The Justice Department’s report Wednesday on the Baltimore Police Department is troubling because “one of the more disturbing underlying themes of the report is that there were many indicators of problems in Baltimore”, former Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director Ron Hosko told Newsmax TV on Wednesday.
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The Justice Department on Tuesday released a scathing report on the 2,600-officer department that found that black residents in the majority-black city are commonly subjected to unconstitutional stops as pedestrians and motorists, arrests and excessive force.
The investigation examined a slew of potentially unconstitutional practices, including excessive force and discriminatory traffic stops, within the department.
She said she will “never sugarcoat our problems nor will I run away from our most pressing challenges”, and that transparency will be the key to “rebuild community trust”. It said officers routinely use unreasonable force, including against juveniles and people who aren’t unsafe.
The conclusion forcefully rejects a strategy that critics condemn as unduly harsh and one that has fallen out of favor in some of the same cities, including Baltimore, where it was developed and regularly employed. Even zero-tolerance policing, he said, was rooted in a goal of trying to combat crime in a “city that is really in a bad place”. “We’re provoking them. Just because they wear the uniform doesn’t give them the right to do whatever they want to do”.
“Many supervisors who were inculcated in the era of zero tolerance continue to focus on the raw number of officers’ stops and arrests, rather than more nuanced measures of performance”, the report said.
“It’s not going to be easy to reform the department, and it’s not going to be quick”, Rawlings-Blake said.
“He smacked me in the head with his walkie-talkie”, Void said, motioning to a patch of discolored skin on his scalp.
We call upon leaders throughout the nation to join us in working for a society in which our lives are protected and preserved.
In 2015, the Justice Department released an in-depth report into the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
All six officers who faced charges in Gray’s death escaped conviction.
In addition to police behavior, the report noted that the relationship between the police and community was so frayed that witnesses frequently refused to share information with officers, even when they had called the police themselves, because of a lack of trust, according to NPR.
Do you think the Baltimore Police Department will properly address these issues?
“This report says nothing that Baltimoreans of color haven’t been saying for years and what national civil rights advocates have been saying since the wrongful death of Freddie Gray: that in communities of color, Baltimore police act more like an occupying force than a partner in public safety”. HRC is heartened to hear that the City of Baltimore recognizes the issues DOJ has identified and is committed to reform.
The report examined Baltimore police data for the past five and-a-half years and is part of the Obama administration’s concentration on police reform in cities where young African-American males have died while interacting with law enforcement – in Baltimore’s case, last year’s death of Freddie Gray.
Investigators discovered an “us versus them” mentality in the department, and when they approached one supervisor about community-oriented policing, were told, “I don’t pander to the public”. Federal officials also found that the police used Tasers as retaliation.
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The U.S. Department of Justice concludes in a study that the Baltimore Police Department routinely violated citizens’ constitutional rights and describes the relationship between the community and the police as “broken”. “We haven’t just sat back waiting for DOJ to tell us about our shortcomings, we’ve worked to enact significant changes and reforms before we arrived here before you today”. “It was clear there were steps that needed to be taken”.
