstep and the friction is smoothed over behind the scenes.
Where does the money for the Council Leadership Fund come from? The actual rulers of Cleveland: Corporate America and the Real Estate Industrial Complex.
Council leadership puts in their longest days when these interests are challenged and calls in all their favors because…
#3. Nothing brings the city together like crushing the grassroots
Because they know who butters their bread, City Hall has repeatedly circled the wagons when activists have tried to use the city’s generous ballot initiative rules to enhance democracy, reduce the influence of plutocrats, or reallocate city money to help the city’s most vulnerable residents.
One benefit of atrociously low voter turnout is that the number of signatures needed to make it to the ballot is only 10% of the people who voted in the most recent citywide election.
In a pattern that has reoccurred nearly every year since 2016, Cleveland residents have used these petition campaigns to try and reshape city government in a more positive direction. Time and again, these efforts have been met by the local machine launching into hyperdrive to stomp them out.
In 2017, during the “Q Deal” saga, a grassroots initiative successfully gathered enough signatures to force a citywide vote to prevent the spending of tens of millions of public dollars on renovating what was then known as the Quicken Loans Arena, home of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers.
After being personally lobbied by billionaire owner Dan Gilbert, then-Council President Kevin Kelly set to work obtaining the vote supermajority needed to pass the deal as an emergency measure, a morally indefensible use of public money in a city where over 30% of residents live in poverty, including half of the city’s children.
The fight saw council introduce their own charter amendment to counteract the signature campaign, which was egregious enough that the Republican-controlled Ohio Supreme Court overturned it.
Council then pivoted to dismantling the coalition through a mix of funding threats and backroom offers, leading Greater Cleveland Congregations (GCC), the largest organization in the coalition, to pull its signatures at the last minute.
The deal went forward as planned, and the supposed concession GCC received— community mental health crisis centers—didn’t materialize until almost five years later in a bastardized form: a jail diversion facility that’s mostly unused by the cops.
In 2018, activists organized under the CLASH Coalition (Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing), again used the referendum process to introduce a lead-safe housing ordinance.
Cleveland is plagued by old housing stock covered in lead paint - something like 80% of Cleveland’s housing was built before 1978, the year lead paint was federally outlawed.
Consequently, around one in five Cleveland children test positive for lead poisoning, an insidious developmental disorder that affects the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and has been convincingly linked to violent crime rates.
This is an even higher rate than in the much more infamous Flint, MI, where then-President Barack Obama pretended to drink a glass of contaminated water, a now proud political tradition carried on by Governor Sleepy Tea in East Palestine last year.
CLASH proposed a law that would mandate the remediation of rental properties containing lead paint and open those who refused to prosecutions, a bold challenge to the negligence and laziness of local landlords.
CLASH successfully collected the requisite signatures twice—the first batch were thrown out on a technicality—before being pre-empted by city council’s own watered-down version of the legislation.
CLASH retooled itself into a watchdog organization to ensure that the legislation followed its mandate—that all of Cleveland’s landlords must remediate their houses to be lead-safe by March 2023.
This did not happen, and the measure has suffered from weak enforcement.
In 2021, we saw Issue 24, a police accountability measure spearheaded by the families of local police violence victims.
This measure won handily, and Justin Bibb’s support arguably won him the mayor’s race.
However, the actual implementation of the law has been very much a monkey’s paw kind of situation—more on this one in a bit.
History repeated last year during the battle over Issue 38—the People’s Budget, a ballot measure that would have given Cleveland residents a direct vote over two percent of the city’s annual budget through participatory budgeting, an increasingly popular form of direct democracy based on the idea that ordinary people might have good ideas about how to spend their own tax money.
Organizers initially tried to work with council on a pilot using just $5 million of the city’s $511 million covid relief package, with four council co-sponsors and the support of the mayor.
During the committee meeting when the proposal was introduced, the remaining 13 council members used the opportunity to each take turns lecturing the group on why participatory budgeting was a stupid idea that they should be ashamed for even suggesting.
A couple of months later, the group re-emerged, ready for a fight as People’s Budget Cleveland, and announced their signature drive.
City council immediately began mounting an unprecedented opposition campaign, arguing that the measure would cripple city services and spur mass layoffs of critical staff.
In addition to council members canvassing against the initiative, there were multiple radio debates, podcast interviews, and even a live televised debate at the city’s convention hall. Echoing the showdown over the Q deal, favors were even called in at the Statehouse to make participatory budgeting illegal statewide.
After receiving rightful pushback to proposed legislation that would have allowed the use of city money to campaign against residents' ability to vote on the use of city money, the Council Leadership Fund worked its magic to pay for absurdities like an enormous plague of yard signs lining every highway exit.
Those signs still litter the city a year later.
Despite this tidal wave of ratfuckery, PB CLE only narrowly lost the vote by less than two percent.
If passed, the measure would have created a process for residents to suggest projects and directly vote on the spending of about $7 million in 2025, before ramping up to $10 million the following year and about $14 million for subsequent years.
This money was successfully protected from the rabble, and the city was supposedly saved from certain financial doom, just in time to announce an unspent 2023 budget surplus of $56 million.
Besides the preservation of business as usual and an elitist hostility to any measure of “real” democracy, why did the council pull out all the stops to fight this measure in particular?
Why did they shoot down the more modest America Rescue Plan Act-based proposal with such naked scorn that the blowback defined the rest of their year?
Well, one big reason might be that initially, the mayor supported it, and…
#4. The Mayor and City Council fucking hate each other
Boy mayor Justin Bibb won in an astonishing landslide back in 2021 against the previous city council president Kevin Kelley, who was four-term mayor Frank Jackson’s heir apparent.
Kelley is a seasoned operator who seemed to have the backing of most of the city’s prominent oligarchs and even quite a bit of its Black leadership, despite an informal understanding that only Black candidates can be elected mayor in Cleveland.
In a crowded race that featured a profoundly tone-deaf “tough on crime” pivot by former mayor Dennis Kucinich, Bibb emerged as the frontrunner in the first round despite it being his first-ever run for public office.
Bibb was also the only candidate to support Issue 24, the aforementioned police accountability measure. For this reason, the election of the young former corporate banker was initially celebrated as a victory for the progressive left.
Kelley ate complete shit, losing 37% to 63% in the runoff, a sign the city was hungry for change that would unfortunately not be forthcoming.
Bad blood against Bibb immediately bubbled up from establishment resentment toward an arrogant young upstart who showed up out of nowhere and broke the line of succession.
Kelley pivoted only a year later to win a seat on the bench of the County Court of Common Pleas, where he will most likely wield power over matters of life and death until whenever he decides to retire because incumbent Democratic judges never face a challenge from within the party.
Bibb, for his part, is a kind of sentient resumé dressed in monogrammed socks. He studied urban planning at American University, then public policy at the London School of Economics, and then briefly worked for Cuyahoga County before attending Case Law.
That education was followed by stints in venture capital, banking, nonprofit administration, and multiple jobs with the Gallup polling group—all in time to run for mayor at only 34 years old.
All that’s missing is a Big Three consulting gig or some kind of stint with the actual Central Intelligence Agency. Bibb’s CV would have begun to glow ominously with radioactive levels of “electability.”
For discerning observers sick of America’s Dictatorship of the Professional Managerial Class, “impeccable credentials” like these should have been a huge red flag.
But his fresh face and willingness to feint towards Cleveland’s activist community initially served to distract from the fact that he is a corporate tool through and through, seemingly incapable of not using quarterly earnings report nothing-speak even in softball media profiles intended to humanize him.
Bibb’s “bold vision” for uplifting the downtrodden city is basically just to make it an attractive place for rich people to move to and inevitably displace its current residents, particularly by developing its underused lakefront into the ultimate SoDoSoPa.
He has proudly referred to his real title as the “Chief Sales Officer” of the city. This supposedly justifies his extravagant spending on trips across the country, which many suspect are less about selling Cleveland and more about selling himself to national Democrats as a potential candidate for higher office.
The man wants to be the next Obama badly, and even interned in his office back when Obama was merely Illinois’s junior Senator. However, back at home, Bibb’s administration has become increasingly defined by pugilistic confrontations with the city council.
After a brief honeymoon, the mutual animosity initially seemed to spark off over arbitrary cuts to the city's leaf pickup program, which caused council members’ phones to ring off the hook.
Then it was disagreements about how to spend the city’s half-a-billion dollar COVID relief package.
It has since spiraled from there to encompass a wide-ranging series of feuds and recriminations including the fight over Issue 38 and access to coveted “casino dollars” for ward slush funds.
Things continued to escalate throughout last year, culminating in Bibb and his staff deciding to boycott one council meeting entirely.
To be fair to him, by that point, grandstanding anti-Bibb monologues by council members were becoming something of a tradition. Like most mayors, he’s taken a lot of performative heat for things that aren’t really his fault, like declining police recruitment and an insolvent public school system.
Those are the results of a system-wide failure to reform a horrifying profession that still kills over a thousand Americans every year and all of the insane property tax abatements given to developers coupled with statehouse fuckery funneling public money towards private schools through so-called parental choice vouchers.
But Bibb’s earnest technocratic style definitely leaves a lot to be desired in a city where the main issue is poverty. And that was before the mother of all unforced errors came this past March, when Bibb hired a personal friend Phillip McHugh to a newly created “public safety advisor” position with a six-figure salary.
While this might seem like fairly common nepotism, every new detail about this story amplified the administration’s shame.
First, we learned that Bibb and McHugh were college roommates. Then we learned that McHugh was the subject of a Civil Rights lawsuit when he was a DC cop, allegedly for stalking and harassing an elderly Black woman named Vashti Sherrod.
The case started because a white woman who hit Sherrod’s car claimed (read: racistly lied) she had waved a gun at her while exchanging insurance info.
Sherrod, a woman in her 70s, served jail time for this lie despite never owning a gun.
McHugh attempted to cover up the debacle despite finding no gun after searching her car and home. Despite mounting alarm from the NAACP and other civil rights groups over this sordid incident, Bibb and McHugh still tried to weather the storm, only for it to then come out that he had helped write the job description for his position.
City Council, smelling blood in the water, seized every opportunity to pounce on the mayor’s administration over this corrupt bullshit. Councilman Richard Starr even wore a custom-made “Who’s getting fired?” t-shirt to the council meeting, where he and other council people took turns tearing into the mayor.
McHugh finally resigned less than a month into his appointment, but the damage was done. Bibb’s claim to be disrupting the city’s corrupt status quo is dead.
Leading the opposition is City Council President Blaine Griffin, who is never once mentioned in the press without flirtily denying that he has decided to run against Bibb in 2025.
Griffin at least sucks in a more tragic way than Bibb, in that he was a seemingly passionate community organizer and social worker who was molded into a status-quo running dog by mentors like former mayor Frank Jackson who “knew how things really work.”
While Bibb eagerly sought degrees from Status Quo University and employment with Status Quo Inc. before pursuing elected office, Griffin has only been on the City Council since 2017.
But Griffin ran the mayor’s Community Relations Board for over a decade prior to his appointment.
During his tenure there, he became known for his steadfast loyalty to Mayor Jackson and bizarre episodes like the time he tweeted asking whether Cleveland needed to “burn like Baltimore” for activists to be satisfied following several horrifying police killings and then deleted the account after a dressing down from Jackson.
Griffin’s loyalty to Jackson was also a source of early tension with Bibb, as he stuck out his neck to protest the bog standard replacement of Jackson’s longtime aide (and rumored mistress) Valerie McCall on the Regional Transit board.
Griffin likes to portray himself as a steady hand keeping the peace and makes an effort to be accessible to his constituents.
But behind the scenes, Griffin is rumored to be a bully who holds a mean grudge and is not above making veiled threats to council members and other local politicos who defy his agenda.
He has repeatedly emphasized, both in public and in private, that “he doesn’t bend to anyone,” a stellar quality in an elected representative and likely a significant source of the friction between him and Bibb.
There was, briefly, a chance for these two creatures of raw ambition to work as partners, captured in a hilarious photo-op with the two carrying big boxes labeled “expungement” when they tried to expunge the marijuana possession convictions of over 4,000 Clevelanders.
This would have been an exceptional, unvarnished good thing to do and a beautiful start to Bibb’s tenure, but the initiative seems to have been abandoned after hitting some legal snags.
This missed chance is perhaps a testament to the good politics that becomes impossible when officials let their egos get the best of them.
The 2025 mayoral race, if we are still having elections in this country by then, will most likely be a referendum on Bibb’s performance with Griffin as the machine standard bearer.
However, local scuttlebutt states that at least two other candidates are considering entering the fray.
One is Nina Turner, the former state senator and Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate who could offer a genuinely progressive alternative to the Bibb and Griffin doctrines.
Turner has twice lost to AIPAC donation leaderboard fixture Shontel Brown while running for Marcia Fudge’s old Congressional seat, indicating an uphill battle ahead despite the city being more left-leaning than the district.
The other is Kerry McKormack, Councilman for Cleveland’s most illustriously gentrified ward, who is rumored to be the pick of Corporate Cleveland.
McCormack, as far as I can tell, offers the same young, vaguely “progressive” but developer-friendly political appeal as Bibb, but he’s gay, and has not had the chance to embarrass himself in the executive office yet.
McCormack’s father Tim has also had a long political career in Cuyahoga County, which illustrates another notable thing about politics here:
#5. It's a family affair (especially if you’re Irish)
If you suddenly find yourself with the Sly and the Family Stone song stuck in your head, you’re welcome. Untangling the dense web of Cleveland politics nepotism babies merits an article of its own, likely several.
Suffice to say that a few last names are so incredibly common that some family reunions have more politicians present than a gay brothel during the RNC.
This often leads to absurdities like the the recent primary ballot where four consecutive races featured an “O’Malley” running, although technically those candidates represent one uncle and niece as well as two brothers.
Some other names to watch out for include Sweeney, Gallagher, Kelly, Conwell, Donnelly, Sutula, Celebreeze, and Russo.
Some of these are alliances formed by marriage. Hey, politicians fall in love at work sometimes, too.
But the number of people who basically inherited their immense power is significant,. Some of these legacies go back to the middle of the last century, and it all mostly goes unquestioned.
It’s part of Cleveland politics' Omerta because newcomers constantly hope to start their own dynasties.
This is to say nothing of (relatively) more subtle forms of nepotism, such as the influence of weird ethnic social clubs for white people like the Irish-American Law Society which alone has six sitting judges on its public membership list.
Some of this is just the way politics are done in every city in our great nation, where the more cocktail hours you attend, the more power you wield, but it’s worth looking a little closer at this Irish shit to illustrate what I’m talking about.
The Irish-Americans are well known for their stranglehold on Cuyahoga County politics, with a machine based around the west side suburbs. They have their own alt-monthly called iIrish, which fills to the brim with campaign ads in March and November touting candidate links to the Mother Isles.
In a vacuum, maybe this isn’t particularly distasteful, but the Irish(Americans) dominate a county justice system that has wreaked absolute havoc on Cleveland’s Black communities.
When running for office, they often eschew the typical red, white, and blue yard signs for a limerick green, a dog whistle if there ever was one to their mostly white suburban voter base.
The Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas has 34 judges, including a Sheehan, a Clancy, a Clary, a Corrigan, a Gall, a Gaul, a Hagan, a McCormick, a McGinty, a Miday, two O’Donnells, THREE Gallaghers, a Kelley, a Kilbane, and a Shaughnessy.
This body, which almost exclusively prosecutes cases against Black Clevelanders, only has four Black judges by contrast, two of which are mother and son.
Just to further prove I’m not imagining this shit, Cleveland has its own Irish consulate, we recently opened direct flights to Dublin from Cleveland-Hopkins, and local politicians have frequently made diplomatic trips there going back decades.
This is to say nothing of the actual nation of Ireland, a formerly oppressed vassal state scoring ‘W’ after ‘W’ while the dastardly English sell the vestiges of their collapsed empire off for scrap.
The real Irish do cool things like support Palestinian statehood, guarantee abortion rights in their majority Catholic country, and blow up King Charles’ pedophile uncle.
Irish-Americans, who have certainly faced discrimination in the distant past, are at this point just white people, and have been for many decades, so let’s be real here.
I have no objection whatsoever to people celebrating their ethnic heritage. What I find creepy is when certain ethnic identities are promoted and politically empowered to the seeming exclusion of others. One need not look far back to see this dynamic having significant political consequences.
Last February, former city safety director Karrie Howard made a banal observation at a policing forum that a lot of Irish people became cops in the early twentieth century.
Howard, who is Black, made these comments in the context of urging more Black people to enter law enforcement, observing, again, an obvious fact that Irish people tended to stop getting blamed for all of the city’s social ills once they became the ones holding the billy clubs.
While I’m personally skeptical that this approach would work out the same way for Black people, the comments were not remotely disparaging of Irish-Americans.
Nevertheless, Cleveland’s police union, with its 80% white membership, issued an 868-38 vote of “no confidence” against Howard on the basis of his “racially biased remarks.”
The absurdity of this bullshit was dryly illustrated in Cleveland.com’s coverage of the controversy (emphasis mine):
Capt. James O’Malley is the president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 8, which represents Cleveland’s higher-ranking officers. He said Howard called him to personally apologize following his comments, “which I appreciated.”
But underscoring the disciplinary authority Howard wields, O’Malley said Howard’s remarks this week present a conflict of interest.
“Imagine a police officer says something derogatory against the Muslim or Jewish community,” O’Malley said. “They could be sitting in front of the director for discipline, but they don’t have the opportunity to apologize and hope it goes away. What’s said is said.”
O’Malley is the son of a former Cleveland police lieutenant whose familial ties with police date to 1875. In addition to the complaints he has received from union members, O’Malley, a member of the city’s Irish community, has been “bombarded by civilians appalled by the statements as well,” he said.
Karrie Howard just barely survived the year before resigning in February for undisclosed reasons, right after his assistant brought him even more heat for getting into an accident in a city-owned vehicle.
The main source of the animus directed at him by the police was, as you might guess, not his anti-Hibernian prejudice, but the fact that he had dared to fire some of them for misconduct. And when it comes to Cleveland, there’s a lot of it!
Because…
#6. The Police Here are a National Disgrace
Since 2015, the Cleveland Police Department has been under a federal "consent decree,” essentially meaning that a federal investigation found Cleveland’s cops to be so institutionally abusive that they mandated independent oversight until serious departmental changes were made.
However, Trump’s justice department essentially didn’t bother to enforce it for four years, perhaps because Cleveland’s police union endorsed him by a margin of 71%.
The consent decree came after a series of three egregious police murders between 2012 and 2014.
First was the 2012 Brelo Case, aka the “137 shots” case, where two unhoused people, Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams, got spooked at a traffic stop and were pursued in a high-speed chase by 62 squad cars from 6 different departments that ended in their deaths after 137 individual shots were fired into the car.
For reference, during the legendary shootout that killed fucking Bonnie and Clyde, only 112 rounds hit their car.
The department maintains to this day that they opened fire in response to the tailpipe on the car backfiring, but personally, color me skeptical that actually happened, as this excuse only materialized after no gun was recovered from the bullet-riddled vehicle.
The case takes its name from Officer Michael Brelo, the hero who jumped on top of the stopped car’s hood after its passengers were already dead and fired 15 shots directly into the windshield.
Brelo was the only officer to face charges and was acquitted in a bench trial (no jury) by Judge John O’Donnell, who the county Democratic party inexplicably tried to run for the State Supreme Court a few years later, an incredibly arrogant and tone-deaf effort that thankfully failed. Five other officers were fired but then reinstated shortly thereafter following arbitration.
Next was the horrifying killing of Tanisha Anderson, who was thrown to the pavement and died of cardiac arrest face down on the freezing sidewalk in front of her family after they called 911 for help when she had a delirious manic episode.
This case resulted in a single 10-day suspension for one of the involved officers. The Anderson family has continued to advocate for the expansion of mental health services that won’t result in the murder of people in crisis when they’re seeking assistance.
The most well-known Cleveland police killing, that of Tamir Rice, continues to stand out a decade later as one of the most senseless in our country’s history.
For those who are unaware of this incredibly sad story, Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old boy who was playing by himself with a toy gun in Cudell Park.
A neighbor called the cops, and Officer Timothy Loehmann, a man previously noted to be unstable by superiors, showed up and executed Tamir before he had even completely stepped out of his patrol car.
Loehmann remained on the force for two and a half years afterward and was defended by the union at every turn.
Tamir’s mother Samaria, seeking redress, has been forced to become a local political figure herself. She and her family formed the core of Cleveland’s Black Lives Matter chapter.
Ms. Rice has earned a reputation for calling out national movement figures like Sean King on their hypocrisy and fame-chasing. After the feds declined to reopen Tamir’s case in 2020, these families went on to organize the Issue 24 ballot initiative.
Following the massive protests and uprisings that defined the George Floyd summer of 2020, which now feel like a quaint memory, activists across the country largely failed to capitalize on that momentum to produce substantive legislation, and by the first year of the Biden presidency, “defund” had already become a dirty word among the Democratic Party establishment.
With Issue 24, Cleveland could still be an exception, although there are a lot of caveats attached to that already cautiously optimistic statement.
Issue 24 turned the existing consent-decree-mandated Cleveland Police Commission into a permanent body of citizen appointees with real regulatory teeth—including the power to fire officers.
After Citizens for a Safer Cleveland, a BLM-led coalition of activists gathered the necessary signatures, the measure won handily, 60-40, despite staunch opposition from both the cops and every mayoral candidate except Bibb.
Bibb entered office with a strong mandate to make this experiment work, and for once, there seemed to be something to be optimistic about when it came to public safety in Cleveland.
Unfortunately, it has proved to be a complete clusterfuck since almost minute one.
Immediately, the Bibb administration began interpreting the charter amendment in the most generous possible way when selecting appointees, despite explicit mandates in the language that the commission include somebody who had been wrongfully convicted and exonerated and an attorney who had prosecuted police misconduct cases.
#7. The Parma Boys
It’s difficult to dig into this problem without coming off like a critic of organized labor in general.
Personally, I believe a worker’s right to organize their workplace is more fundamentally important to their dignity and autonomy than most guarantees in the Bill of Rights.
Attacks on unions with vague allegations of corruption have typically been a tool for consolidating the corporate oligarchy that currently governs our country. The massive unionization push we’ve seen post-pandemic is one of the few real signs of optimism for this country's political future.
Nevertheless, the same glad-handing, nepotism, and favor-trading that infests our political leadership also infests much of our labor leadership, and in my opinion, it’s a problem for the people they claim to represent.
The unions in Cleveland are deeply intertwined with the city’s power structure and have been ever since the middle of last century when that power structure was mobbed up.
Arguably the city’s most famous labor leader is still folk hero Danny Greene, the one-time International Longshoreman Union president and mafia enforcer who struck out on his own against the Italians and then survived dozens of carbombings in the mid 1970’s right up until he didn’t.
You can learn more about him in Kill the Irishman, a mediocre Scorsese send-up that criminally underused Linda Cardellini in a generic nagging wife role. Greene was essentially a ruthless gangster and federal snitch who is lionized to this day because he knew how to give a good TV news interview and bought Thanksgiving turkeys for poor families with his blood money.
Well and you know, the Irish thing. Anyways his son is now on city council, but he’s actually pretty chill.
Nowadays “the guy” is one David Wondolowski, head of the Building and Trades local whom The Rooster has covered previously.
Unmentioned in that article was Wondo’s extensive personal and professional history with County Prosecutor Mike O’Malley, who appointed him to be the Grand Jury foreman issuing indictments in the HB-6 case.
Both O’Malley and Wondo are members of the Democratic Party clique known as “the Parma Boys” that dominated County Government in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
Former County Prosecutor Bill Mason long oversaw this political machine.
Wondolowski’s a far cry from the brutal bad old days of the 70’s, but hey… there might be something untoward going on nonetheless.
“Wondo,” as he is known to friends, is the kind of figure endemic to city political machines. Somebody who has never run for elected office but has accrued immense power through shrewd leveraging of his personal relationships.
I have heard through the rumor mill that Wondo personally lobbied arch-conservative State Senator Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) to introduce legislation making participatory budgeting illegal last year.
Wondolowski is the kind of labor leader who writes op-eds arguing against a 15-dollar minimum wage while making roughly six times that amount per hour.
By contrast, when business gets done in Cleveland, it’s typically on behalf of the construction business because…
#8. Like Most American Cities it’s Actually Governed by Rich Developers Who Don't Live Here
As The Rooster has repeatedly demonstrated, across the US, statehouses are a free-for-all for all kinds of special interest groups jockeying to buy off incredibly powerful state legislators who the average voter could not even name.
But when it comes to municipal governments, one special interest reigns supreme: real estate development.
Developers donate generously the campaign PACs of city council people and mayors, then those officials make sure that lucrative development contracts occur on the taxpayer dime through the use of public subsidy and abatements.
It’s a good system from their perspective, and to a certain degree, our tax system inherently incentivizes this arrangement.
City governments are funded through property and income taxes, and so splurging on big banner projects to attract wealthy people and high-paying jobs to the city is an easy pitch to people whose own paychecks theoretically depend on that kind of growth.
It’s no mistake that a lot of these same developers also own local sports teams and thereby become directly responsible for “branding” the city. Your city no doubt has these motherfuckers too, pulling strings from their C-Suites, evading accountability, and funding opposition to every effort to make things better for the poor.
Here in Cleveland, we’ve had a lot of them over the years. Here’s just one example.
Bratenahl, One of many carve-out enclaves surrounding Cleveland proper. The home base of many of the County’s wealthiest denizens.
Bratenahl is notorious locally for issuing “driving while Black” tickets, and curious visitors will find a “city” that is essentially just one long street full of walled-off lakefront mansions.
Bratenahl is also the home of Jimmy Haslam, owner of the Cleveland Browns, one of the worst teams in the NFL.
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This was eye-opening, thank you!
I recommend David Pepper Pepperspectives davidpepper@substack.com - the most knowledgeable person I know on all things Cincinnati, Hamilton County, and Ohio politics. You may be familiar with his book "Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines".
Carnegie was from Pittsburgh