Vol. 80/No. 32 August 29, 2016
Report: Baltimore cops violate the Constitution
“The Department of Justice revealed what Baltimore already knew,” Tawanda Jones, whose brother Tyrone West died in police custody in 2013, told the Militant by phone. “These are not isolated instances. The police who beat my brother to death were of every color and hue. They are the color of blue, that’s why they got away with it.”
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake requested the investigation last year, after thousands took to the streets to protest the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody. Gray was chased by cops — they say he “fled unprovoked upon noticing police” in an area known for drug dealing — arrested and put in the back of a police van. Cops still claim they don’t know how his spinal cord was severed.
Weeks of protests led to six cops — three Black, three Caucasian — being indicted for manslaughter, but after three were acquitted, the prosecutor dropped the charges against the rest.
The report is a sign that the U.S. rulers are worried the Baltimore cops have gone too far and need to be reined in. City and federal officials are close to agreeing on a consent decree, under which police training and practices will be revised under court supervision.
Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, said at a press conference the pattern of “serious violations of the U.S. Constitution and federal law” had “eroded the public’s trust in the police.”
Speaking after Gupta, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis asserted that it is a minority of police officers who carried out the “egregious” acts of “racism, sexism” detailed in the report.
Davis says he fired six cops and ordered new vans or retrofitted ones to replace the type that transported Gray. The new vehicles have cameras that record inside, and seat belts that can be held on to by prisoners whose hands are cuffed behind their backs.
Report details patterns of abuse
While Davis claims that it was just a few bad apples, the report details case after case of police abuse encouraged by top levels in the police department, often in collusion with prosecutors.Among the most egregious examples:
A cop strip-searched a teenage boy in public and in front of his girlfriend, then denied it. After the teen filed a complaint, the same cop strip-searched him again and grabbed the teen’s genitals. Cops claimed they found drugs on the youth, but never produced them as evidence and all charges were dropped.
From January 2010 to May 2014, cops made 301,000 pedestrian stops, but the “true number of stops is likely far higher” because many go unreported. One African-American man was stopped 34 times without being charged with a crime. Although Blacks make up 63 percent of the city’s population, 95 percent of those stopped were Black. Nearly 50 percent of the police force and police officials are Black.
The cops often used loitering charges to harass Blacks. On several occasions, youth were arrested for “loitering” — on the doorsteps of their own homes.
The report says that it could not reach a “conclusive determination” on what working people in Baltimore refer to as “rough rides,” when the cops drive recklessly with people they’ve arrested handcuffed in the back of the van. But it “found evidence that BPD officers routinely fail to safely secure arrestees in transport vans with seatbelts.”
One section of the report is titled, “Gender Bias in BPD’s Response to Sexual Assault.” Cops frequently told women reporting rapes, “Why are you messing that guy’s life up?”
In one case a prosecutor emailed a cop, “This victim seems like a conniving little whore.” The cop replied “Lmao! [Laughing my ass off] I feel the same.”
Arlene Rubinstein contributed to this article.
Related articles:
‘Charge cop who killed Sylville Smith in Milwaukee’
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home