Ex- Oakland police chief fired from top Baltimore PD job

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Commissioner Anthony Batts was sacked by the mayor Wednesday, less than three months after riots erupted over Gray’s death from a spinal injury the 25-year-old black man suffered while bouncing around in the back of a moving police van.

Police said Wednesday that the shooting wasn’t random, but no arrests have been made.

Baltimore’s next police commissioner will have a daunting to-do list: quell a surge in homicides, rebuild trust between officers and the public, win the confidence of a demoralized and alienated department, and keep the peace when the explosive Freddie Gray case comes to trial.

Deputy Police Commission Kevin Davis has assumed the role of interim commissioner. Batts’ tenure was fraught with the conflicting reality of both these competing problems, but was also defined by the killing of Gray, which led to the indictment of six officers and worldwide attention to police brutality in Baltimore.

On Sunday, April 26, 2015, after hearing many horrific reports from the officers, President Ryan, a Baltimore Police Lieutenant with 32 years of experience, felt it necessary to contact the Police Commissioner with his many concerns.

The embattled Baltimore police force is getting a major shake up amid amid a city-wide spike in homicides and accusations that department leadership exacerbated the civil unrest following the April death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.

We can not continue to have the level of violence we’ve seen in recent weeks in this city. Batts served as the Oakland Police Department’s chief for two years before resigning in 2011.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake explained her decision to fire Anthony Batts in a one-on-one interview.

Hogan says he is “feeling well” after going through his first round of chemotherapy. Circulating this rumor undermined the credibility of law enforcement and unnecessarily inflamed tensions… He is the author two books on the philosophy of policing Why Do We Kill?: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore, You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths About Policing in Baltimore and Beyond, and two novels This Dream Called Death, and Orange: The Diary of an Urban Surrealist.

The U.S. Justice Department is conducting a civil rights review of the department and Batts announced Tuesday that an outside organization would review the police response to the unrest.

“The new chief has to institute a culture that builds much closer relationships between the department and the community”, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “Police departments and their cultures have been reformed”.

Change at the top.