“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. Officers often arrest people who are standing in front of private businesses or public housing projects, the report notes, unless they are able to satisfactorily “justify” their presence there. They promised it will serve as a blueprint for sweeping changes.
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The damning report, released on Wednesday, is based on a yearlong investigation into the force, following the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man killed when his spine was severed after being deposited into the back of a police van unrestrained.
“My community knows about it and all of Black Baltimore knows about it”, he said.
You can read the full DOJ report on Baltimore here.
In the report, an image of a police department permeated with racial bias emerges.
The head of the justice department’s civil rights division, Vanita Gupta, told reporters the Baltimore Police Department’s practices had “deeply eroded” trust between officers and the community. The Baltimore Police Department, like many police departments across the country, is unconstitutionally biased against Black citizens, as well as people suffering from mental illness, trans women, sex workers, and those who come forward to report sexual assault or harassment.
“Fighting crime and having a better, more respectful relationship with the community are not mutually exclusive”, he said.
The Justice Department alleged the incident appeared to violate the First, Fourth and 14th amendments and resulted in the destruction of valuable evidence.
Investigators interviewed current and former city leaders, police department chiefs and officers, as well as people and organizations from the community. Black motorists accounted for 82 percent of traffic stops even though they make up only 60 percent of drivers.
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.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told reporters that change is already underway, with dozens of key policies revised, including the department’s use-of-force policy.
The Justice Department’s top civil rights official says the Baltimore Police Department has agreed to negotiate with the agency on reforms to policies that have led to discrimination against African-Americans. No individuals of any other race were stopped more than 12 times. Six officers were charged in Gray’s death. They also search black residents at higher rates despite the fact that searches of African-Americans are less likely to find contraband than other searches, the DOJ says.
Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said six officers who committed egregious violations have been fired this year.
But among the 300,000 reported stops of pedestrians between January 2010 and May 2015, 44 percent took place in two small districts that contain just 11 percent of the city’s population and are predominantly African-American.
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A news release from Justice said it entered into an agreement in principle with the city to work, with community input, to create a federal court-enforceable consent decree addressing the deficiencies found during the investigation. Baltimore PD also perform unconstitutional and public strip searches, and often use excessive force against civilians, including juveniles. Many of these stops and the resulting frisks lacked constitutional justification, Ms Gupta said.
