FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CPT Once Again Calls on GCRTA To Divest From Violent Transit Police and Reinvest in Transit Ambassadors
Transit Ambassadors Needed for Mental Health Responses, De-escalation, and Empathetic and Productive Engagement with Riders.
Clevelanders for Public Transit (CPT) continues to call for an alternative to Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority transit police.
On Tuesday, February 16, 2021, RTA transit police officer Patrick Rivera shoved a 68-year old rider onto train tracks at the Brook Park Rapid station. GCRTA security footage shows Rivera assaulting a man by pushing him, unaware and caught off guard, from his side with such force that the man fell onto the tracks. The video reveals that Rivera and a fellow officer blocked the rider from climbing back onto the platform, with the rider ultimately walking down the tracks out of frame. However, when news first broke about Rivera’s attack on the rider, GCRTA denied public records requests for the security footage, and Rivera’s initial story included significant discrepancies from the footage that was eventually released. GCRTA released the video the same day that they announced that Rivera did use excessive force but will stay on staff as long as he does not violate any more policies.
GCRTA must remove Rivera from its payroll and staff, as the proposed 40-hours of crisis intervention and de-escalation training he will undergo is no guarantee that such violent, dangerous, and unethical behavior will not be directed towards another rider.
GCRTA employs 148 transit officers including 30 fare enforcement officers. In Pittsburgh, the Port Authority of Allegheny County had 64 million riders in 2019, double GCRTA’s 2019 ridership of 32 million. Yet, the Port Authority’s transit police force has only 47 officers.
Now is the time to act. It has been over three years since the Judge Emanuella Groves ruled: “[t]here must be an intermediary between police and passengers to prevent arbitrary and abusive police encounters.”
CPT agrees with Judge Groves, and demands that RTA create a transit ambassador program that does not impinge on the constitutional right of riders to “be left alone, in their private thoughts and spaces, as they travel to their destinations.”
In February 2018, CPT published the Fair Fares Platform calling for civilian transit ambassadors among other reforms to improve GCRTA. Last year, Black Spring CLE released their Abolish the Overlap Campaign calling for the removal of redundant and overlapping police forces that waste money, over police and criminalize communities and obscure accountability. The aim is to create alternatives to police beginning with our transit system and schools, and replace contact points of trauma with contact points of care.
GCRTA must use this latest attack on a rider by a transit officer to pivot from their existing policing model to show it is serious about police reform by following the lead of innovative transit systems around the country and investing in civilian transit ambassadors.