By MATT APUZZO and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
New York Times
MAY 7, 2015
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department will investigate
whether the Baltimore Police Department engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional
policing, law enforcement officials said on Thursday, a day after the mayor
asked for an inquiry.
The request by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake came days
after the state’s attorney for Baltimore filed criminal charges against six
officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray, who died April 19 after being
injured while in police custody. His death set off large demonstrations, arson
and looting.
At a policing conference earlier on Thursday, the
Baltimore police commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, said he did not object to an
outside investigation, adding that he was committed to reforming the Police
Department. He said he recognized that Baltimore residents did not trust the
city to make changes voluntarily.
“I am willing to do anything it takes to win that trust
back,” he said. “If it’s D.O.J., whatever it takes.”
Protesters said the unrest set off by Mr. Gray’s death
was the culmination of years of police mistreatment. The turmoil has dominated
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch’s first days in office.
“The situation in Baltimore involves a core
responsibility of the Department of Justice — not only to combat illegal
conduct when it occurs, but to help prevent the circumstances that give rise to
it in the first place,” Ms. Lynch said on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
There was no immediate reaction from Ms. Rawlings-Blake.
Earlier Thursday, the mayor convened business, religious and philanthropic
leaders at the intersection of West North and Pennsylvania Avenues, near a CVS
store that was looted and burned in last week’s riots, to announce a
public-private partnership to improve areas devastated by the unrest. She
called it a “once-in-a-generation effort to tackle inequality.”
Ms. Lynch, who took office a week after Mr. Gray died,
was in Baltimore this week to meet with community, religious and political
leaders about whether to conduct a “pattern or practice” review, which would
look into whether police officers used excessive force, carried out street
stops based on race or arrested people without probable cause.
Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat who
represents Baltimore — and who lives four blocks from the CVS that was burned —
said there was uniform agreement.
“She asked them, ‘How many of you all think we should
have a patterns and practices review investigation?’ ” Mr. Cummings recalled in
an interview Thursday. “If I remember correctly, all of them raised their
hands; there were about 40 of them. And I raised mine too.”
Mr. Cummings said that even before that meeting, he and
other members of Congress from Maryland had a conference call with Ms. Lynch
shortly after she took office in which he asked for such a review.
The decision by the Justice Department was welcome news
to civil rights advocates who had been pressing for a review for a long time.
“A range of people and organizations have been asking for this for years,” said
Sonia Kumar, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of
Maryland, “but really, I think those calls became louder and more forceful in
the wake of the death of Freddie Gray.”
Civil rights investigations often end with court
settlements and independent oversight of police departments. They can be
powerful agents of change, but they are not immediate, and the Baltimore
investigation could take a year or more. A similar investigation into the
Police Department in Ferguson, Mo., took seven months, an extraordinarily fast
timeline for such cases.
Mr. Batts and the mayor had already asked the Justice
Department’s community-policing experts to conduct a voluntary review of the
department. The preliminary results of that review will most likely be released
in the coming weeks and are expected to recommend changes to training and
use-of-force policies. Those recommendations would not be binding, but Mr.
Batts said he planned to work with the community-policing experts to make
changes to the department regardless of what civil rights investigators did.
A version of this article appears in print on May 8,
2015, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Justice Dept. Will
Examine Baltimore’s Police Patterns. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
