Justice Department David Jacobs declined to comment on the timing or content of the report. The city and the department have also entered into an agreement in principle to work together, with community input, to create a federal court-enforceable consent decree addressing the deficiencies found during the investigation.
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“Mere words by officials mean little when it’s people on the ground who are living with these material conditions every day”, said the Rev. Heber Brown III, a Baptist pastor who was among a small group of community leaders who met privately a year ago with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
It’s a shame that it requires a federal agency digging into a police department’s practices before anyone ― including members of the department themselves ― steps in to implement reform or even takes true responsibility for what officers continue to do to black people. “We commend the Justice Department and all those who played an instrumental role in bringing these truths to light”.
“We’re going in the right direction, but it’s going to be a while for the community to trust the police”, Hill-Aston said.
One man who spoke to investigators said he was stopped 30 times in less than four years.
That includes, she said, “making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests; using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches, and arrests of African-Americans; using excessive force; and retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression”. “We were troubled by the lingering problems associated with gender-biased policing in Baltimore”, she said Thursday.
She also said the city is now retrofitting transport vans to improve safety, including the installation of cameras in the vans.
Officers failed to perform basic detective work, the report said.
Kelly, who still lives in the same neighborhood, said she routinely sees people in the area being stopped, harassed and strip-searched by officers.
The report concludes that the relationship between the police department and Baltimore’s residents is “broken” and said that investigators discovered over the course of many interviews that people in impoverished, minority communities often felt “belittled, disbelieved and disrespected” by police officers. 410 people were stopped at least 10 times since 2010, and 95 percent of them were African-American.
One of O’Malley’s central arguments is that while arrests increased, he also expanded police oversight – increasing the size of the police department’s internal affairs division, for example – to counter the potential for abuse.
In other words, according to the 163-page Justice Department report: “The relationship between the Baltimore Police Department and numerous communities it serves is broken”.
Baltimore police and civil leaders undertook a collaborative reform process beginning in October 2014 with DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
The Justice Department said almost 90 percent of excessive force incidents it identified involved force against African-Americans.
MAYOR STEPHANIE RAWLINGS-BLAKE: What it means is that the Department of Justice has never had as detailed a blueprint moving forward with a city on how we can be better, that they should know that the level of commitment that I have, that the police commissioner has, that the rank-and-file officers have to improving not just the relationship with the police and the community, but also the results for getting a safer city, there is no stronger example of our determination and our intention to be better.
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. If I stood on the corner with a suit on, I’d probably still be a drug dealer to them. Black people were “91 percent of the 1,800 people charged exclusively with “failure to obey” or “trespassing”; 89 percent of the 1,350 charges for making a false statement to an officer; and 84 percent of the 6,500 people arrested for ‘disorderly conduct'”. “And the Justice Department has nothing to say about that at all”. At times, residing in the neighborhood was like living under martial law, he said.
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Baltimore police officers routinely discriminate against blacks, repeatedly use excessive force and are not adequately held accountable for misconduct, according to a harshly critical Justice Department report being presented Wednesday. 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. I suspect much of the usage they talk about is from black officers.
