DOJ Releases Baltimore Report

[Alyrium Denryle]

On consideration, I decided this warranted its own topic.

So the DOJ released its report on the Baltimore PD. It is exactly what most of us expected. Possibly worse.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/09/us/baltim ... index.html

(CNN)A Justice Department investigation found that the Baltimore Police Department engages in unconstitutional practices that lead to disproportionate rates of stops, searches and arrests of African-Americans, and excessive use of force against juveniles and people with mental health disabilities.

The Department of Justice monitored the department's policing methods for more than a year at the request of the Baltimore Police Department, after the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal injury while in police custody.

The long-awaited report, which covered data from 2010 to 2016, attributed the practices to "systemic deficiencies" in training, policies, and accountability structures that "fail to equip officers with the tools they need to police effectively."

Gray's death touched off protests and riots in Baltimore and beyond, fueling ongoing debate over racial bias in policing that has drawn the Justice Department's attention. Though the report does not directly reference the actions of officers in the Gray case, it notes that "recent events" underscored the importance of mutual trust between law enforcement and the people they serve, a recurring theme in DOJ investigations of police departments following police-involved deaths of African-Americans.
A DOJ investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department after the shooting death of Michael Brown reached a similar conclusion: a "pattern and practice" of discrimination against African-Americans that targeted them disproportionately for traffic stops, use of force, and jail sentences. So did the investigation after the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, concluding that Cleveland police have a pattern of excessive force.

The legacy of Gray's death continues to loom large over the city. The federal civil rights report comes weeks after charges were dropped against the remaining officers facing trial in Gray's death.
As a result of the probe, the city and the Justice Department have agreed to negotiate a court-ordered consent decree that will prescribe steps for reform, in addition to steps Baltimore already has taken, city and federal officials told reporters in Baltimore on Wednesday. In June, the department announced an overhaul of its use of force policy.
"Change is painful. Growth is painful. But nothing is as painful as being stuck in a place that we do not belong," Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said.

Here are some of the report's highlights:
Unconstitutional stops and arrests

The report blamed "zero tolerance" enforcement practices that emphasized stops, searches and arrests for repeated violations of constitutional rights that eroded the community's trust.
Encouraged by BPD supervisors, "zero tolerance" policing continues in certain neighborhoods, leading to unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests, with little to no suspicion, the report said.
For example:
• About 44% of those stops occurred in two small predominantly African-American neighborhoods that contain only 11% of the city's population
• Hundreds of individuals were stopped at least 10 times during this period, and seven were stopped more than 30 times
• Only 3.7% of those stops resulted in citations or arrests
• From 2010 to 2015, prosecutors and booking supervisors rejected more than 11,000 charges made by BPD officers because they lacked probable cause or did not merit prosecution

Discrimination against African-Americans
BPD stops African-American drivers and pedestrians at disproportionate rates, subjecting them to greater rates of searches than whites, the report said, creating racial disparities at every stage of law enforcement actions, from stop to arrest.

"These racial disparities, along with evidence suggesting intentional discrimination, erode the community trust that is critical to effective policing," the report said.
Among the investigation's findings:
• African-Americans accounted for 95% of 410 individuals stopped at least 10 times from 2010 to 2016
• One African-American man in his 50s was stopped 30 times in less than four years; none of the stops resulted in a citation or criminal charge
• African-Americans accounted for 82% of all BPD vehicle stops though they make up 60% of the driving age population in the city and 27% percent of the driving age population in the greater metropolitan area
• BPD officers found contraband twice as often when searching white individuals compared to African-Americans during vehicle stops and 50% more often during pedestrian stops
Use of constitutionally excessive force

After reviewing all deadly force cases from January 2010 to May 1, and a random sample of more than 800 than nondeadly force cases, the DOJ concluded that BPD engages in a pattern or practice of excessive force. Insufficient training and lack of oversight of those incidents perpetuate the pattern, leading to several recurring issues:
• Use of overly aggressive tactics that escalate encounters and increase tensions and failure to de-escalate encounters when appropriate to do so
• Frequently resorting to physical force when a person does not immediately respond to verbal commands, even if the subject poses no imminent threat to the officer or others
• Due to a lack of training and improper tactics, BPD officers end up in needlessly violent confrontations with people with mental health disabilities
• Failure to use widely accepted tactics for dealing with juveniles, treating them the same way as adults, leading to unnecessary conflict
• Use of excessive force against people already restrained and under officers' control
Retaliation for activities protected by the First Amendment
DOJ investigators found that officers "routinely infringe" upon First Amendment rights in the following ways:
• Unlawfully stopping and arresting people for cursing at officers, even though it's not illegal to use vulgar or offensive language as long as they are not "fighting words"
• Retaliating with excessive force against people in cases of protected speech
• Interfering with people who record police activity, including a time in which officers seized the phone of a man who recorded his friend being arrested and deleted all the videos on his phone, even personal videos of his son

Indications of gender bias in sexual assault investigations

The report concludes that BPD "seriously and systematically under-investigates" sexual assault reports and engages in practices that "compromise the effectiveness and impartiality" of their investigations. Among the examples cited:
• In interviews with women, officers ask questions or make statements in a manner that places blame on them, such as "why are you messing that guy's life up"? or suggesting their behavior invited the assault
• An email between an officer and a prosecutor expressing disbelief of a survivor, calling her a "conniving little whore"
• A review of case reports involving people in the sex trade indicated a tendency to not take them seriously
• Allegations of disparaging and inappropriate comments toward transgender individuals, including the refusal to call a transgender woman a woman
• Rape cases remain open for years at a time with little to no follow-up
• Detectives request testing of rape kits in fewer than one in five adult sexual assault cases
Need for better training and more accountability

The report dedicates significant space to the department's failure to train, equip, supervise and hold officers accountable, or to build relationships with the community.
"Numerous members of BPD, from line officers to command staff to training personnel, conveyed to us that training is not a priority within the Department," the report says.
The department also fails to collect and record important data on a broad range of activities that could inform their processes, the report said. And when it does, it does not use the data to manage and supervise officer activity.

Next steps
The findings came as little surprise to citizens of Baltimore, who said they witness the instances described in the report on a constant basis.

Kenny Avery, a West Baltimore resident, said his 3-year-old son is already aware of mistreatment by police.

"He's scared of the police, you know what I mean? Just because he see it," he said.
Y.N.E. Pokie, a rapper who lives in West Baltimore, said people avoid calling police even when they need them.

"I don't even call them if I'm in my own predicament," he said. "I don't mess with the police."
The police department already is making changes to key policies, including those on how officers are trained, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said Wednesday.
She put the estimated cost of such changes between $5 million and $10 million annually, similar to what other cities have spent on similar changes, she said.

Officers who "choose to engage in racist, sexist , discriminatory or biased-based policing" will not be tolerated, Police Commissioner Davis said. Officers involved in the most egregious examples noted in the report already have been removed from the job, he said, without identifying them or saying how many had been removed.

On Tuesday, Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby anticipated that the report "will likely confirm what many in our city already know or have experienced firsthand."
"While the vast majority of Baltimore City Police officers are good officers, we also know that there are bad officers and that the department has routinely failed to oversee, train or hold bad actors accountable."

Here is the full report

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... 30/a313381

[TheFeniX]

The report blamed "zero tolerance" enforcement practices that emphasized stops, searches and arrests for repeated violations of constitutional rights that eroded the community's trust.
Encouraged by BPD supervisors, "zero tolerance" policing continues in certain neighborhoods, leading to unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests, with little to no suspicion, the report said.

This leads to a system where the populace (well, a certain portion of it) doesn't trust police. So, they are slow to cooperate, evasive, disrespectful. This makes them look guilty to police, so police up the ante. And when something stupid is done, either by police or the citizen: it's the citizen who ends up in a body bag or prison. So, they become even more distrustful of police. Maybe they run at the sight of cops because they're going to get their shit stomped either way. So more of them die because cops have a lot more to go all-in with.

If you know/believe police are going to try and fuck you: There's no real point in cooperating with them at all except the fear of death. And that's not a good policing strategy.

BPD officers found contraband twice as often when searching white individuals compared to African-Americans during vehicle stops and 50% more often during pedestrian stops

I like how nothing in this report surprises me at all. Of course they'd find more contraband when searching a white person when they generally need a "good" reason to stop them. Unlike a black guy they will stop for no reason to hassle.

Use of overly aggressive tactics that escalate encounters and increase tensions and failure to de-escalate encounters when appropriate to do so

New York had a big ol' cop convention years back where the commissioner said the same thing. Part of the problem is the rookies are hungry to prove themselves and show that they won't let anyone (criminal or cop) walk over them. The verterans came up under the same system*. But when you force escalation because you can, that's a huge problem.

There are so many incidents, even posted in this thread, that could have been avoided solely with De-escalation or just waiting things out. And in more than a few of those situations, it would have been safer for everyone, even the cops, to do so. Such as the Tamir Rice shooters who decided to take on an "armed" "man" by rolling up on him in a squad car and stopping mere feet from him. Had he actually been armed and looking to shoot someone: easily two dead cops.

* Same thing with doctors hazing interns and residents with 16+ hour work-shifts. "I went through it, so will you." Even when evidence was showing this system was killing people, they haven't done shit about it. People are stupid, no matter how well educated.

[Alyrium Denryle]

It gets even more special with sexual assault cases because the BPD [url="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/12/us/ba ... share&_r=0]systematically does not investigate them.[/url]

WASHINGTON — For the past two years, ever since 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer, America has been enmeshed in a wrenching discussion about how the police treat young black men.

But this week’s blistering report from the Justice Department on police bias in Baltimore also exposed a different, though related, concern: how the police in that majority-black city treat women, especially victims of sexual assault.

In six pages of the 163-page report documenting how Baltimore police officers have systematically violated the rights of African-Americans, the Justice Department also painted a picture of a police culture deeply dismissive of sexual assault victims and hostile toward prostitutes and transgender people. It branded the Baltimore Police Department’s response to sexual assault cases “grossly inadequate.”

Baltimore officers sometimes humiliated women who tried to report sexual assault, often failed to gather basic evidence, and disregarded some complaints filed by prostitutes. Some officers blamed victims or discouraged them from identifying their assailants, asking questions like, “Why are you messing that guy’s life up?”

And the culture seemed to extend to prosecutors, investigators found. In one email exchange, a prosecutor referred to a woman who had reported a sexual assault as a “conniving little whore.” A police officer, using a common text-message expression for laughing heartily, wrote back: “Lmao! I feel the same.”

The inclusion of gender bias issues in the report stemmed from an aggressive push by the Justice Department, under President Obama, to improve the handling of sexual assault cases on college campuses and in cities and communities around the country.

Other “pattern or practice” investigations of police departments — including in New Orleans; Puerto Rico; and Missoula, Mont. — have also identified gender bias. In Puerto Rico in 2011, while examining discrimination against people of Dominican descent, Justice Department investigators cited a police department’s failure “to adequately police sex assault and domestic violence” cases, including spousal abuse by fellow officers. In New Orleans in 2012, investigators described a deeply dysfunctional force and found that the police “systemically misclassified possible sexual assaults.”

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In Missoula, where the department also investigated a campus of the University of Montana, the inquiries focused specifically on gender and also examined the actions of prosecutors. In a 20-page report issued in 2014, the Justice Department said county prosecutors so thoroughly ignored rape cases that they were placing “women in Missoula at increased risk of harm.”

But experts and advocates agree that the problem is especially complex, and perhaps more acute, in Baltimore because so many women there are poor and black.

DOCUMENT
The Justice Department’s Report
A Justice Department investigation into the practices of the Baltimore police department found "reasonable cause to believe that the BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law."


OPEN DOCUMENT
“Baltimore is worse in the sense that Baltimore is a city that has more people of color and more poor people of color, so we are likely to see more excesses, and that is manifest in the report,” said Lisalyn R. Jacobs, an expert on race and gender bias who works closely with the Obama administration on issues including sexual assault.

The Baltimore police commissioner, Kevin Davis, who vowed Wednesday to turn his department into “a model for the rest of the nation,” did not dispute the Justice Department’s findings. He said in an interview Thursday that he was already taking steps, including putting a trusted captain in charge of a new sex offense unit and assigning a sergeant to act as an “L.G.B.T. liaison,” to address the problems.

“The challenge of interacting respectfully with victims of sexual assault is a challenge to our profession,” Commissioner Davis said, “and we are getting better at it in Baltimore, and we are paying attention to it.”

African-Americans make up 63 percent of the population in Baltimore, and the city has been in the thick of its own painful conversation about race and policing since the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained a fatal spinal injury in police custody. Tessa Hill-Aston, the president of the city’s branch of the N.A.A.C.P., said the Justice Department’s report this week had pushed the conversation about victims of police bias beyond black men.

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“There’s a lot of women in the same communities that have been victimized just as much,” Ms. Hill-Aston said, adding of the police, “They just didn’t care, because it was a poor black woman or a poor black neighborhood.”

Civil and women’s rights advocates in Baltimore have been saying for years that the police do an inadequate job of investigating rape and sexual assault cases. In 2010, The Baltimore Sun reported that in the previous four years, the police had routinely failed to solve rape cases; in reviewing F.B.I. data, the newspaper found that the percentage of rape cases dismissed as false or baseless was higher in Baltimore than in any other city in the country.

But so little progress was made that Justice Department investigators felt compelled to raise the issue, though they did not formally cite the Baltimore police for violating women’s constitutional rights, said Vanita Gupta, the department’s top civil rights official, who supervised the report. “We were troubled by the lingering problems associated with gender-biased policing in Baltimore,” she said Thursday in an interview.

The Police Department’s lackluster investigation of rapes was of particular concern, the report said. From 2010 to 2014, the department found, rape kits, which hold forensic evidence gathered by doctors and nurses, were tested in only 15 percent of Baltimore cases involving sexual assault victims.

Officers failed to perform basic detective work, the report said.

One woman reported a rape by a taxi driver, but the department never tried to test the suspect’s DNA. Another woman reported a sexual assault by an unlicensed cabdriver, and although a detective identified a suspect, the police never tried to contact him, and the investigation faltered. Neither of these victims were named in the Justice Department report.

“We have many, many women who will never go to the police about a rape ever again because of the way they’ve been treated,” said Jacqueline Robarge, the director and founder of Power Inside, an organization that works with victims of gender-based violence, some of whom shared their stories with Justice Department investigators. Ms. Robarge said she had also recorded at least 15 interviews with women and had given them to the department.

Ms. Robarge added that she had worked with women who had been the victims of sexual misconduct by officers themselves. She recalled a 24-year-old prostitute who said a police officer had ordered her into his car and coerced her to have sex.

The woman, fearing retaliation, did not talk to investigators, Ms. Robarge said. But Justice Department investigators cited similar instances in their report.

“We heard complaints from the community that some officers target members of a vulnerable population — people involved in the sex trade — to coerce sexual favors from them in exchange for avoiding arrest, or for cash or narcotics,” the investigators wrote.

The report also described deep insensitivity on the part of some Baltimore officers toward transgender people, which reflected “underlying unlawful gender bias.” One transgender woman, for instance, said that an officer who was ordered to search her had protested in disgust, complaining to a colleague, “I am not searching that.” Then the officer turned to the woman and declared: “I don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl. And I really don’t care. I am not searching you.”

Commissioner Davis said he was committed to improving the treatment of sexual assault victims, and spoke Thursday of a “sea change” in policing culture.

In an interview, Capt. Steven Hohman, the commander of the department’s Special Investigations Section, which contains the Sex Offense Unit, declined to respond to individual examples in the report. “I believe that much of the work was being done,” Captain Hohman said. “We just weren’t very good at documenting.”

Experts agree that these problems are not unique to Baltimore. In December 2015, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, concerned by the findings of the inquiries in New Orleans, Puerto Rico and Missoula, issued guidance to law enforcement agencies on how to prevent gender bias.

“We saw time and time again where women were discounted and officers would ask them: ‘Did you have an orgasm? Was this regret sex? Do you have a boyfriend?’” said Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department official who supervised those inquiries, referring to the Missoula investigation. He added: “Those are privileged kids. Low-income women are facing sometimes worse.”

In each of those instances, the department demanded improvements as part of a consent decree, in which police practices are overhauled under the supervision of a federal judge. That will now be the case in Baltimore, Ms. Gupta said.

Emphasis added.

They are at the point where they are defending their lack of investigation in rape cases by citing the fact that they dont document the investigations they "totally do perform, honest, trust me guys".

And now their police practices will be supervised by a responsible adult.

[Kamakazie Sith]

The chief, each division commander, and the individual officers that are responsible should be let go and charged where applicable. This "we're going to fix this" dialogue doesn't do anything for anyone even if it is legit. Dallas PD should be considered a role model for all problem departments.

Also, members of the elected government that had any hand in this should also be looked into what role they played in all of this as well as prominent city figures such as powerful business owners.