By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Saul Green walked into a jury assembly room at the federal courthouse Thursday, introduced himself to reporters, and quickly established that he was not a clock-watching law professor from Berkeley.

Mr. Green, a former federal prosecutor from Detroit who will oversee Cincinnati's historic police reform agreements, is making his first official visit this week.

In 20 minutes of questions and answers Thursday, Mr. Green signaled that he would interpret the agreements in a stricter, more literal way than his predecessor, Dr. Alan Kalmanoff. The Berkeley law professor resigned after three weeks on the job because of an uproar over his first monthly bill for $55,241.

"I'm certainly not going to sit here and tell you that's going to happen again," Mr. Green said Thursday, laughing. "I think we've established good, clear communications."

He said he would stick to his initial cost proposal, which called for $3.4 million over five years - and suggested his job would indeed take five years to complete.

"Three weeks into it, to say whether it's going to be three or five is very difficult," he said. "The agreements anticipate five."

Those agreements followed the April 2001 shooting of an African-American man by police, which led to the city's worst rioting in decades.

In the agreements, the city settled actions by the U.S. Justice Department, which investigated allegations of excessive force by police, and the plaintiffs in a racial profiling lawsuit, who claimed that police illegally discriminate against African-Americans.

The monitor will collect and analyze data on the police use of force, the racial makeup of motorists stopped by police and other measures of police accountability.

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com