The long-awaited use-of-force policy review of the Akron Police Department that Mayor Shammas Malik previously called a “matter of life and death” and “the most significant issue facing our city” has been completed, highlighting significant roadblocks and potential ways forward on an issue that has led to lost lives, costly litigation, broken trust and community division.
The public announcement of the 136-page report containing extensive recommendations from the Police Executive Research Forum, a year and a half after Malik publicly proposed the idea amid controversial incidents and six months after PERF began work on it, coincides with a new use-of-force policy incorporating or tweaking several key findings from the nonprofit’s review.
The new use-of-force policy incorporating some PERF suggestions, which goes into effect on Friday, includes more conspicuous language about police officers valuing life and a commitment to proportionate force.
But one section of the policy, as written, appears to be more permissive of force than the policy it replaces. The previous policy dictated that force incidents are policy compliant if they could be viewed as “objectively reasonable” in the moment.
The new policy dictates “use of force that is not necessary, proportional, and objectively reasonable and does not reflect reasonable de-escalation effort, when safe and feasible to do so, is prohibited and inconsistent with Akron Police Department policy.” That would indicate that force incidents have to violate all of those additional standards to be considered out of policy.
Malik said he would look into Signal Akron’s question about whether that was intentional.
The city is still in the “research, assessment, and development stage” of the many remaining recommendations issued by PERF. Some that will require significant money to implement will need Akron City Council approval, some require the unlikely buy-in from the police union, some require approval from the independent police auditor and some are heavier lifts than others.
Akron mayor, police chief discuss PERF report
At a press conference Thursday morning, Malik, Police Chief Brian Harding and Public Safety Director Craig Morgan spoke of an “implementation team” of police and city officials tasked with ensuring the recommendations are addressed in the next six to 18 months.
While the three promised that the city will incorporate every one of the PERF recommendations — 58 in all — that it has the ability to, the mayor confirmed at the press conference that the city signed off on all the recommendations before they were publicly released in the report. They were also involved in revising a version previously turned in.
Akron City Council approved the contract for PERF last year based on pledges to work with the University of Akron. That occurred after council rejected Malik’s more expensive plan in late 2024 and early 2025 to hire a New York law firm for the job. The university was not significantly involved in conducting the review because of the “scheduling constraints” of key people, the report says, and Malik said on Thursday that he expects the criminal justice program to be involved in some manner as the recommendations are implemented.
The Washington, D.C., organization said it based the report on a comparison of the APD’s existing policies against policies from other agencies deemed to be doing it right; “extensive engagement” with police officers, the mayor and his staff, members and representatives of some nonprofits, and some faculty and staff members from the University of Akron.
The PERF report, before listing its recommendations, highlights several key themes relevant to public buy-in.
They include:
Officers don’t believe they should be punished internally for force not viewed as criminal
Akron police officers have a widespread belief that the Supreme Court’s Graham v. Connor case, which helped cement a high threshold of when a police officer’s use of force becomes criminal (when it could not have been viewed as “objectively reasonable” in the moment despite what is later learned), should remain as the foundation of the department’s use-of-force guidelines.
The APD’s longstanding policy essentially prevented employment consequences for use of force if internal investigators believe they would not be criminally indicted for it.
“This repeated reference to the Graham standard was striking because it surfaced in every conversation we had with APD members,” the report says. “In PERF’s extensive experience conducting hundreds of management studies, it is rare for personnel to spontaneously reference Graham at all, much less for it to arise unprompted in every interview.”
The reviewers concluded that “failing to look beyond the minimum legal threshold can erode community trust.”
Statistics and perceptions around Akron Police use-of-force incidents
Nearly every officer interviewed “felt that the public holds inaccurate beliefs about APD’s UOF rates and practices” and voiced irritation that “the media” perpetuates it.
PERF reviewed APD data from 2025: Of 127,524 calls for service throughout the year, 280 reported some type of use of force. That’s a .22 percent rate – one out of every 455 calls – but “officers expressed concern that some members of the public seem to believe that nearly every call for service ends in a UOF – a perception that some city residents may hold for reasons of their own, but which is clearly misaligned with the data and seldom contextualized in local media reporting.”
While officers expressed frustration about perceived misconceptions about the force rate, the report details that APD officers almost never face internal consequences for the incidents that do actually happen.
PERF reviewed APD data from 2024: APD supervisors tasked with investigating the 301 use-of-force incidents that year “concluded that only one was out of policy; this is an out-of-policy rate of one-third of 1 percent.”
PERF called the rate of out-of-compliance findings “theoretically possible” but “extremely unlikely in any agency of APD’s size. … Even if every one of these findings were entirely legitimate, the appearance of near-unanimous ‘in-policy’ findings creates its own credibility problem – it looks as if the outcomes were preordained and therefore undermines public trust.”
Signal Akron reported in 2024 that APD’s internal affairs unit overruled a supervisor who initially deemed Officer Ryan Westlake’s use of force on a handcuffed girl to be reasonable. That incident occurred before he shot a 15-year-old in the hand and he was later fired for it.
The consultants also highlighted record-keeping practices deemed to have artificially inflated use-of-force statistics for officers who were not primarily responsible for the incidents.
An officer who joined in on pinning down and handcuffing a civilian who had been punched by another officer, for example, is listed as an “involved officer” just like the officer who actually threw the punch.
PERF recommended tiered designations that more accurately reflect each officer’s role. The APD, as of Thursday, instituted those changes. Officers involved in the incidents will be labeled as “involved,” “witness,” or “assisting” officers – changes that will drastically decrease the number of cases on officers’ records.
Akron’s unique police union structure could lead to conflicts of interest
The PERF reviewers expressed how rare the union structure within the APD is compared to departments of similar size and believes it could contribute to the “exceedingly low rate of out-of-policy findings in APD’s UOF reviews.”
In Akron, all sworn officers except for the police chief and four deputy chiefs are members of the Fraternal Order of Police Akron Lodge #7, and there is one single collective bargaining agreement.
That means that the line officers who typically use force are investigated by supervisors with the same union representation and same contract, which “raises serious questions,” the PERF report said, about whether it “compromises the objectivity of internal assessments.”
PERF highlights the union’s structure compared to similarly sized police departments:
- In Cleveland, Dayton and Toledo, one union represents non-supervisory officers and another represents those in higher ranks.
- In both Cincinnati and Columbus, one union represents all sworn officers, but there are separate collective bargaining units for officers and employees who aren’t supervisors and one contract for supervisors.
APD personnel uniformly told PERF they prefer the structure this way — “there’s strength in numbers” — but PERF declared “its sworn members should consider whether a different bargaining unit structure would better serve their interests and the department’s broader needs.” PERF recommends a two-unit structure
Frustration with the civilian oversight system
PERF highlighted that “non-APD stakeholders” were significantly frustrated with the lack of authority and perceived dismissiveness toward the Office of the Independent Police Auditor (run by Anthony Finnell since early 2024) and the Citizens’ Police Oversight Board that oversees it.
The system was approved by Akron voters in the wake of Jayland Walker’s death, but the board has little authority beyond providing non-binding recommendations that the city and APD are not obligated to acknowledge.
PERF dinged the extensive reviews and suggestions issued by Finnell and his office as hard to fully grasp by the APD.
“While it has made a meaningful contribution to transparency by publicly posting its reports, the volume of its recommendations has begun to eclipse their practical value,” PERF wrote, making it difficult for the police department to buy in.
Finnell “should ensure that this system does not become a repository for discussing minor, one-off issues” and the APD should work with the office to create “a mechanism to distinguish high-value actionable recommendations from lower-impact observations so they can address issues without overloading the system.”
