Calvin Void, 45, said Wednesday that he was once tackled by a police officer who was convinced he had just participated in a drug deal. Baltimore police officers routinely discriminate against blacks, repeatedly use excessive force and are not adeq. FILE – In this April 28, 2015 file photo, police and protestors gather at the intersection of North Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, bottom right, in Baltimore, a day after unrest that occurred at the intersection foll.
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Rep. Elijah Cummings says the Justice Department’s report on the Baltimore Police Department validates what many city residents already know, that the trust between police and communities “is in desperate need of fix”. The statistics are simply astounding, and the unconstitutional violations of our citizens’ rights are unacceptable. The report shows that Baltimore police have routinely engaged in conduct that violates the Constitutional rights of our City’s residents.
Davis said he had fired six officers so far this year – “a small number”, he said, “but those who have left this agency deserve to have left this agency”.
“This failure similarly undermines accountability and community confidence in both BPD and the school police”, the report said.
While the BPD will work to eliminate biased police tactics, Davis warned during his Wednesday news conference that making meaningful changes will take time, commitment and trust. There are nearly two dozen cities now under investigation by the Justice Department.
“Nearly everyone who spoke to us … agreed the Baltimore Police Department needs sustainable reform”, Gupta said.
“These violations have deeply eroded the relationship between the police and community it serves”, Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said at a news conference alongside the mayor and police commissioner. That decree, which would lay out reforms that could be enforced by the courts, likely will not be finalized for many months.
The federal investigation of the Baltimore PD did not focus only on Gray’s case, but examined the department as a whole.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake pledged in a statement to revamp the city’s approach to police accountability “including the way that the use of force by officers is reviewed and how officers are disciplined”. One African American man in his mid-50s was stopped 30 times in less than four years, yet none of the stops resulted in a citation or criminal charge. He recalled being out with his children and seeing police chase down a teenager for smoking marijuana. He says five police jumped on the teenager. “They come to the projects, and they get nervous”, he said.
Donald Whitehead said officers would often jump out of the auto and grab people “for no reason at all”. Police he said have terrorized this neighborhood. He said he was wearing black and police told him that he “looked like somebody”. The 25-year-old was arrested by police and later died from injuries incurred while in police custody, including a partially severed spinal cord and crushed voice box. “The findings in the report are devastating”.
The U.S. Justice Department has released a scathing report on its investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, finding a routine use of “enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans”. “We must ensure that BPD officers have the best possible training, equipment, and resources to carry out their sworn duties in a lawful manner that builds trust with communities they serve, and that officers are quickly held accountable for misconduct”.
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The investigation examined a slew of potentially unconstitutional practices, including excessive force and discriminatory traffic stops, within the department. But the Rev. Cortly “C.D”. Despite an official denunciation of the policy in 2010 (as a result of a settlement with the NAACP), The Justice Department report found that the Baltimore PD still acted unconstitutionally as a result of the “legacy of the zero tolerance era”.
