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.
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This DOJ report confirms the lived experience of many Black people, especially Black transgender people, in Baltimore.
In a four-year period beginning in 2010, roughly 44% of 111,500 police stops occurred in two small, predominantly African-American neighborhoods that account for about 11% of the city’s population, according to the report.
Ray Kelly, whom the New York Times describes as “a black man and a lifelong resident of this city” and someone who’s been “stopped by the police more times than he can count” told the newspaper, “Hearing the actual numbers, like on the traffic stops, is blowing my mind”. In one debate, he noted that he was elected at a time when the city was “burying more than 300 young, poor black men every year”.
“These findings should serve to reinforce what we already know: we must act”, Clinton senior policy adviser Maya Harris said in a statement.
“The city’s African Americans bore the brunt”, she told a news conference alongside Baltimore’s mayor and police chief. “I don’t do drugs”, he said. The Justice Department report also found that Baltimore police officers tend to treat minors the same as they do adults and have no training in dealing with those with mental health issues.
The report said the police department makes unconstitutional searches and arrests, uses excessive force, uses “enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans”, and retaliates against people practicing freedom of expression, which is protected by the Constitution.
“Appropriate oversight, training and accountability are key components to upholding justice, protecting citizens’ rights and restoring trust between law enforcement and vulnerable communities that have been disproportionately impacted by unconstitutional policing practices”, said CAIR Maryland Outreach Manager Dr. Zainab Chaudry.
Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, discusses the department’s findings on the investigation into the Baltimore City Police Department as Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, left, and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, right, listens on Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016 at City Hall in Baltimore. The 25-year-old suffered a fatal spine injury in police custody, triggering demonstrations and riots that brought the city into the national debate over race-based policing and fatal law encounters involving black men.
“The problems in Baltimore didn’t happen overnight or appear in a day”. Perhaps fittingly, his ill-fated 2015 presidential bid leaned in part on his crime record in Baltimore, one fictionalized on HBO’s The Wire.
The DOJ’s investigation found “BPD officers frequently ignore these requirements and strip-search individuals prior to arrest, in public view, or both”. “I really gotta take my clothes off?” the woman asked.
A female officer performed the search, before putting on latex gloves and searching her. In shocking news this week, the Justice Department said its investigation into the group had turned up more troubling information than expected.
The DOJ in recent years had launched similar civil rights investigations into police departments in Chicago, Cleveland, Ferguson, etc. And local policing seems to have systematically reinforced segregation by heavily concentrating on the borders between white and black neighborhoods.
“This is a moment to get better”, Commissioner Davis added. Majority lacked probable cause, the report says, and about 44 percent were made in two black areas of the city.
Since Gray’s death, city officials have revised 26 policies, Rawlings-Blake said, including the one governing use of force.
She said she has heard officers call residents the n-word.
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“Nearly everyone who spoke to us. agreed the Baltimore Police Department needs sustainable reform”, Gupta said.
