The mayor stressed that she, Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Kevin Davis and other police officials had been working on implementing reforms during the Justice Department’s investigation of the department.
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The report on the 2,600-officer department released on Tuesday found that black residents were regularly subjected to stops as pedestrians and motorists, arrests, strip searches and excessive force in violation of U.S. constitutional rights and federal anti-discrimination laws.
We applaud the Department of Justice for releasing this report. According to the report, Baltimore’s cops showed bias by targeting African-Americans for unconstitutional stops, excessive force and bogus arrests.
From 2010 to 2015, officers stopped 34 black residents 20 times, and seven African-Americans 30 times or more.
The long-awaited report should resonate nationally, coming almost two years after a similarly scathing probe suggested Ferguson, Missouri, was basically a police state.
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”. Police he said have terrorized this neighborhood. “We’re going in the right direction, but it’s going to be a while for the community to trust the police”, Hill-Aston said. “BPD failed to use adequate policy, training, and accountability mechanisms to prevent discrimination, despite longstanding notice of concerns about how it polices African-American communities in the city”. His spine was 80% severed after he was held in the back of a police van during a bumpy ride. And then they’ll say you’re resisting arrest. Baltimore prodigal son and journalist David Simon chimed in to say the former mayor’s policies were to blame.
“Fighting crime and having a better, more respectful relationship with the community are not mutually exclusive endeavors”.
In a statement, fund President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill calls the findings of the report being released Wednesday “devastating”, saying they “lay bare the harsh reality of discriminatory policing in a major American city”.
The federal investigation found that Baltimore’s African-American residents suffer unfairly under a “zero tolerance” policing philosophy that routinely uses “overly aggressive tactics that unnecessarily escalate encounters”.
Ifill urges “residents, community groups, and leading city institutions to marshal their resources and prepare for the long haul to find a way forward”.
Black people are disproportionately affected by this unconstitutional and systematic behavior, which also includes widespread use of excessive force, and has been going on for several years, resulting in general mistrust of the police by the city’s residents. But the Rev. Cortly “C.D”.
The Justice Department is seeking a court-enforceable consent decree to force the police agency to commit to improving its procedures to avoid a lawsuit.
The Justice Department launched its investigation in April 2015, after a 25-year-old black Baltimore resident named Freddie Gray died of spinal injuries sustained while in policecustody. Of the 2,818 use of force incidents that BPD recorded in the almost six-year period the Justice Department reviewed, “BPD investigated only ten incidents based on concerns identified through its internal review”.
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The report being issued Wednesday represents a damning indictment of how the city’s police officers carry out the most fundamental of policing practices, including traffic stops and searches and responding to First Amendment expression. In particular, Baltimore has come under the spotlight for the death of Freddie Gray, which recently saw all charges dropped for the officers involved in his arrest.
