Janea Ivory, the group’s former chair who stepped down in late 2022, said they started out meeting quarterly unless something came up, but had issues with membership.
“The charter called for 12 people but we rarely had half of that. We had some people red-hot about it, especially after George Floyd ... and we had a couple people move out of the county and that excluded them. Usually, it was an issue with getting people recruited for the board. We tried for about a year,” she said.
The team was established in the wake of social justice protests nationwide that took place after the killing of George Floyd. Floyd was an unarmed black man who was killed while in Minneapolis police custody. Officers were caught on video holding him down and one officer was shown kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Floyd’s death renewed conversations about police brutality and systemic racism in the country and prompted massive protests throughout the summer, including locally in Springfield, New Carlisle and Dayton.
While in the group, Ivory previously said the team’s three areas of focus were reviewing community complaints made about deputies, building and conducting implicit bias training with all deputies, and education and outreach within the community
“The idea was to act as a quasi-authority. We couldn’t hire, fire or discipline, but in the incidences where racism showed up in the institution of policing ... (we’d) get a report, formulate some gentle correction and tips for that person, then share those reports ... We didn’t get to do that,” she said.
Ivory said they only interacted with the sheriff’s office under former Sheriff Deb Burchett, but never got anything to review in the years she was in the group.
“There were absolutely no instances of race-based discrimination to come out of the Clark County Sheriff’s Office to include the jail, patrol and the support of the courts which included service and process. In 2.5 years, the leadership at the sheriff’s office reported absolutely no racism on the part of any sheriff’s deputy during the time that I served,” she said.
Ivory said CCLEAT members did ride-alongs and worked to understand what deputies go through while on duty.
The group met regularly until 2023, when they decided to meet only on a when-needed basis, if and when a county law enforcement situation arose that needed to be addressed by an outside perspective, Wilt said. Since then, the group, which had only five or six active members, met one time and had some phone and email interactions related to law enforcement training and staffing.
The decision to continue on a needed basis was made because of several factors including limited interest in serving, more interest in community policing rather than county law enforcement, and duplication of efforts with similar advocacy groups in Springfield and the Criminal Justice Committee, as well as the Haitian Task Force, which has been vetting issues related to the Haitian immigration population.
“We feel that these concerns can be addressed through these other groups,” Wilt said.
The most recent public instance of misbehavior by a sheriff’s deputy was on political, not racial lines. A patrol commander last fall was disciplined but not fired for posting on social media that he would not come to the aid of Democrats. Lt. John Rodgers later apologized and blamed sleep medication for causing his “out of character” actions.
While the CCLEAT team itself was disbanded, Wilt said the intent remains the same.
“To keep open, transparent lines of communication and improve relationships between community members and law enforcement. This remains a high priority for the county commissioners and the new county Sheriff,” she said.
Wilt said if the community decides they want to re-establish the group in the future, the county will defer to law enforcement.
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