Baltimore police officers routinely discriminate against blacks, repeatedly use excessive force and are not adequately held accountable for misconduct, according to a harshly critical US Department of Justice report due to be presented today.
The report, the culmination of a year-long investigation into one of the country’s largest police forces, also found that officers make large numbers of stops — mostly in poor, black neighborhoods — with dubious justification and unlawfully arrest citizens for speech deemed disrespectful.
Physical force is used unnecessarily, including against the mentally disabled, and black pedestrians and drivers are disproportionately searched during stops, the report said.
The department released a copy of the report in advance of its public announcement at an event yesterday morning in Baltimore.
The report represents a damning indictment of how the city’s police officers carry out the most fundamental of policing practices, including traffic stops and searches and responding to First Amendment expression. Beyond that, though, it could serve as a blueprint for sweeping changes: The department is seeking a court-enforceable consent decree to force the police agency to commit to improving its procedures in order to avoid a lawsuit.
The department in recent years has undertaken similar wide-reaching investigations into the police in Chicago, Cleveland, Albuquerque and Ferguson, Missouri, among other cities.
The federal investigation was launched after the April last year death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose neck was broken while he was handcuffed and shackled, but left unrestrained in the back of a police van. The death set off protests and the worst riots in decades.
The report went far beyond the circumstances of Gray’s death to examine a slew of potentially unconstitutional practices, including excessive force and discriminatory traffic stops, within the Baltimore Police Department (BPD).
Among the findings: Black residents account for about 84 percent of stops, although they represent just 63 percent of the city’s population. Likewise, African-Americans make up 95 percent of the 410 people stopped at least 10 times by officers from 2010 to last year.
During the same time period, officers stopped 34 black residents 20 times, and seven African-Americans 30 times or more, while the report said that no people of any other race were stopped more than 12 times.
In addition to pat-downs, Baltimore officers perform unconstitutional public strip searches, including searches of people who are not under arrest.
The report also said officers routinely use unreasonable and excessive force, including against juveniles and citizens who are not dangerous or posing an immediate threat.
Twenty percent of force incidents reviewed by investigators involved someone who was not being arrested for a crime or who suffered from a mental health disability.
Force is often used as a retaliatory tactic in instances where officers “did not like what those individuals said,” the report said.
“BPD teaches officers to use aggressive tactics,” the report reads. “BPD’s trainings fuel an ‘us vs. them’ mentality we saw some officers display toward community members, alienating the civilians they are meant to serve.”
The report partially blames the BPD’s unconstitutional practices on a “zero tolerance” policy dating back to the early 2000s, during which residents were arrested en masse for minor misdemeanor charges such as loitering.
Although the BPD has publicly denounced these practices after a 2010 settlement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sued the department over the policing strategy, “the legacy of the zero tolerance era continues to influence officer activity and contribute to constitutional violations,” the report said.
Officers also routinely stop and question individuals without cause or a legitimate suspicion that they’re involved in criminal activity, the report says: No charges were filed in 26 of every 27 pedestrian stops.
The directives often come from supervisors. In one instance, a supervisor told a subordinate officer to “make something up” after the officer protested an order to stop and question a group of young black men for no reason.
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