Concerns about policing in the city of about 620,000 people are not new, but there has been a greater focus on law enforcement with Baltimore tallying a record number of homicides past year and the high-profile death of an African-American man while he was being transported in a police van. A copy of the report was first posted Tuesday by The New York Times.
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In addition to pat-downs, Baltimore officers perform unconstitutional public strip searches, including searches of people who aren’t under arrest. “When the patrol officer protested that he had no valid reason to stop the group, the sergeant replied, ‘Then make something up, ‘” the report said.
“The supervisor’s template thus presumes that individuals arrested for trespassing will be African-American”, the report stated, describing the sort of detentions the language was meant to facilitate as “facially unconstitutional”.
Brian Rice, one of six officers charged in the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, will reportedly be given almost $127,000 in back pay Wednesday, following his acquittal of charges stemming from Gray’s death.
Such federal investigations generally resolve with court-monitored consent decrees in which a police department commits to broad changes sought by the Justice Department.
No such agreement has been reached, but the report states that the city and the Justice Department have agreed in principle to identify “categories of reforms the parties agree must be taken to remedy the violations of the Constitution and federal law described in this report”. “These racial disparities, along with evidence suggesting intentional discrimination, erode the community trust that is critical to effective policing”, the 163-page report found. But the Justice Department found that the ingrained strategy continued. In one incident in 2010, a man fled from an officer patrolling a “high-crime area”.
Police have also engaged in a pattern of using excessive force and retaliated against people engaging in constitutionally protected expression, the investigation found. The report says African-Americans make up 64 percent of the city’s population but 86 percent of criminal charges.
The report, the culmination of a yearlong investigation into one of the country’s largest police forces, also found that officers make large numbers of stops mostly in poor, black neighborhoods with dubious justification and unlawfully arrest citizens for speech deemed disrespectful.
“The agency fails to provide officers with sufficient policy guidelines and training, fails to collect and analyze data regarding officers activities; and fails to hold officers accountable for misconduct”, the report said.
“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”. Department records showed more than 2,800 force incidents during the almost six-year review period, of which only 10 were investigated and one found to be excessive.
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby, in a statement, said the report “will likely confirm what many in our city already know or have experienced firsthand”.
“While the vast majority of Baltimore City Police officers are good officers, we also know that there are bad officers and that the department has routinely failed to oversee, train or hold bad actors accountable”.
“A cultural resistance to accountability” has developed in the department that leaves serious misconduct unpunished, even against officers with known a reputation for violating department rules and constitutional protections, the report said.
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The disproportionate focus on African-Americans in Baltimore extends to the number of drivers stopped by police and the number of people who are searched during stops. The department, for example, has redesigned and placed cameras in its police transport vans and introduced a software platform for the streamlined and tracked dissemination of new training materials and policies for officers; both are issues that arose in the Gray case. Please see our terms of service for more information.
