Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, was arrested April 12 and suffered a spinal injury in police custody.
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“The city’s African Americans bore the brunt”, she told a news conference alongside Baltimore’s mayor and police chief.
With the release of the report, the city agreed to negotiate with the Justice Department a set of police reforms over the next few months to fend off a government lawsuit. “Systemic deficiencies in BPD’s practices contribute to constitutional violations, erode community trust, and inhibit effective policing”, the report states. This, too, was confirmed by the report: “Officers frequently resort to physical force when a subject does not immediately respond to verbal commands, even where the subject poses no imminent threat to the officer or others”.
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 Justice Department report, as reported by The Washington Post, found police would even stop people who were being “disrespectful” to them. I pray the reaction to this report will not obscure their selfless service and will inspire others to follow them and to join efforts to address this resounding call for urgent change.
“But let me be clear: I never sugarcoat our problems nor will I run away from our most pressing challenges”, she said.
Six officers have been fired this year, Davis said, and while it’s a small number, he says they “deserve to have left” the department.
Baltimore police “routinely use unreasonable force against individuals with mental health disabilities”, the DOJ wrote, escalating encounters instead of de-escalating them. Black residents of Baltimore accounted for 82 percent of all traffic stops, yet they compose only 27 percent of the driving population in the greater metropolitan area.
The report also says officers routinely use unreasonable and excessive force, including against juveniles and citizens who aren’t unsafe or posing an immediate threat. “All we ask, we just want some supportive cops who are anxious about our people, and not just black people: white people, Mexicans, all types of people”. “The report’s assessment and its follow-up to it will help us to heal the relationship between the police and our communities”.
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.
That negotiation will result in a court-enforceable, independently monitored consent decree, according to DOJ’s Vanita Gupta.
In Baltimore, a city that is 63 percent black, the Justice Department found that 91 percent of those arrested for discretionary offenses like “failure to obey” or “trespassing” were African-American. Gray’s death was one of a series of incidents in various cities in the past two years that have raised questions about racial discrimination in United States law enforcement. Ifill says it is instructive that the legacy of “zero tolerance policing” is identified as the key source of the systematic unconstitutional conduct. The findings announced Wednesday reveal that the BPD routinely violated the basic civil rights of predominantly African-American residents by employing unconstitutional policing practices that included unsubstantiated stops, searches and arrests.
In a statement, fund President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill called the findings of the report being released Wednesday “devastating”, saying they “lay bare the harsh reality of discriminatory policing in a major American city”.
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“And some of the more egregious acts described in report, action has been taken, and those police officers have been removed and no longer work for the Baltimore Police Department”, he said.
