In addition to pat-downs, Baltimore officers perform unconstitutional public strip searches, even of people not under arrest, the report said. “It’s instructive that the DOJ identifies the legacy of “zero-tolerance policing” as the key source of the systematic unconstitutional conduct of the Baltimore Police Department”.
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The mayor estimated that the cost of implementing these reforms would be about $5-$10 million annually and said that the city is prepared to pay it. Although the city cut that average down to 40,000, much damage was done with the Justice Department saying the “relationship with certain Baltimore communities is broken”.
The DOJ said it is seeking “court-enforceable consent decree” that would compel BPD to commit to revising and improving its procedures. One African-American man was stopped 30 times in less than four years, with none of the stops resulting in a citation or criminal charges.
[Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images] The federal civil rights report does not mention the behavior of the officers involved in the death of Gray, and comes just weeks after the charges against the last of those officers were dropped. Between 2010 and 2015, though they comprised about 63 percent of the city’s population, African Americans accounted for 84 percent of stops. The DOJ believes the Baltimore Police Department routinely violates people’s civil rights, with excessive force, disproportionate policing, and more.
“We are revamping our approach to officer accountability – including the way that the use of force by officers is reviewed and how officers are disciplined”, Rawlings-Blake said.
Gray, 25, died after suffering a neck injury while in police custody in April 2015, igniting protests and illuminating tension and distrust between the black community and Baltimore’s police force. A grand jury concluded that too many arrests were being made in black neighborhoods without merit, and the city paid $870,000 to settle a lawsuit from the NAACP on behalf of people who said they were illegally arrested.
The investigators found that “supervisors have issued explicitly discriminatory orders, such as directing a shift to arrest “all the black hoodies” in a neighborhood”. “But 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”.
Federal investigators interviewed current and former city leaders, police department chiefs and officers, and people and organizations from the community. The report found that police stopped black residents three times as often as white residents. But when the officer checked his pockets, he found no cash or drugs. However, they do not address the level of crime committed by blacks in relation to other races and their percentage of the population. In detailing its findings, the report depicted a bleak picture for local African-American communities which had always been complaining about excessive use of forces and racial profiling by local police force. As DOJ and Baltimore work together to improve the state of policing in Baltimore, HRC will continue to work with Congress and the Administration to push for criminal justice reform on the federal level.
The fact that trial boards are required before police face serious discipline arises from state legislation, the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, which provides officers accused of wrongdoing with a matrix of protections – and impediments to discipline – unavailable to other public employees (except prison guards) or to police in most other states.
The mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, made it clear that the city was already working on solutions, and has been for some time.
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“The problems in Baltimore didn’t happen overnight or appear in a day”.
