Six Baltimore Police Officers Fired as Justice Department Report Alleges Excessive Force

Those findings proved to be incendiary: The Justice Department’s report accuses the Baltimore Police Department of routinely violating the constitutional rights of residents by subjecting them to unlawful stops and excessive force.

The report’s big-picture look at the BPD marks the first step toward a consent decree between Baltimore and the feds that will force the new reforms into practice.

We found indications that officers fail to meaningfully investigate reports of sexual assault, particularly for assaults involving women with additional vulnerabilities, such as those who are engaged in sex work.

The court-enforced order will be independently monitored and created to sustain reform regardless of who is the police commissioner or mayor, justice officials said. This decree would assign an objective, third-party team to oversee the implementation of the necessary changes throughout the police department.

“Policing that violates the Constitution or federal law severely undermines community trust, and blanket assumptions about certain neighborhoods can lead to resentment against police”, she said.

Rawlings-Blake added during a press conference Wednesday that the report was “challenging to hear”, as it listed repeated, nearly routine instances of racial discrimination, unlawful arrests and use of excessive force, NPR reports.

The investigation was launched after the April 2015 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. If residents of white neighborhoods lived in the thrall of the drug trade, they would be demanding enforcement and enforcement would follow.

The 164-page report identifies systemic problems and gives examples of police treatment of the city’s African American residents, who make up the majority of its population.

That includes, she said, “making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests; using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches, and arrests of African-Americans; using excessive force; and retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression”.

“But nothing is as painful as being stuck in a place that we do not belong”, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said, promising to remove officers who engage in discriminatory policing.

African Americans accounted for 82 percent of all traffic stops, even though they make up just 60 percent of the driving age population.

“I am very, very concerned by some of the information contained in this detailed report”, Davis said.

“It’s not going to be easy to reform the department, and it’s not going to be quick”, the mayor said.

Democratic Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, who represents portions of the city and who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, said finding that money is likely to be hard in a Congress still focused on spending cuts.

Rawlings-Blake, when discussing those broad, city-wide problems, said “no one is waiting around until we solve poverty” before addressing the problems in the police department.

“The supervisor’s template thus presumes that individuals arrested for trespassing will be African-American”, the report says.

“This report says nothing that Baltimoreans of color haven’t been saying for years and what national civil rights advocates have been saying since the wrongful death of Freddie Gray: that in communities of color, Baltimore police act more like an occupying force than a partner in public safety”.

African Americans also made up 95% of 410 individuals who were stopped at least 10 times by police officers from 2010-15, the report added. Neither of these victims were named in the Justice Department report.

The Justice Department in recent years has undertaken similar wide-reaching investigations into the police in Chicago, Cleveland, Albuquerque and Ferguson, Missouri, among other cities.