“Police reform won’t happen overnight or by chance”.
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A U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report said on Wednesday discriminatory practices against the African-American communities had long existed among police forces in Baltimore, Maryland. “I think you will see, in numerous urban centers in the United States, exactly the same behavior”. “There’s nothing that the community can do on its own to create the safe neighborhoods we want”. Fourty-four percent of all stops were made in two of the city’s police districts-both predominantly black. Confronting a decade of 300 or more homicides annually, O’Malley adopted the zero-tolerance policing strategy of New York City.
Homicides dropped to 261 in O’Malley’s first year in office.
“Fighting crime and having a better, more respectful relationship with the community are not mutually exclusive”, he said.
Strip-searching should be used in limited circumstances and always in private, the DOJ says, but “BPD officers frequently ignore those requirements” and the department has received more than 60 complaints over the issue in five years.
In a statement released Wednesday, O’Malley, who made a failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, defended his record. A auto strikes and severely injures a protester during a peaceful demonstration in Ferguson, Missouri, on the second anniversary of the fatal police shooting of unarmed 18 year old African American Michael Brown. 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.
BALTIMORE (AP) – In a scathing report, the Justice Department detailed rampant abuse within the Baltimore Police Department, including racial discrimination against blacks, unlawful stops and excessive force. Likewise, African-Americans make up 95 percent of the 410 people stopped at least 10 times by officers from 2010 to 2015. The “zero tolerance” policies are practiced in specific neighborhoods and encouraged, regardless of whether an officer has reason to be suspicious of the people being stopped, searched, and arrested.
“I think we have a tendency and a sort of instinct to rationalize these systems that we all come to rely on, and to think that they must be operating in a way that is just and fair, or that it makes some sort of rational sense”, said Blake Strode, an attorney with an organization working to reform abusive courts in the St. Louis area.
And, even still, the Justice Department’s probe has its limits. The reforms will be enforceable by the courts.
BPD Commissioner Kevin Davis assured the public at the news conference that the report is a “turning point” and that the city’s police department “will be the model for this nation”.
“Change is painful, growth is painful”, he said, “but nothing is as painful as being stuck in a place that we don’t belong”.
“Those things didn’t grab their attention sufficiently – and what we ended up with is a tragedy, pain and suffering in the streets of Baltimore a year ago in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death”, Hosko, the former No. 2 in the agency’s criminal investigative division, told “The Hard Line” host Ed Berliner.
Freddie Gray, the black man whose death sparked the Justice Department’s probe, is a prime example of policing gone wrong in the city. Even though officers found contraband 50 percent more often on white pedestrians and twice as often during vehicle stops of white residents, blacks pedestrians were 37 percent more likely to be stopped than white ones, and black drivers were 23 percent more likely to be stopped than white drivers.Blacks had a higher rate of arrest than any other group.
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However, gaps in the data collected obscured problem police behaviors in stops, use of force, and injuries to people in police custody.
