According to The Wall Street Journal, an investigative report has been released and the findings are not good for the Baltimore Police Department. He recalled being out with his children and seeing police chase down a teenager for smoking marijuana.
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“They only put out there what they want to put just to get the votes and get what they need to get in, and once they get in, they don’t care”, Ross said.
The long-awaited report should resonate nationally, coming almost two years after a similarly scathing probe suggested Ferguson, Missouri, was basically a police state.
Freddie Gray, the black man whose death sparked the Justice Department’s probe, is a prime example of policing gone wrong in the city.
The Baltimore Police Department and U.S. Justice Department have agreed to implement dramatic reforms in the law enforcement agency in the wake of Wednesday’s scathing federal report that concluded city police officers routinely violated the civil rights of black residents. They promised it will serve as a blueprint for sweeping changes.
The government report represented a damning indictment of how the city’s police officers carry out the most fundamental practices, including traffic stops and searches. For this reason, the report said, officers often miss “significant amounts” of required training. If I stood on the corner with a suit on, I’d probably still be a drug dealer to them. “I don’t do drugs”, he said.
“We’re choosing both. It’s 2016”, Davis said.
“Fighting crime and having a better, more respectful relationship with the community are not mutually exclusive”, he said.
The pledge increases police accountability and transparency by (1) cutting funding to law enforcement agencies that discriminate and by requiring (2) effective investigation of discrimination by law enforcement agencies, (3) detailed data gathering and reporting, (4) comprehensive use of force standards, and (5) independent review of police violence.
Federal investigators spent more than a year interviewing Baltimore residents, police officers, prosecutors, public defenders and elected officials, as well as riding along with officers on duty and reviewing documents and complaints. The report says African-Americans make up 64 percent of the city’s population but 86 percent of criminal charges.
It found that one African-American man was stopped 30 times in less than four years and never charged.
The probe found that almost half of BPD’s 300,000 pedestrian stops between 2010 and 2015 occurred in two, majority-African American districts.
In addition to pat-downs, Baltimore officers perform unconstitutional public strip searches, including searches of people who aren’t under arrest. Seven men reported they had been stopped over 30 times. During that time, no one of any other race was stopped more than 12 times.
It found that officers make a large number of stops – mostly in poor, black neighborhoods – with dubious justification and unlawfully arrest citizens when officers “did not like what those individuals said”. None of the stops resulted in charges.
The report also found that officers were let down from the start – poorly trained, not held accountable for misconduct and not given the equipment and the resources they needed to effect safe policing. And the police use of excessive force was found across the board – when BPD officers engage with people with mental health disabilities, minors, in situations in which there is little or no threat, even when suspects are already restrained – all with little or no consequences. “BPD’s trainings fuel an “us vs. them” mentality we saw some officers display toward community members, alienating the civilians they are meant to serve”.
Although the department has publicly denounced these practices after a 2010 settlement with the NAACP, which sued the department over the policing strategy, “the legacy of the zero tolerance era continues to influence officer activity and contribute to constitutional violations”, the report said. The directives often come from supervisors. “It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be quick”, she said, estimating that, based on costs in other cities, reforms could cost as much as $10 million dollars per year.
The attorney for the family of a black man whose fatal neck injury in the back of a police van touched off riots in Baltimore says a Justice Department report indicates there are “widespread human cancers” in the city’s police department.
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At the press conference, Rawlings-Blake emphasized a number of reforms already being implemented in the city, noting she’s already revised 26 key policies in the police department, and that the city is “revamping our approach to officer accountability”. Three were acquitted, another officer’s trial ended in a mistrial and the charges against the others were dropped.
