By Dan Horn
Enquirer staff writer

The Cincinnati Police Department is making steady progress in improving the way officers do their jobs, a federal monitor said Thursday.

But the monitor warned that those changes mean little unless community leaders, police officers and city officials start working harder to repair the relationship between police and African-Americans.

In his sixth report since a federal judge appointed him to oversee two police reform agreements, monitor Saul Green said one of the agreements is on track while the other lags.

The good news, Green said, is that the police department seems to be following through on promises to change policies and training as part of a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The bad news, he said, is that a separate, collaborative agreement between police, the city and activists has failed to yield similar results.

"I just want to caution people that the agreement calls for dialogue," Green said after releasing his report Thursday. "At this point, I haven't seen that on the level called for in the collaborative agreement.

"There's still a lot of work to be done."

Green, a former U.S. attorney in Detroit, said the police department's deal with the Department of Justice is in some ways easier to implement because it involves clear rules and goals that must be met.

Those goals include changing specific policies on the use of force, requiring officers to be trained to deal with mentally unstable suspects and creating new forms to document arrests and citizen complaints.

The collaborative agreement, however, calls for reforms that are harder to measure, such as changing the way police and the residents they serve view one another.

"The collaborative agreement really gets to the relationship of the police department to the community," Green said. "It's more difficult. For it to work, all the parties really have to pitch in, to really engage in issues that historically Cincinnati has had a problem engaging in."

In his 133-page report, Green cited several goals that so far have fallen short. They include:

• Making Community Problem Oriented Policing, or CPOP, a bigger part of Police Academy training. CPOP requires officers and residents to work closely to solve neighborhood problems.

• Developing a plan to improve communication between police and residents.

• Creating police policies and performance reviews that are consistent with CPOP.

The president of Cincinnati's police union, Harry Roberts, said progress has been made in improving police-community relations, even if it has not yet registered in the monitor's report.

He said officers are "getting a lot of positive feedback" from residents. "We're very happy with the way things are going in the community," Roberts said.

But he acknowledged some problems with the collaborative agreement.

A community activist group, the Black United Front, withdrew from the agreement last year, which prompted the Fraternal Order of Police to threaten to do the same. The union stayed under orders from a federal judge.

Roberts said it's difficult to fulfill the promises of the collaborative when a key player has dropped out. "The partners still involved are very enthusiastic," he said. "But when the agreement doesn't involve everyone, you're limited on the progress you can make."

Scott Greenwood, an attorney who helped negotiate the deal, said the pace of progress should improve soon.

"It's relatively easy to change policies and procedures," Greenwood said. "The (collaborative) piece of this is necessarily more difficult. We are reorienting the culture of the police department and the community."

After 18 months of trying, Green said, it's time for the collaborative agreement to show the same kind of results as the Department of Justice agreement.

"To accomplish true reform," he said, "both of these things are necessary."

E-mail dhorn@enquirer.com