U.S. Justice Department to Release
Blistering Report of Racial Bias by Baltimore Police
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr., SHERYL
GAY STOLBERG and MATT APUZZOAUG. 9, 2016
The Justice Department has found
that the Baltimore Police Department for years has hounded black residents who
make up most of the city’s population, systematically stopping, searching and
arresting them, often with little provocation or rationale.
In a blistering report, coming
more than a year after Baltimore erupted into riots over the police-involved
death of a 25-year-old black man, Freddie Gray, the Justice Department is
sharply critical of policies that encouraged police officers to charge black
residents with minor crimes. A copy of the report was obtained by The New York
Times.
The critique is the latest
example of the Obama administration’s aggressive push for police reforms in
cities where young African-American men have died at the hands of law
enforcement.
The findings, to be released
Wednesday, are the first formal step toward the Justice Department’s reaching a
settlement with Baltimore — known as a “consent decree” — in which police
practices would be overhauled under the oversight of a federal judge. The
department started the inquiry at the invitation of Mayor Stephanie
Rawlings-Blake.
To show how officers disproportionately
stopped black pedestrians, the report cited the example of a black man in his
mid-50s who was stopped 30 times in less than four years. None of the stops led
to a citation or criminal charge. Black residents, the report said, accounted
for 95 percent of the 410 individuals stopped at least 10 times in the five and
a half years of data reviewed.
The most pronounced racial
disparities were in arrests for the most discretionary offenses: For example,
91 percent of those arrested solely for “failure to obey” or “trespassing” were
African-American, even though the city is 63 percent black, the report found.
In one telling anecdote from the
report, a shift commander provided officers with boilerplate language on how to
write up trespassing arrest reports of people found near housing projects. The
template contained an automatic description of the arrestee: “A BLACK MALE.”
“The supervisor’s template thus
presumes that individuals arrested for trespassing will be African-American,”
the report stated, describing the sort of detentions the language was intended
to facilitate as “facially unconstitutional.”
The report indicated that the
frequency of arrests without probable cause was reflected in the fact that
booking supervisors and prosecutors had declined to file charges, after arrests
by their own officers, more than 11,000 times since 2010.
Two weeks ago, Maryland
prosecutors dropped charges against the last of six officers charged in the
April 2015 death of Mr. Gray, who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury while in
custody. With that, Baltimore joined a growing list of cities where
police-involved deaths sparked outrage, and even riots, yet no one was held
accountable in court.
While no consent decree has been
reached, the report states that the city and the Justice Department have agreed
in principle to identify “categories of reforms the parties agree must be taken
to remedy the violations of the Constitution and federal law described in this
report.”
FINDINGS OF THE JUSTICE
DEPARTMENT REPORT
In its report, the Justice
Department concluded that the Baltimore Police Department “engaged in a pattern
or practice of conduct” that was unconstitutional or violated federal law,
including:
• Making
unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests.
• Using
enforcement strategies of stops, searches and arrests that unfairly target
African-Americans.
• Using
excessive force.
• Retaliating
against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression.
“I don’t think at this point,
it’s about justice for Freddie Gray anymore,” said Ray Kelly, a director of the
No Boundaries Coalition, a West Baltimore group that provided its own report on
police abuses to the Justice Department. “Now it’s about justice for our
community, for our people.”
City Councilman Brandon
Scott,vice chairman of the council committee that oversees the department, said
the next fight could be over how to pay for the police overhaul.
Baltimore is among nearly two
dozen cities that the Obama administration has investigated after they were
accused of widespread unconstitutional policing. Using its broad latitude to
enforce civil rights laws, the Justice Department has demanded wholesale change
in how cities conduct policing. In several cities, including Seattle;
Cleveland; and Ferguson, Mo., those investigations began in the aftermath of a
high-profile death that sparked protests and in some cases riots.
Police chiefs, prosecutors and
experts say the investigations have forced cities to address longstanding,
entrenched issues far beyond the targeted cities.
“Chiefs are constantly looking at
these reports, not just to learn lessons and best practices from each other,
but also what pitfalls we can avoid,” said Scott Thomson, the police chief in
Camden, N.J., who is also the president of the Police Executive Research Forum.
But court-ordered reform can take
years, which does little to ease the frustration of activists who say that
police officers too often go unpunished for deadly encounters with unarmed
people.
