After more than 100 hours of settlement talks over the past three weeks, negotiators reached a tentative agreement this morning in the racial profiling lawsuit filed against the city of Cincinnati.

        Looking worn from more than 17 hours of negotiations, those representing the city, the American Civil Liberties Union, local black activists and the Fraternal Order of Police left the federal courthouse at 2:30 a.m. with an agreement.

WHAT'S NEXT

Representatives from the Cincinnati Black United Front will vote on the tentative agreement today. Fraternal Order of Police members will start their voting process Thursday and will continue over the weekend. City Council will vote Friday and the ACLU will vote early next week.     Although an April 5 deadline had been set for final negotiations to end, U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael R. Merz, who has been mediating the last days of settlement talks, will allow a short extension for the votes.

        “We think we have an agreement that will be a landmark for this city,” said the Rev. Damon Lynch III, president of the Cincinnati Black United Front. “For this nation.”

        Billy Martin, the Washington, D.C. attorney representing the city in the talks, said the document will be presented to Cincinnati City Council at 2 p.m. today.

        It will address, he said, excessive use of force, how the police department addresses those allegations and how accessible the department is to citizens.

        Thirty pages of the 60-page report involve recommendations from a U.S. Department of Justice investigation that was called by Mayor Charlie Luken after the worst race riots in decades erupted last year following the police shooting of Timothy Thomas, an African-American man in Over-the-Rhine.

        The foundation of the other 30 pages comes from the input of 3,500 citizens who were surveyed on how to improve police-community relations, which was part of the negotiation process in the racial profiling lawsuit.

        There will be one monitor to oversee all of the changes in the agreement and the federal court will have oversight of that monitor, said Ken Lawson, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

        “That way the city has only one monitor to answer to,” he said.

        Parts of the agreement include implementing:

        • Community problem-oriented policing, which will build on a number of existing police department programs to deepen the city's commitment to address specific neighborhood problems.

        It will involve information and analysis, tailor-made solutions (details of which will be presented today) and an examination of results.

        • A Citizen Complaint Authority, which will replace the Citizens Police Review Panel, created in 1998, and the Office of Municipal Investigation, created in 1981. If an agreement is signed, it will mark the end of a process that began more than a year ago when the Ohio chapter of the ACLU and a group of local black activists asked that a racial profiling lawsuit already filed against the city be certified as a class action.

        Instead of litigating, the parties embarked on mediation that many hope will not only change race relations in Cincinnati but become the model for other cities.

        “We've always be cautiously optimistic,” said Scott Greenwood, general counsel for the Ohio chapter of the ACLU. But now, “Cincinnati is really going to get to be the model.”

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