Indeed, seven African-American men were stopped more than 30 times during this period …
Advertisement
Detailing what people in Baltimore have long known, the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing 163-page report, saying policing patterns in the city are unconstitutional and violate federal anti-discrimination law.
In Cleveland and Ferguson, police departments-from the top brass down to the rank and file-are collaborating with independent authorities and local citizens to reform policing. When this woman arrived at intake the report goes on, a supervisor (who was a woman) said, “I am not here for this shit”.
And the culture seemed to extend to prosecutors, investigators found. One officer even allegedly called a victim a “conniving whore”.
Another officer wrote on Facebook, “Do not treat criminals like citizens”. “I feel the same”.
Justice Department David Jacobs declined to comment on the timing or content of the report. In the past under my administration, when I saw that we were falling short, that’s when I asked the Department of Justice to come in for a collaborative review to help us strengthen our community policing effort. Police determined only one was a case of excessive force. A helicopter unit called “Foxtrot” was also committed by BPD to patrol for violations of the Maryland gambling code.
Baltimore police found contraband twice as often when searching white drivers who they stopped in comparison the African American stop.
Police commissioner Kevin Davis said the report was an indictment of “a relatively small number of police officers” and said he had fired six police officers in 2016 alone.
The sergeant replied, “Then make something up”.
Although the city is 63 percent black, African Americans accounted for 84 percent of pedestrian stops, and 95 percent of 410 individuals who were stopped at least 10 times by police officers from 2010-15, the report said.
Police Departments in at least 20 major USA cities are now operating under DoJ Consent Decrees.
What the DOJ report does not mention but is frequently mentioned by the trans community is the amount of searches performed by police simply because someone is trans, especially a trans woman, and even moreso if they are a trans woman of color. In 2010, The Baltimore Sun reported that in the previous four years, the police had routinely failed to solve rape cases; in reviewing Federal Bureau of Investigation data, the newspaper found that the percentage of rape cases dismissed as false or baseless was higher in Baltimore than in any other city in the country.
“Policing that violates the Constitution or federal law severely undermines community trust, and blanket assumptions about certain neighborhoods can lead to resentment against police”, Vanita Gupta, head of the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) Civil Rights Division, said at a Wednesday conference. “And he said if I reported him I couldn’t come around here anymore because he’d jump out and whip my ass”. Backing up this sexist behavior are numbers: Detectives requested less than one in five rape kits to be tested in adult sexual assault cases. The report examined police practices from 2010 to 2015.
The department has tried to do away with discriminatory practices in recent years, but numerous supervisors who rose in the department under those policies have continued them, the DOJ report found, according to The Sun.
“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. Those include revising policies on the use of force as well as boosting accountability and transparency with steps such as beginning to equip officers with body cameras to record their activities. “Pre-interviews impede the integrity of the investigation”, the report said. But Justice Department investigators cited similar instances in their report.
One resident described officers jumping out of cars to grab people on the street “for no reason at all”.
Harris, of Pitt Law, said it was clear that zero-tolerance policing was insufficiently flexible and nuanced, even if it has contributed to a drop in crime.
Experts agree that these problems are not unique to Baltimore. “We’re here to do it collaboratively with you”. Was this regret sex? “Low-income women are facing sometimes worse”.
Advertisement
Baltimore and the Justice Department “have entered into an agreement in principle that identifies the types of reforms we plan to address as we prepare to negotiate a court-enforceable, independently-monitored consent decree”, Gupta said. That will now be the case in Baltimore, Gupta said.
