I called him to see what he learned from his experience, and what Rahm Emanuel might take from it. Like Emanuel, Luken faced a crisis rooted in issues that predated his term in office, lacked quick fixes, and involved issues extending well beyond the city limits. In our conversation, Luken put a premium on transparency above all else. “When I see something like we held a video of a kid getting shot for 14 months, I’m shocked,” he said. “That could never, ever happen here.” But he said there’s no clear guidebook—the path he followed was difficult and fraught, and his reelection hinged in large part on his luck in facing a weak challenger. Luken ended on a somewhat pessimistic note. Although proud of Cincinnati’s work to repair the relationship between police and citizens, he worries that the issues underlying the 2001 riots aren’t any closer to being solved than they were then.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

David Graham: How does a mayor approach police-community relations problems like the ones in Chicago and Cincinnati, that started long before you entered office and don’t have simple fixes?

Charlie Luken: We went through hell, and by that I mean, we didn’t just flip a switch and go from darkness to sunlight. It was a few years of work and pain. I’m certain things are much better. I’m not sure we solved anything. Issues of poverty, racial discrimination—they still exist here. If we solved anything it would be in the area of police-community relations. Large problems still exist as they do in many American cities. When I became mayor in 2000, it was clear that the city had a very serious police-community relations problem, and I talked about it but nobody paid any attention until the young man was shot, Timothy Thomas. Then the riots happened for three days, and then people got more serious about corrective action.

Graham: How did you go about reforming Cincinnati’s police department?

Luken: I invited the Justice Department to town, which was not a real popular decision, but it was a good one. The teaching, the lessons, just have to do with police training and transparency. If I look at Chicago from 10,000 feet, I would say they never got the transparency part or really all of the police-training part. [With Timothy Thomas,] they had a guy who was got out of a mental hospital, and he had a brick. A bunch of police surrounded him and shot and killed him. Obviously there are alternative ways to handle that.

Graham: I imagine it was hard for you as the mayor to convince a huge group of career officers to change their methods.

Luken: The brass used to say to me, “You know, I was here before you, and I’ll be here after you.” They were generally right about that. The interesting thing is over the few years that we engaged in this process, the Fraternal Order of Police and most of the police brass went from rejecting this process and fighting any changes to really embracing it. That’s been the key going forward. Now I think there’s even a little pride when people go to Cincinnati in talking about the reform.