One woman went through a strip search on a public street after being stopped for a broken headlight.
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The investigation was launched in 2015 following the widely publicized death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American who died from wounds he sustained while in BPD custody. His death a week later led to protests and rioting in Baltimore that prompted a curfew and a National Guard deployment. Three were acquitted, another officer’s trial ended in a mistrial and the charges against the others were dropped.
Wednesday’s report – which focused on agency-wide, institutional practices – is separate from a specific, ongoing probe into Gray’s death.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called for comprehensive reforms by the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) after the U.S. Department of Justice released a report revealing unconstitutional policing practices and extensive violations of basic civil rights. To many people, the blistering report issued Wednesday was familiar reading. They promised it will serve as a blueprint for sweeping changes.
The report partially blames the department’s unconstitutional practices on a “zero tolerance” policy dating back to the early 2000s, during which residents were arrested en masse for minor misdemeanor charges such as loitering.
“Erasing anything is indicative of the police officer believing that the person captured them doing something wrong”, Crawford said. The department was on a ride-along when a supervisor told a patrol officer to stop and question a group of young black men for no valid reason.
The primary victims of such practices were the city’s black citizens, a sadly predictable conclusion that the DOJ documents in a catalogue of grim statistics: Ninety-five percent of residents who were stopped by BPD more than ten times over the past five-and-a-half years were African-American.
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 USA constitutional rights and federal anti-discrimination laws. The report noted that one African American man in his mid-50s was stopped 30 times in less than four years.
“Seeing it all collected and pulled together really hit me in the solar plexus”, said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who lived in Baltimore for 15 years while teaching law at the University of Maryland. None of the 30 stops resulted in a citation or criminal charge. It found that enforcement strategies particularly impacted Baltimore’s African-American community with stops, searches and arrests.
Unconstitutional frisks are also rampant, the report says.
Baltimore officers arrest black residents for “highly discretionary offenses” at disproportionate rates. “I didn’t hear the word used once by a white officer”. Twenty percent of force incidents reviewed by investigators involved someone who was not being arrested for a crime or who suffered from a mental health disability.
Baltimore and the Justice Department “have entered into an agreement in principle that identifies the types of reforms we plan to address as we prepare to negotiate a court-enforceable, independently-monitored consent decree”, Gupta said.
“Change is painful. Growth is painful”.
When asked how the DoJ findings relate to police accountability in those cases, Mayor Rawlings-Blake said: “One has nothing to do with the other”.
The problem is not a few bad apples, as Mr. Davis suggested in saying the abuses were carried out by “a relatively small number of police officers”.
The Baltimore Police routinely stopped pedestrians without reasonable suspicion, the DOJ found – even though 26 out of 27 pedestrian stops don’t result in any finding of criminal activity.
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This DOJ report confirms the lived experience of many Black people, especially Black transgender people, in Baltimore.
