They don’t let him sit in front of his house; they’ve arrested his friends without probable cause. “I had to tell my kids they were just playing”. If they cared, he said, this city would not look like “a damn abandoned area”. “I don’t do drugs”, he said.
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To supporters, zero-tolerance policing has long represented a logical crime-fighting approach: Crack down on minor infractions before they mushroom into more serious and disruptive violence.
I invite all members of the community to join me in praying for our city, for those who justly protect its citizens, and for all who call Baltimore home.
Davis said six officers who committed egregious violations have been fired this year.
Among the Justice Department findings: Baltimore police too often stopped, frisked and arrested residents without legal justification, and such activities fell disproportionately on Black residents.
That negotiation will result in a court-enforceable, independently monitored consent decree, according to DOJ’s Vanita Gupta.
“Effective proactive policing is community policing”, Gupta said.
In 2015, the Justice Department released an in-depth report into the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
Zero-tolerance policing emerged in Baltimore more than 15 years ago, when homicides regularly topped more than 300 annually. It found that enforcement strategies particularly impacted Baltimore’s African-American community with stops, searches and arrests. “African-Americans accounted for 95 percent of the 410 individuals the police department stopped at least 10 times”, she said.
In a statement, fund President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill called the findings of the report being released Wednesday “devastating”, saying they “lay bare the harsh reality of discriminatory policing in a major American city”.
One man who spoke to investigators said he was stopped 30 times in less than four years.
Officials warned, however, that changing a department entrenched in a culture of unconstitutional policing would be a slow process and could cost millions. Black people accounted for 91 percent of all those charged exclusively with trespassing or failure to obey; 89 percent of people charged for making false statements to an officer; and 84 person of those charged with disorderly conduct. They promised it will serve as a blueprint for sweeping changes. Regarding the department’s unconstitutional practices, the critical report states, “Racially disparate impact is present at every stage of BPD’s enforcement actions, from the initial decision to stop individuals on Baltimore streets to searches, arrests, and uses of force”. “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”. The report, which includes interviews with residents, was a damning indictment not only of the city’s police officers’ tactics, but their motives and collective character.
The BPD also showed a lack of training and awareness when it came to interacting with people who are mentally ill, often responding with excessive violence during interactions that could have been de-escalated or not escalated at all with the correct training. In one instance, a supervisor told a subordinate officer to “make something up” after the officer protested an order to stop and question a group of young black men for no reason. Black residents made up 91 percent of those charged with “failing to obey” an officer, and 84 percent of those charged with “disorderlyconduct”.
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After bench trial acquittals for three of the officers and a mistrial declared for a fourth, Mosby dropped the charges against the two remaining officers.
