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.
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The report was released at a news conference in the city more than a year after riots provoked by the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray from injuries suffered in police custody.
The report said police had made more than 300,000 recorded pedestrian stops from January 2010 to May a year ago in the city of about 621,000 people, mostly in black neighborhoods.
BPD Commissioner Kevin Davis assured the public at the news conference that the report is a “turning point” and that the city’s police department “will be the model for this nation”.
“When we get to an agreement, it will be a court enforceable agreement which helps sustain the commitment to change regardless of who’s in any of our positions and will be independently monitored by a monitoring team and I think that just helps build in and ensure sustainable reform over the long haul”, Gupta said.
“Fighting crime and having a better, more respectful relationship with the community are not mutually exclusive”, he said. The department was on a ride-along when a supervisor told a patrol officer to stop and question a group of young black men for no valid reason.
For instance, the mayor said the Baltimore Police Department had already begun updating police vans and fitting them with. Likewise, African-Americans make up 95 pe rcent of the 410 people stopped at least 10 times by officers from 2010 to 2015.
The Department of Justice is conducting a separate investigation into Gray’s death.
“The FOP is prepared to continue to demand the reforms we called for in our 2012 Blueprint for Improved Policing that is cited in the Department of Justice’s findings”. She describes several incidents in the report, including the refusal of citizens to cooperate due to poor police response and handling. Sixty-three percent of Baltimore residents are black, but the report found blacks faced 86 percent of charges by police.
The sharp indictment of the agency came in an extensive report the federal government released this week after a 14-month “pattern or practice” investigation of the city’s police force.
Rawlings-Blake, when discussing those broad, city-wide problems, said “no one is waiting around until we solve poverty” before addressing the problems in the police department.
Zero-tolerance policing emerged in Baltimore more than 15 years ago, when homicides regularly topped more than 300 annually.
In his own remarks, Davis assuaged his officers by clarifying that this is not a condemnation of the whole department, but the “bad behaviors by a relatively small number of police officers over many, many years”.
While this report rightly warrants a collective call for change, we can not ignore the good and just service of the vast majority of policemen and women who put their lives on the line every day as they carry out their duties with respect for their office and those they serve. The DOJ’s probe found an incredible lack of training and accountability: “Numerous members of the BPD, from line officers to command staff to training personnel, conveyed to us that training is not a priority within the Department”. Lt. Rice was the fourth officer to stand trial was tried after Judge Williams, who is black, previously acquitted Officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson Jr. of all charges.
“The BPD is not a bunch of white officers calling blacks niggers”, said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
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The Justice Department looked at hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, including internal affairs files and data on stops, searches and arrests.
