Gray reportedly made eye contact with Baltimore police before he was chased by a unit of bicycle officers, on April 12, 2015.
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Indeed, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby said in a statement Tuesday that the report “will likely confirm what many in our city already know or have experienced first hand”.
Justice is set to release the full report tomorrow.
Officers also too frequently used excessive force in situations that did not call for aggressive measures, the report said, and were found to have routinely retaliated against residents for exercising their right to free speech and free assembly.
In a statement, Sen.
“‘It’s the beginning of a reform process that hopefully will change how the Baltimore police operate with some new professional standards that hopefully will result in lawful, constitutional policing, ‘ Walker said”.
Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson declined to comment on the report or its findings. Critics said the spectacular collapse proved the prosecution was misguided from the start, while Mosby defended her actions and accused the police of undermining the investigation.
It was Ms Rawlings-Blake, an African-American, who requested the Justice Department launch an investigation in the wake of the death of Mr Gray, which sparked days of unrest on her city’s streets last April.
“It’s so very import that we get this right”, Ms Rawlings-Blake said at the Wednesday press conference. The probe found discriminatory policing practices, and local and federal officials will now have to negotiate a court-enforceable order to ensure future reforms, one of the people said. She says there have been longstanding systemic problems with the Baltimore Police Department, including excessive force and the targeting of African-Americans.
Vanita Gupta announced the findings of the federal investigation on Wednesday during a news conference in Baltimore. For example, during traffic stops and searches, police found contraband in 3.9 percent of blacks’ vehicles, compared to 8.5 percent of others.
Anthony Williams, a 27-year-old father raising young children in Sandtown-Winchester, the neighborhood where Gray was arrested, said he was once with his kids and saw officers chasing a teenager for smoking marijuana.
Donald Whitehead said officers would often jump out of the auto and grab people “for no reason at all”. He said he was wearing black and police told him that he “looked like somebody”.
One man who spoke to investigators said he was stopped 30 times in less than four years.
Among the groups reacting to the Justice Department’s report is the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
Commissioner Kevin Davis stressed that the report isn’t an indictment on all city police officers, just the bad behavior of a small few.
The report went far beyond the circumstances of Gray’s death to examine a slew of potentially unconstitutional practices. Ifill says it is instructive that the legacy of “zero tolerance policing” is identified as the key source of the systematic unconstitutional conduct.
“The report found a vast racial disparity in enforcement, especially in stops, searches, and discretionary misdemeanor arrests”.
Anticipating what the Justice Department would discover, city officials already have pushed forward on several fronts, revising the use-of-force policy and instituting new training. But the Rev. Cortly “C.D”.
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Similar consent decrees have been enforced by the DOJ in recent years to reform other cities’ police departments, including that of Ferguson, Missouri. They promised it will serve as a blueprint for sweeping changes.
