The U.S. Department of Justice says the police department in the eastern city of Baltimore, Maryland shows a pattern of illegal stops, searches, arrests and use of excessive force, particularly against the city’s African-American population.
“We find that BPD’s practices perpetuate and fuel a multitude of issues rooted in poverty and race, focusing law enforcement actions on low-income, minority communities in a manner that is often unnecessary and unproductive,” the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a report Wednesday.
Investigators interviewed current and former city leaders, police department chiefs and officers, as well as people and organizations from the community. They also rode along with police officers during their shifts and reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.
Concerns about policing in the city of about 620,000 people are not new, but there has been a greater focus on law enforcement with Baltimore tallying a record number of homicides last year and the high-profile death of an African-American man while he was being transported in a police van.
The Justice Department report pointed to the lingering legacy of department policy in the 1990s and early 2000s that prioritized officers making large numbers of stops, searches and arrests, saying that today supervisors who began their careers during that era still focus on those numbers to measure performance.
Investigators found that multiple officers showed a mistaken understanding of the law believing that people standing in front of a business or a vacant lot were considered loitering or trespassing.
“During a ride-along with Justice Department officials, a BPD sergeant instructed a patrol officer to stop a group of young African-American males on a street corner, question them, and order them to disperse. When the patrol officer protested that he had no valid reason to stop the group, the sergeant replied, ‘Then make something up,'” the report said.
In another incident reviewed by the Justice Department team, an officer who believed his supervisor would be unhappy if he did not clear an area where people were talking and waiting for food outside of a late-night restaurant confronted the group and ended up in an altercation with a man who refused to leave. The officer feared the man was going to kick him and responded by firing his gun, striking two people, including one person who was not involved. Supervisors said later the officer acted appropriately.
The report criticizes the department for underreporting the number of people that officers stop. But among the 300,000 reported stops of pedestrians between January 2010 and May 2015, 44 percent took place in two small districts that contain just 11 percent of the city’s population and are predominantly African-American.
The Justice Department said the stops “often lack reasonable suspicion,” and that less than 4 percent of them resulted in any citation or arrest. Many of those arrested later had their charges dismissed. The report noted that one African American man in his mid-50s was stopped 30 times in less than four years. None of the 30 stops resulted in a citation or criminal charge.
The disproportionate focus on African-Americans in Baltimore extends to the number of drivers stopped by police and the number of people who are searched during stops. The report says African-Americans make up 64 percent of the city’s population but 86 percent of criminal charges.
“In some cases, BPD supervisors have ordered officers to specifically target African-Americans for stops and arrests,” the report said. “BPD failed to use adequate policy, training, and accountability mechanisms to prevent discrimination, despite longstanding notice of concerns about how it polices African-American communities in the city.”
Investigators found a stark difference in public perception of the police department when talking to different communities. People in wealthier and largely white areas told the Justice Department that officers are usually respectful and respond to their needs, while those in largely black neighborhoods said police are disrespectful and do not respond promptly when they call for help.
The report further criticizes the department for using what it says are overly aggressive tactics that only escalate situations.
“Officers frequently resort to physical force when a subject does not immediately respond to verbal commands, even where the subject poses no imminent threat to the officer or others.”
The Justice Department said nearly 90 percent of excessive force incidents it identified involved force against African-Americans. But it said the department rarely categorizes incidents as excessive. Department records showed more than 2,800 force incidents during the nearly six-year review period, of which only 10 were investigated and one found to be excessive.
“This pattern or practice is driven by systemic deficiencies in BPD’s policies, training, supervision, and accountability structures that fail to equip officers with the tools they need to police effectively and within the bounds of federal law.”
The Justice Department said it recognizes the challenges officers in Baltimore and other communities face, and said the department’s current leadership has taken “laudable steps” toward improvements. 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.
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