#doj report

Report Reveals Staggering Racism by Baltimore Police Department

I’m not sure what to actually say, or do.  Because, like, nothing in that report is news to anyone involved in criminal justice in Baltimore: cops, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, nobody.  And it’s not news to approximately 100% of Baltimore’s black population.  It’s the way criminal justice has been in Baltimore for at least two decades, I think; definitely since I started 9 years ago, which was in the last few years of O’Malley’s era.  (And by the way, if there is a hell, there’s a special room reserved for O’Malley, who will be face-fucked by horses not just for destroying the last vestige of lawfulness in Baltimore’s police department, but still insisting after pretty much everyone in the universe has disavowed zero tolerance that it was totally awesome.)

People have been talking about these problems for years.  Both people from the black community, and groups like the NAACP speaking on their behalf.  Even David Simon, for fuck’s sake, spoke up more about what happened to the Baltimore police and the impact it was having than any politician in Baltimore ever has.  Moreover nobody can even pretend that this is news in the classic sense; there has been scandal after scandal, revelation after revelation that the BPD is a racist, incompetent shitshow of a department. 

The Jemini Jones case, where in 2005 a cop was charged with raping a prostitute at the police station while two colleagues stood by, brought huge attention to the issue of malfeasance by police; yet sexual abuse by police is heavily stressed in the DOJ report.  In 2010 the Baltimore Sun highlighted how frequently the police were hand-waving sex assault accusations as “unfounded” without investigation, and how insensitive and poorly trained the detectives were; reforms were promised, and yet mishandling of rape and sex assault cases by the BPD is listed as a major ongoing problem in the DOJ report.  In 2008-2010, multiple media reports focused on the frequency of cases being dropped because of police witnesses failing to show up for court, and on the prosecutors’ “do not call list” of officers whose misconduct was so well-known and so egregious that the elected State’s Attorney felt she could not ethically base cases on their testimony.  Yet instead of spurring greater accountability for police officers, these reports simply became fuel for a campaign blaming the state’s attorney for poor police-prosecutor relations and demanding her ouster.  (For example, the police supporters successfully spun the do not call list as a baseless attack by prosecutors on innocent officers designed to destroy their careers, rather than an indictment of a clearly broken internal affairs division that allowed even the most egregiously corrupt officers to stay on the street.)  In 2013, the shitty training in the BPD was highlighted when a 19-year veteran doing weapons instruction managed to accidentally incorporate a live weapon into a training exercise and shot a trainee officer in the head; yet the DOJ report says that the facilities and personnel provided to train BPD officers are fewer and shittier than ever today.

And every year, every month, every week, every fucking day, the police generated new racial injustices: black people ordered to stop loitering on their own stoops, arrested for trespassing on their own steps, strip-searched on the street, stopped and hassled and searched and arrested for walking too fast or too slow, for being in a high crime neighborhood, for being in a low crime neighborhood, for making eye contact with a cop, for avoiding eye contact with a cop, for being a young man, for being a young woman, for being a cross-dresser or too obviously trans.

The problem is that the city elite don’t want to acknowledge the problem, or fix it: they whine about how people have a bad perception of the city because of The Wire, while missing the point that The Wire is practically a documentary series.  Instead of saying, “how can we fix our problems,” they ask, “how can we get more people to ignore the problems and come here anyway?”

Important readings in #BlackLivesMatter | May 15, 2015 | Blog#42

This is a selection of the articles I thought were most important this week on the topic of race and race relations.  (more…)

VIDEO: St Louis: Ferguson Shooting Won’t Derail Recovery

After Missouri top officials resign, what the Ferguson community is doing to move forward in the aftermath of racial violence and the DOJ’s recent report. Photo: Getty

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VIDEO: St Louis: Ferguson Shooting Won’t Derail Recovery

After Missouri top officials resign, what the Ferguson community is doing to move forward in the aftermath of racial violence and the DOJ’s recent report. Photo: Getty

(more…)