CLEVELAND (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department and Cleveland reached an agreement Thursday to overhaul the city's police department after federal investigators concluded that officers use excessive and unnecessary force far too often and have endangered the public and their fellow officers with their recklessness.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and the department signed an agreement that says both sides will work toward the appointment of a court-appointed monitor to oversee reform.

"We understand the progress we seek will not come over night," Attorney General Eric Holder said in announcing the findings.

The Justice Department found a systemic pattern of reckless and inappropriate use of force by officers and cited concerns about search-and-seizure practices. It also said officers frequently violated people's civil rights because of faulty tactics, inadequate training and a lack of supervision and accountability.

Officers' excessive use of force has created deep mistrust in Cleveland, especially in the black community, the report concluded.

"We saw too many incidents in which officers accidentally shot someone either because they fired their guns accidentally or because they shot the wrong person," the report said.

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Tamir E. Rice, 12, is seen allegedly pointing a pellet gun at the Cudell Recreation Center in Clevel …

The federal investigation was prompted by several highly publicized police encounters, chiefly the deaths of two unarmed people who were fatally wounded when police officers fired 137 shots into their car at the end of a high-speed pursuit in November 2012. Jackson was among those who asked the department to conduct the inquiry.

The report comes amid inflamed tensions between police and residents in several cities where white officers have killed young blacks, including in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri. All those events have raised urgent national questions about the sense of trust between police and communities, Holder said.

Last week, hundreds of people blocked a Cleveland freeway at rush hour to protest those killings and the fatal shooting of a black 12-year-old boy by a white officer outside a Cleveland recreation center. Police said the officer thought the boy was holding a firearm, but he actually had an airsoft gun that shoots nonlethal plastic pellets.

The Justice Department has opened civil rights investigations into the practices of some 20 police departments in the past five years, and it is reviewing both the Ferguson police department and the chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man in New York City. It's also currently enforcing more than a dozen agreements to overhaul police department practices nationwide.

"We have seen in city after city where we have engaged that meaningful change is possible," Holder said.

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This fake handgun taken from 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was fatally shot by Cleveland police over t …

Cleveland and the Justice Department will begin negotiating an agreement that will be submitted to a federal judge outlining the scope of reforms, to include the appointment of an independent monitor. A joint statement signed by city and federal officials said Cleveland's mayor, safety director and police chief "will always retain full authority" to run the police department.

Jackson said Thursday that the city disagreed with some of the facts and conclusion in the report, but he did not dispute the overall findings.

The report notes that the Justice Department first looked at Cleveland officers' use of deadly force in 2002 and that an agreement was reached two years later on how such policies would be changed. There was no court order or independent monitor assigned then.

The Justice Department began its investigation in March 2013 and reviewed nearly 600 use-of-force incidents — both lethal and not — that occurred between 2010 and 2013. The report notes that Cleveland police officials did not provide many of the documents sought by federal investigators.

The Justice Department found that officers are poorly trained on how to control people during arrests and that some officers don't know how to safely handle firearms.

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Cleveland Police Deputy Chief Ed Tomba, right, shows surveillance video of the weekend police shooti …

The report highlighted one encounter in which a sergeant fired two shots at a man wearing only boxer shorts after he escaped from a home where he was being held against his will. The sergeant told investigators he shot because the man raised an arm and pointed his hand toward the officer, but no other officers at the scene could verify the account, the report said.

The 58-page report was especially critical of how the Cleveland police department investigates when officers use force.

The report says specially trained officers assigned to investigate those cases "admitted to us that they conduct their investigations with the goal of casting the accused officer in the most positive light possible."

The investigation also found that officers are suspended for use of force "at an unreasonably low frequency." The Justice Department said only six officers had been suspended for improper uses of force in three years.

Part of the problem, the report concluded, is the lack of support, training and equipment provided to city police officers.

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said the details were difficult to hear. "People of this city need to know we will work to make the police department better," he said.

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AP reporters Jennifer Smola in Cleveland and John Seewer in Toledo contributed to this report.

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Yahoo News Special Report: American Unrest

By Sebastien Malo, Barbara Goldberg and Joseph Ax

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday promised a full investigation into a white New York police officer's role in the choking death of an unarmed black man, following a night of protests over a grand jury decision not to bring charges in the incident.

More protests were expected on Thursday in New York. The grand jury's decision on Wednesday came nine days after the news that a white officer in Missouri who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager would also not face criminal charges.

The New York officer, Daniel Pantaleo, could face disciplinary action from an internal probe, his lawyer said, adding that he expects that process to move quickly.

A departmental investigation will likely focus on whether he employed a chokehold, banned by New York Police Department regulations, contributing to the death of 43-year-old Eric Garner as officers arrested him in July.

The New York and Missouri cases have sparked sometimes violent protests around the country by demonstrators who say U.S. law enforcement and the criminal justice system are stacked against African Americans and other minorities.

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Protesters rallying against a grand jury's decision not to indict the police officer involved in the …

Speaking in Cleveland, where he announced the Justice Department had found the police department in that city systematically engaged in excessive use of force, Holder said officials must do more to repair the trust between police officers and the communities they patrol.

Federal investigations into the Missouri and New York cases, which are ongoing, are not enough, said Holder, who is the country's top law enforcement official.

The Cleveland investigation, which began in March 2013, gained added prominence after a Cleveland police officer last month shot dead a 12-year-old boy who was carrying what turned out to be a replica pellet gun on a playground.

POLICE RETRAINING

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who took office in January promising to improve relations between minority New Yorkers and police, told reporters on Thursday the city's thousands of patrol officers would undergo extensive retraining.

Eric Garner grand jury decision sparks protests; 8 …Play video

"The relationship between police and community has to change," he told a news conference. "People need to know that black lives and brown lives matter as much as white lives."

Stuart London, the police officer's lawyer, said in an interview Thursday that Pantaleo testified to the grand jury that he never put pressure on Garner's neck. Instead, Pantaleo said he used a proper takedown technique, London said.

That account was echoed by Patrick Lynch, the president of the patrolmen's union, who called Pantaleo a "model" officer at a press conference on Thursday.

London said he expects the internal police review to conclude quickly, perhaps within weeks, and expressed confidence his client would be exonerated.

The city's medical examiner has said police officers killed the 43-year-old Garner by compressing his neck and chest, adding that Garner's asthma and obesity had contributed to his death.

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A child reads posters at the makeshift memorial where Eric Garner died during an arrest in July, at …

CHOKEHOLDS BANNED

Although chokeholds are technically banned by New York City police regulations, the 2,000-page patrol guide is vague about whether such use of force can be allowed in certain circumstances, said Maria Haberfeld, who heads John Jay College’s Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration.

That gray area, she said, may have influenced the grand jury and could play a role in determining whether Pantaleo faces departmental discipline.

A New York judge offered some basic details about the grand jury proceeding at the request of Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan. Justice Stephen Rooney said the panel heard from 50 witnesses and examined 60 exhibits in the course of nine weeks of deliberation.

Prosecutors instructed the jurors on New York's statute that delineates when police officers are permitted to use force during an arrest, the judge added.

Sharpton calls for national march in DC to protest …Play video

The panel's decision sparked protests by hundreds of people who swarmed the streets in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday night, many chanting "I can't breathe," the same phrase Garner repeatedly gasped in a video captured by a bystander of the incident on a Staten Island sidewalk before his death. Police said on Thursday there had been 83 arrests.

People also demonstrated in other cities, including Oakland, Washington, D.C., Denver and Minneapolis.

Holder acknowledged on Thursday that the bar for bringing federal civil rights charges is high but said the Justice Department has met that standard when appropriate.

Michael Selmi, a professor at George Washington University and former litigator in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said announcing a federal investigation following a controversial state grand jury decision is a tool the Justice Department can use to ease tensions, though it rarely leads to a conviction.

He pointed to the federal investigation into the case of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin in 2012, which has yet to be concluded.

(Additional reporting by Laila Kearney, Frank McGurty, Sascha Brodsky and David Ingram in New York, Fiona Ortiz and Kim Palmer in Cleveland, David Bailey in Minneapolis and Daniel Wallis in Denver, Julia Edwards in Washington; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Scott Malone, Grant McCool and Frances Kerry)