The more Police Department routinely violated the civil rights of African-American residents, a Department of Justice report says.
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The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the report ahead of its public release on Wednesday.
The Civil Rights Division report traced much of the problem to a decision in the 1990’s to pursue “zero tolerance” enforcement, encouraging officers to make large numbers of stops, searches, and arrests with minimal training.
The Justice Department will hold a press conference Wednesday in Baltimore to discuss the findings. Hundreds of residents were stopped by police at least 10 times – some, more than 30 times – in the span of four years, according to the copy of the report that Mic obtained Tuesday night. African Americans make up 63 percent of the city’s population but account for 86 percent of criminal charges issued by police. They also found evidence that police “routinely fail” to secure arrestees with seatbelts.
Gray reportedly made eye contact with Baltimore police before he was chased by a unit of bicycle officers, on April 12, 2015.
“I don’t think at this point, it’s about justice for Freddie Gray anymore”, said Ray Kelly, a director of the No Boundaries Coalition, a West Baltimore group that provided its own report on police abuses to the Justice Department.
The report said Baltimore’s police too often resort to physical force when it’s not needed, such as when a subject does not immediately respond to commands but poses no threat, and against juveniles and people with mental health problems.
He said he was once stopped and harassed by police just because he was in a bad neighborhood.
The report went far beyond the circumstances of Gray’s death to examine a slew of potentially unconstitutional practices, including excessive force and discriminatory traffic stops, within the department. He says Baltimore’s residents who were denied justice and equal treatment under the law are owed? the opportunity to make the police department a model for the nation. Protests and riots rocked the city following Gray’s funeral, which residents said police handled with unnecessary aggression. “These racial disparities, along with evidence suggesting intentional discrimination, erode the community trust that is critical to effective policing”, the 163-page report says. Justice Department investigators, though, were not focused on Gray’s death in particular – that is part of a separate, ongoing federal investigation. Out of almost 3,000 force incidents logged over a six-year period, the report says, only 10 were thoroughly investigated and just one was declared excessive. In one incident in 2010, a man fled from an officer patrolling a “high-crime area”.
The Justice Department is seeking a court-enforceable consent decree to force the police agency to commit to improving its procedures to avoid a lawsuit. Baltimore’s police commissioner, Kevin Davis, worked in Prince George’s County, Md., when its department was being monitored by the Justice Department, and he was involved in implementing reforms there.
“Over the next few months, we will put in place a concrete plan for change and a new culture – for the good of the city, the Police Department and the people it protects”, Rawlings-Blake said in a statement.
One result, it said, was over 300,000 pedestrian stops in a roughly five-year period for minor offenses and with minimal or no suspicion of lawbreaking, concentrated in African-American neighborhoods. Individual trials ended with the acquittals of three and prosecutors dropped the charges against the other three, citing a lack of confidence in securing any convictions.
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“A cultural resistance to accountability” has developed in the department that leaves serious misconduct unpunished, even in the case of officers who have a reputation for violating department rules and constitutional protections, the report says.
