Officers routinely use unreasonable and excessive force, including against juveniles and citizens who aren’t risky or posing an immediate threat, the report said.
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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. To many people, the blistering report issued Wednesday was familiar reading. Baltimore police recorded 300,000 pedestrians stops from January 2010 to June 2015. “They come to the projects, and they get nervous”, he said.
And at this point, that’s all that many Americans and Black Lives Matter advocates are asking for – the beginnings of change. “And if you run, they’re going to beat you up when they catch you”.
Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson declined to comment on the report or its findings. Likewise, African-Americans make up 95 percent of the 410 people stopped at least 10 times by officers from 2010 to 2015. During that time, no one of any other race was stopped more than 12 times.
The Department of Justice is set to release their findings on the practices of law enforcement in the Baltimore Police Department today. The reforms will be enforceable by the courts. They promised it will serve as a blueprint for sweeping changes.
“Fighting crime and having a better, more respectful relationship with the community are not mutually exclusive”, he said.
Six officers were tried, but three were acquitted, one case ended in mistrial and charges were dropped against the others. The police department is trying to create new organizations rather than build relationships with existing organizations, the study says. But when the officer checked his pockets, he found no cash or drugs. Still, Void was arrested. 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 made me frightened”. They jumped on him.
The report said police had made more than 300,000 recorded pedestrian stops from January 2010 to May a year ago in the city of about 621,000 people, mostly in black neighborhoods.
In recent years the department has completed numerous such investigations into local police departments around the country, including one after the 2014 shooting of an unarmed black man by Ferguson, Mo., police.
Next, federal officials will fan out across the city to learn what can be most beneficial for the Baltimore community, while negotiating a consent decree with the city, according to Gupta. Offering another detail, she noted that 44 per cent of police stops happened in one small portion of the city that accounts for just 11 per cent of the city’s population, where residents are overwhelmingly black. Most of those stops were in African-American neighborhoods, and most lacked “reasonable suspicion”.
The report concluded that Baltimore’s police department “fails to engage in effective community policing”, offering up differing services to affluent, white neighborhoods and impoverished, black neighborhoods.
The Justice Department investigation also found that officers regularly engaged in unconstitutional stops and arrests to “clear corners”.
Baltimore police officers routinely discriminate against blacks, repeatedly use excessive force and are not adeq.
“While the vast majority of Baltimore City Police officers are good officers, we also know that there are bad officers and that the department has routinely failed to oversee, train, or hold bad actors accountable”, she said in a statement.
“They have huge unresolved problems, huge festering problems”, O’Donnell said.
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.
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Especially since there is a little clause in the Justice Department’s thesis about the department that says it’s not adequately disciplined for misconduct.
