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Tag: Baltimore

  • On Felony Running

    [From pp.58-59 of Cop in the Hood]

    To meet the standards needed for a formal prosecution, one must follow the informal rules imposed by the state’s attorney. Rule number one is don’t take your eyes off the drugs. Drug charges against a suspect will not be prosecuted in Baltimore City if an officer fails to maintain constant sight of the drugs. A suspect fleeing from police will throw down drugs while running. An officer in foot pursuit must then choose between catching a suspect with no drugs and retrieving the drugs with no suspect. Officers generally will choose to follow the suspect over the drugs because— along with a personal desire to catch a fleeing suspect—arrests are a police statistic used to judge performance. Found drugs are not.

    After catching the suspect, the officer will return to retrieve the drugs and charge the suspect with possession, knowing full well that the charges will be dropped if the report is written honestly. But officers are rewarded for arrests, not convictions. If the drugs can’t be found–lost in weeds, scooped up by a bystander, or never there to begin with–the officer is in a bit of a bind, left with the noncrime of “felony running.” You can’t lock somebody up for drug possession without drugs. And after a chase, even loitering doesn’t apply. But the officer will find some crime, however minor If you run and get caught, you’re probably not sleeping in your own bed that night.

    [This is why Freddie Gray was arrested for a barely illegal knife].

  • On Clearing Corners and Drug Arrests

    [From pages 65, 83, 49, and 55 of Cop in the Hood]

    Clearing the corner is what separates those who have policed from those who haven’t. Some officers want to be feared; others, respected; still others, simply obeyed. An officer explained: “You don’t have to [hit anybody]. Show up to them. Tell them to leave the corner, and then take a walk. Come back, and if they’re still there, don’t ask questions, just call for additional units and a wagon. You can always lock them up for something. You just have to know your laws. There’s loitering, obstruction of a sidewalk, loitering in front of the liquor store, disruptive behavior.” Police assume that if the suspects are dirty, they will walk away rather than risk being stopped and frisked. You can always lock them up for something, but when a police officer pulls up on a known drug corner, legal options are limited.

    Because of these problems and the “victimless” nature of drug crimes, most drug arrests are at the initiative of police officers. On one occasion, while driving slowly through a busy drug market early one morning, I saw dozens of African American addicts milling about while a smaller group of young men and boys were waiting to sell. Another officer in our squad had just arrested a drug addict for loitering. I asked my partner, “What’s the point of arresting people for walking down the street?” He replied: “Because everybody walking down the street is a criminal. In Canton or Greektown [middle-class neighborhoods] people are actually going somewhere. How many people here aren’t dirty? [‘None.’] It’s drugs…. If all we can do is lock ’em up for loitering, so be it.”

    The decision to arrest or not arrest those involved in the drug trade becomes more a matter of personal choice and police officer discretion than of any formalized police response toward crime or public safety.

    Although it is legally questionable, police officers almost always have something they can use to lock up somebody, “just because.” New York City police use “disorderly conduct.” In Baltimore it is loitering. In high- drug areas, minor arrests are very common, but rarely prosecuted. Loitering arrests usually do not articulate the legally required “obstruction of passage.” But the point of loitering arrests is not to convict people of the misdemeanor. By any definition, loitering is abated by arrest. These lockups are used by police to assert authority or get criminals off the street.

    Police have diverse opinions about the drug problem. I asked my sergeant if it was more effective to arrest drug addicts or to remain on and patrol the street to temporarily disrupt drug markets. He surprised me by choosing the former:

    Arresting someone sends a better message. Locking up junkies makes a difference. This squad used to have more arrests than five of the districts. We used to go out every night and just make arrest runs as a squad. Start with six cars, like a train. Fill one up, then you have five cars. Continue until you’re out of cars. At 1 am, everybody on a drug corner is involved with drugs. We locked them up for loitering. Got lots of drugs, a few weapons, too. After a few weeks, everything was quiet. Eventually it got so that we had to poach from other districts. We ran out of people to arrest. You think the neighbors didn’t like that?

    [Note: This happened in the late 1990s, before O’Malley’s now-maligned “zero-tolerance” push.]

  • Use and Abuse of Terry

    There are some excerpts from Cop in the Hood that seem particularly relevant in light of the DOJ’s report on the Baltimore police. This is from pp.30-31.]

    The 1968 Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio gives officers the right to frisk a suspect for weapons if they have reasonable suspicion that a suspect might be armed. A “Terry Frisk” is a limited pat-down of the outer clothing for weapons. This is distinct from and less than a “search” (for which probable cause is needed).

    While a limited pat-down of the outer clothing for weapons may seem benign, a frisk is very personal and intrusive. During any encounter, an officer can justify a frisk of a suspect by noting the drug trade in the area and the inherent link between drugs and violence. Legality depends on an officer’s perception of his or her own safety. And given the violence, officers in some neighborhoods have good reason to fear for their safety.

    The result of Terry v. Ohio is a huge legal loophole in which people in high-crime neighborhoods, usually young black men, are stopped and frisked far more often than people in other neighborhoods. Intended or not, constitutional rights depend on the neighborhood where you live. While race-blind in theory, the Terry Frisk (confusingly also known as a Terry Stop or Terry Search) gives police the legal right to stop and frisk most individuals in a violent, high-drug area.

    Technically a Terry Frisk may be used only to find weapons. But any contraband in plain view or “plain feel” is fair game, even if the found object was not the original goal. While reaching into someone’s pockets is technically and legally a search, one can easily feel drugs from outside a pocket while ostensibly frisking for weapons.

    In the police academy, trainees are instructed how to use the Terry Frisk to make drug lock ups. If drugs are found on a suspect during a frisk for weapons, officers should complete their search for weapons before addressing the issue of the suspected drugs. If a police officer were to stop a frisk for weapons upon finding drugs, it would be obvious–since drugs are not a direct threat to a police officer’s safety–that the intention of the search was not really officer safety. Once hands go in pockets, a legal frisk becomes an illegal search. The Terry Frisk explicitly does not give police the right to search or empty pockets. But on the street the line between a frisk and a search is not as clear-cut as the Supreme Court wants to believe. Necessary as the Terry Frisk is, in the war on drugs, officers on the street commonly exploit and abuse Terry v. Ohio.

  • Mr 34Stop

    From the DOJ report on Baltimore Police:

    This data reveals that certain Baltimore residents have repeated encounters with the police on public streets and sidewalks. Indeed, the data show that one African-American man was stopped 34 times during this period in the Central and Western Districts alone, and several hundred residents were stopped at least 10 times. Countless individuals–including Freddie Gray–were stopped multiple times in the same week without being charged with a crime.

    When I hear somebody is stopped 34 times, my first thought is “what the hell is he doing.” Indeed, this does not happen at random. (I’d be more worried about a non-criminal being stopped five times.) You don’t have to be charged with a crime to be an active criminal worthy of police attention. Stops (based on reasonable suspicion) can be a tool to get criminals to desist or change their illegal behavior. If this is targeted enforcement, so be it. Let’s not forget, Freddie Gray was a drug dealer. He was charged and convicted of plenty of crimes. The real question is what do we want police to do? Don’t we want police to have (legal) “repeated encounters” with drug dealers and those prone to shoot people?

    Here is a good response from somebody else:

    OK, so?

    Who was that guy stopped 34 times? Clearly they couldn’t get him on any serious crimes in this period, but who was he? What does he do for a living? Does he have a criminal history apart from any of these possible humbles? If so, what is it? And who are his associates, if any? What is their line of work? DoJ presumes that all must be treated equal. But modern policing has, and will continue to, begin targeting individuals based on data and intelligence. Everything from camera footage to CIs to past history to social network makes some people targets of police “proactive enforcement.” This is what that looks like in the cold type of a DoJ report: not pretty.

    But how does DoJ propose BPD (and all other departments) square this circle? Let’s assume for just a moment that Mr. 34Stops runs a sharp crew and moves several kilos per week into Sandtown and Bolton Hill. He’s never in the same room or parking lot as his product, and he has two or three henchmen who take care of the violence necessary to keep things running smooth. He stays off the phone and his people are loyal. Citizens in the neighborhoods he effectively controls are terrified and silent, but for a few nods and whispers. What is a district commander supposed to do about him?

    Now, this is speculation, admittedly. Mr. 34Stops could as easily be a life-long resident, truck-driver and crossing guard who works nights, rides the bus and, maybe, enjoys a can of beer while sitting on his own or a neighbor’s stoop sometimes. The DoJ–and the U.S. Constitution–does not distinguish between these two men. Everyone else does though, because they present very different threats to order and safety.

  • Initial thoughts on the DOJ Report on policing in Baltimore

    Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD.
    1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/
    2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/
    3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/
    4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/
    5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/
    6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/
    7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/
    8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/
    9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/
    10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/
    11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/

    My take away is that the report is 1/3 spot on, particularly in describing some of the dysfunction in the department (e.g. pp. 128-137) and some (but not all) of the abuses of Terry, 1/3 crazy and wrong (that goddamn 2007 kid on a motorbike is brought up as racist evil policing), and 1/3 bullshit and errors of commission (like the black power structure and majority-minority status of the city and police department).

    The optimist in me hopes it will be hammer that improves the department and the lives of police officers and Baltimoreans. The report brings up problems I’ve spent over a decade bitching about. So good. Cops don’t want to work in a dysfunctional police department. Maybe this will change that. (One can dream…)

    And I hate zero-tolerance policing. But today’s politicians are trying to pass the buck to the past for present failures. Stop blaming “the early 2000’s” for what is going on today. And those horrible O’Malley days when I was a cop? Crime and homicide were lower; and there were no riots. That should count for something.

    Too many of the examples of bad policing are A) good policing or B) completely misinterpreted/misunderstand on a situational and legal basis. And it bothers me because this isn’t an undergraduate paper I can correct. It’s the friggin Department of Justice! Of course some anecdotes are examples of bad policing. But take that that damn dragging a seven-year-old kid off his bike incident from 2007. That was an example of bad parenting (and bad reporting), not bad policing. If that’s used against police, I don’t know which anecdotes I can believe. Too many Terry Stops do become illegal searches. I know that. And too many cops are rude to people. I know that, too. Preach on and spread The Word. But is every damn complaint lodged against police God’s unalterable truth? Get real.

    I’ll write more later, but for now I’m going to cut and paste (with permission) from my good friend Leon Taylor. He grew up in the Eastern. We were exchanging emails last night as we were both reading the report until I finished and went to bed under the glow of rosy-fingered dawn.

    Police are a crime fighting entity, not a cost effective social outreach unit. Teach every officer that they police communities. Stop hiring white police who feel they’re some sort of heroes, and whose friends laud them for working in a “war zone.” Stop hiring Black Police who don’t understand that they’ll be disciplined more harshly than White Police.

    Will somebody please own up to the fact that the same politicians who criticize Police are responsible for bettering the communities that Police serve?

    The report only pays lip service to the real problem of socioeconomic disparity. People think of “The Police” as a faceless, soulless entity, when in fact, the “Police” experience more of the human condition than most scholars and politicians. You say “Stop Police Trauma”; I say “Stop Traumatizing Police.”

    Police everywhere are a direct reflection of the communities they serve. It’s extremely difficult to have a functional police department in a dysfunctional community. We need to stop using police as a societal band aid to cover wounds that require complex surgical procedures and intense rehabilitation. There’s no use touting police reform as the panacea to all of our social ills if that ends political reform. Political reform will have a lasting positive effect on the communities most at risk in this country.

    Fuck community policing. It’s just for show.

    And this:

    I know we try so hard to be cavalier about it, but the truth is we’re not staying up all night reading this document because we don’t care. Quite the contrary. We do. You can’t police Baltimore the right way and come away from it unchanged. You can’t forget what you’ve seen. I could sleep better if I could. And I can’t imagine how those charged to improve the quality of life for Baltimoreans can sleep at all.

    One one think “healing the city” would be a simple enough task, given the mayor appoints both the Police Commissioner and the Director of Public Safety. I mean, they do report directly to the Mayor’s office.

    Maybe the real issue here isn’t to investigate the police in Baltimore, but to investigate the other social services services in the affected neighborhoods. If they’re not up to par or non-existent, there’s no way the police service can be up to standard. The level of dysfunction in the community is simply too overwhelming.

    I’m reminded of former PC Batts, knocking on doors to talk to residents in high crime neighborhoods, never understanding, as any BPD rookie knows, that that’s a good way to get someone killed. I’m reminded of Mayor Rawlings-Blakes’ “those who wish to destroy” comment which precipitated the riots last year. Both are examples of presumably well meaning but woefully uninformed assessments of the realities of life in some Baltimore neighborhoods.

    Ferguson and Baltimore are two completely different situations, but both play extremely well to the masses. You can’t police Baltimore like Beverly Hills. Ideally, you should be able to — that should be the goal — but I’m too much of a realist to suggest it’s even remotely possible. I’m all for making things better, call it police reform, if you will.

    But we also need political reform. We need a societal overhaul to even begin to address the issues that drive violent crime in places like Baltimore. Where else in the U.S. (or the world) would anything less than 300 homicides a year for a population of 620,000 be cause for celebration?

  • Prequel to the DOJ BPD report

    Dan Rodricks in the Sun:

    Anticipating the Department of Justice’s release of its civil rights investigation, Davis clearly staked out a position as the man who is trying to fix the department’s broken relationship with large sectors of the community it serves.

    …

    Getting ahead of police reform is no easy task, but it’s much easier than getting ahead of all the shooting.

    …

    When Mosby dropped all remaining charges in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, she stood on a street in West Baltimore and angrily accused certain police officers of sabotaging the state’s case. She went further than that, asserting that police officers have an “inherent bias” when they investigate fellow officers. … The takeaway from her screed was this: You can’t count on cops to investigate cops. “As you can see,” she said, “whether investigating, interrogating, testifying, corroborating or even complying with the state, we’ve all bore witness to an inherent bias that is a direct result of when police police themselves.”

    Turns out, as Mosby spoke, Cagle was going to trial for shooting a burglary suspect who had already been wounded by two fellow officers. Those two officers testified against Cagle for his use of unnecessary force. That this happened shortly after Mosby’s angry declaration was remarkable. Not only did the Cagle jury hear the testimony of two officers, Isiah Smith and Keven Leary, it saw clear evidence — literally, from an interrogation video — of an earnest investigation by the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division.

    …

    Mosby knows, sooner or later, she’ll be judged by the same standards by which she asked voters to judge Bernstein. While some Baltimoreans will reward her for prosecuting cops, many more, sick of their city being one of the most violent in the country, want to see her get convictions of murderers and rapists. She needs a full partnership with Davis to make that happen.

    I’m on page 90 of DOJ report. I’ll finished it before I go to bed and write something about it tomorrow. It’s late.

  • Lor Scoota got killed

    Lor Scoota got killed

    Yeah, I had never heard of him either. But apparently he was a big deal to a good number people in Baltimore. They liked his music. So what does he stand for? I don’t know. Google and read up if you want. What’s amazing is all the tears shed by some people who had never heard of him.

    I wrote this in a comment to another post:

    I’m not gonna lie. I never heard of Lor Scoota and don’t really give a damn about him. With my bougie life, I may not be keeping it real. I’ve been out of Baltimore too long.

    Artists and musicians should be cut a lot of slack. I mean, Willie Nelson is an unrepentant and repeated drug criminal! So yeah, do the bird flu dance all you want and have some fun. That said, I wouldn’t my kids looking up to a gun-toting drug-dealing robbery-committing motor-dirt-bike-riding victim-of-a-targeted-shooting as a potential role model. But what do I know?

    Clarence Mitchell IV, host of the C4 Show (which I’ve been on a few times):

    asked listeners to look past Lor Scoota’s past and recognize the difference he made in the community at the time he was killed.

    But it’s not at all clear his criminal past was behind him. Not at all. But one a drug dealer doesn’t mean always a drug dealer. Jay-Z worked his way to respectability. I’ve had students who once slung crack. Maybe Scoota was targeted by a hater. Maybe by a criminal rival. Maybe both. But there’s so much BS from people who don’t live in Baltimore and don’t have to be afraid of criminals. There’s so much BS from people who are able to relax and take a nap in the sun in a public park without fear the 12 O’Clock Boys are going to zoom through on ATVs and run you over.

    And there was a tense moment involving police.

    (photo: Baynard Woods)

    This is the best I’ve read, from The Baltimore Chop (worth reading it all, really. But FYI Bird Fluwas Scoota’s one big hit. In half of Baltimore.):

    If Bird Flu was the sound of the streets, it is also an anthem of everything that is wrong with this city. It’s not possible to write a song like that without having lived the experience firsthand. Sure, you could try… but you’d end up sounding as corny and benign as the Beastie Boys did early in their career. It’s not possible to separate Lor Scoota’s life from his music. If he says in the song he was moving weight, he was moving weight.

    …

    And Scoota was carrying a gun, by the way. In this song he serves notice that he was in the habit of carrying a gun constantly. He was arrested with one at the airport a while back which had the serial number ground off. He also had a handful of domestic violence charges against him including a no-contact order. Personally, we don’t believe a serial woman-beater deserves much in the way of community support, catchy hooks notwithstanding. If you consider yourself a feminist, ally, or just someone who cares at all about the general well being of women, maybe sit quietly and think a while about whether or not you want to be the type of person willing to excuse violence against women because the perpetrator has earned some small measure of notoriety.

    …

    And lest you think Scoota was maybe some kind of lovable outlaw, some latter-day Billy the Kid or something we kindly invite you to pull your head out of your ass. Billy the Kid was certainly an awful person to be around, just like our neighbors have been and just like we imagine Scoota himself probably was. He wasn’t selling your cousin heroin or beating up your sister or waving his gun at you, but if it had been you you might feel differently about it, no?

    …

    There’s a wide gulf in Baltimore between people’s words and actions. That much is true of everyone; black and white, rich and poor. In the social media age everyone is hard at work spinning their own narrative every hour of every day but little of it has anything to do with the truth. In the Sun article about the speaking tour the author says Scoota and Moose ‘acknowledge an imperfect route’ to whatever ‘success’ they had achieved. Beg your pardon? What does that mean, exactly? An imperfect route? It means they were terrorizing their fucking neighborhoods and were dealing large quantities of narcotics. That’s not ‘an imperfect route’ it’s a goddamned life of crime. What’s more, it’s not clear that either Scoota or Moose have achieved real success by any measure. As far as we know they were self-releasing music, not exactly the fast lane on the road to riches. A little radio airplay in your hometown market and an Instagram of you with two or three actually famous rappers doesn’t amount to much in the great scheme of things.

    …

    But if you really want to know why the police came ready for trouble it’s because the likelihood of trouble starting was high. Grief does not preclude violence. After all, it was less than a month ago a West Baltimore man shot his father in a church at his own brother’s funeral. To assert that there were no drug dealers, no gang members, and no armed people in that crowd is either disingenuous or foolish. The police know, and the whole city should know that it only takes one half-assed gangster goddamned fool like Meech to turn up in a highly volatile crowd, discharge a gun, and cause utter chaos.

    …

    There are at least three official funeral related events scheduled to take place soon. All of them represent a volatile combination of grief, pain, hatred, resentment, ignorance and anger which could, if not very carefully managed, boil over into further chaos.

    Maybe you think criminal behavior is “normal” for Baltimore, or somehow OK for “those people.” You know, who are you to judge? Well, shame on you. Talk about the bigotry of low expectations! Criminal behavior is not normal; it’s not good. Not even — especially even –in Baltimore City. I say this in particular to my white liberal readers who don’t know Baltimore and also to many of the journalists who just learned of this guy and managed to scratch off a quick sob story in his honor.

    You think it’s cool other people, poor black boys and girls in Baltimore are being told to emulate Lor Scoota as some noble role model? Are you out of your mind? “We selling scramble coke and smack (X7), keep them junkies coming back.” This is the city of Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, Vivien Thomas, Frederick Douglass, Cab Calloway, David Hasselhoff, and ten of thousands of regular people who have wage-paying jobs. They are the city’s role models.

  • Politics, Police, and Prosecution

    One thing that may be worth considering is the position of former commissioner Anthony Batts and current Commissioner Kevin Davis as to whether or not the officers should have been criminally charged in the first place.

    Perhaps Batts thought of Gray’s death as more of civil issue (which was the correct position) and Batts pushed back against the mayor and state’s attorney. It’s entirely possible that before the cops were indicted on May 1, 2015, there were some meetings between Davis and city leaders in which Davis agreed with the elected officials. Batts was fired on July 8th, and Davis took over. Presumably this eased some pressure on Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and State’s Attorney Mosby.

    It would be a shame if somebody got the top job by being willing to throw six officers under the bus in a mistaken criminal prosecution. Or is such backroom drama just business as usual?

    On the plus side, Davis has done a better job at actually being commissioner.

  • All in the Family (II): Another Nexus of Baltimore Violence

    All in the Family (II): Another Nexus of Baltimore Violence

    Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, as I did a few days ago. But today the Baltimore Sun has a feature about a man who has had two sons murdered. Tragic. It really is. Nobody should have to deal with one child murdered, much less two.

    But being cynical and a former Baltimore cop, I’m thinking maybe this is a case of, “you play the game, you take your chances.” Zeus does not throw random thunderbolts. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. You get the idea? Did they “have it coming?”

    But read Colin Campbell’s sob story. These kids are presented as nothing but lost angels:

    “He was my best friend,” said [father] Nedrick Johnson, 38.

    The Johnson brothers played pickup sports and rode dirt bikes since they were 5 or 6 years old, their father said. “They used to sneak them out of the house and everything,” he said.

    Both were athletic: Darrian played quarterback, and Darrius power lifted competitively, he said. Darrius shot pool, could do a flip off a wall with a running start, and would sometimes ride his dirt bike with one hand — or none.

    …

    Nedrick Johnson scrolled through photos of his sons on his cellphone: standing in front of the Christmas tree, sitting together at a family get-together, diving into a pool in tandem, popping wheelies on their dirt bikes.

    …

    Darrian was caring, helpful, loyal, supportive and fiercely protective, his friends said.

    …

    “He was the type to call you out of the blue,” she said. “‘You good?’ ‘I’m just checking on you.’ ‘You need anything?’”

    …

    Homes said Darrian was a great cook and a lifelong friend.

    “He lived his life,” he said. “No matter if he died young, he lived his life to the fullest.”

    All that and a “great cook”? My God! Norman Rockwell couldn’t present such a dreamy All-American Family.

    But it made my Spidey-Sense tingle. Maybe you shouldn’t be “living life to the fullest” when you’re 19 years old. When I was 19 I was studying in college and waiting tables. But my first warning sign was “popping wheelies on their bikes.” Might seem wholesome to you. I love bicycles! Do you picture something like this?

    (This guy is not a Johnson brother)

    But in Baltimore we know what “dirt bike” means. (In a tweet, Colin confirmed “motor”.) “Dirt bikes” are horrible for quality-of-life. And they kill people (eight between 1997 and 2000, as I have in my notes, but more since. Update: this (dirt bike seriously hurts pedestrian, runs) and this (car hits dirtbike, driven get beaten), and even this. But by some bleeding-heart narrative I don’t understand, riding illegally and dangerously is just kids expressing themselves, even part of an uprising against racist cops.

    I respectfully beg to differ.

    First of all, good parents don’t let their under-10 kids “sneak out” with any bike, much less a motor bike. “Oh, that Junior. You turn your head for a second and next you know he’s doing wheelies on North Avenue!” Imagine the flack you’d get if you simply let your kid ride a bicycle without a helmet! You somehow it’s OK for other children — poor black kids in Baltimore — to do no-hand tricks on motorbikes while going the wrong way in traffic?!

    And, get this — pay attention because this is important — Baltimore police officers have gotten in trouble for trying to stop 7-year-olds from riding motorized ATVs in the streets. Why? I don’t know, but I suspect because when people read, “police removed a 7-year-old from his bike and detained his mom,” they’re thinking the kind of bike with cards in the spokes, so the cops must be assholes. It lead to media and public outrage against the police. And also a multi-year lawsuit from the boy’s mother (really from a lawyer who thought he could get a cut of the city payout.) The city actually fought the case and won.

    [Update: That kid on a bike story got mentioned in the DOJ’s 2016 report on the Baltimore Police Department as an example of how systemic problems are. No, not in Baltimore. But in the BPD. It makes no sense.]

    Here’s what I found from a brief search of Maryland’s online criminal records.

    Darrius Johnson — the brother killed in a double-shooting in 2015 — was born in October 1995 and had a moderate criminal record: assault, trespass, escape, burglary, assault, and trespass on school grounds. But keep in mind this record only covers the last two years of his life. Victims may beg to differ, but crimes don’t officially count until you’re an adult. (And there’s even a movement to raise the age.)

    Darrius’s brother, the one just killed, Darrian “Doddy” Johnson, seems to have stayed on the good side of the law with no criminal record. [Update: I originally posted incorrect information here that listed a Darrian Johnson with a different DOB and address. This was kindly corrected by a commenter. Corrections are always welcome.]

    But the real criminal seems to be their father. He’s no father of the year. For starters there’s the murder charge he faced when he was 15! (The disposition of the murder charge isn’t clear — hey, maybe he didn’t do it — but I suspect that when the case was booted up to circuit court, he got charged as a juvenile and the records were sealed.) There’s a first-degree rape charge at 18 (got null prossed, as ineffective prosecution could be seen as form of ghetto criminal entitlement). (There’s also the issue of some fraud case with the State Employees Credit Union that he lost for $34,000 plus court fees.)

    And then there’s the usual mélange of battery, assault, drugs possession with intent, more assault, drug dealing, more drugs, handgun violations, more drug dealings, assault, more handguns and drugs (not marijuana), armed robbery, and another handgun violation.

    The three sons mentions in the article may just be the kids he willingly took responsibility for. Paternity suits indicate at least two other sons (including a Nedrick Jr. already been convicted of a handgun violation). In fact, best I can tell (I may be wrong) Senior had three sons in two years! [Update: originally I had the time frame wrong.]

    Reading a fluff pieces like this in the papers, you might begin understand why cops hate “the media.” Neighbors call 911 and complain about shitty and violent public drug dealing neighbors over the years and over the generations. Police respond day after day after day to the crimes of this family. We pay and expect police to deal with the Johnsons.

    Let me say the taboo: Nedrick is a bad father and perhaps even a bad person. There. I’ve said it so cops don’t have to.

    Like the Antonios [sic] Addison and the Johnsons, some individual families are personally responsible for a disproportionate amount of violence and pain in Baltimore. Individual people on individual blocks actually are the problem. This isn’t some abstract theory of crime. This really is about “these people” not in the abstract offensive sense but in the literal sense of these people with these names who live in this house and commit these crimes.

    Police have to deal with the micro problems, the individuals, the Addisons and the Johnsons. Police don’t deal with the macro issues of social justice. And since nobody else (government, church, school, welfare, prosecutors) seems to be able to deal with these problems, we pay and pray that police do. And then if and when something goes wrong, we put the police on trial? I doesn’t make sense.

    Does this matter? I think it does. Because when you read about a poor father with two murdered sons, you may think think he deserves your sympathy. Hell, maybe he does. Like, despite all the father’s efforts, the mean streets of Baltimore done reached out and grabbed his children. But keep in mind it’s this very man that make the streets of Baltimore so mean.

    Who do you think shoots and kills and assaults people every year? The same criminals who sue police departments. Freddie Gray’s death was tragic; it may even be criminal, but that doesn’t mean he’s a role model on par with Martin Luther King, Jr. Keith Davis Jr. is an armed criminal who shot at and was shot by police. Even the out-to-prosecute-cops State’s Attorney agreed. That should be the end of the story. But it’s not.

    False narratives matter because we’re not being honest. When we portray criminals as innocent victims and give violent criminals the moral high ground, we perpetuate the violence.

  • All in the Family

    Here’s another one for the record books.

    This isn’t the first time somebody has been shot at a funeral. Kevin Rector and Justin George of the Sun observe, “Gunfire has marred other services in recent years to mourn deceased victims of violence in Baltimore.”

    And this is probably not even the first time a father has been shot at his son’s funeral. Gosh, you might be thinking, what could possibly be worse?

    Well… how about being shot at your son’s funeral by your own son, the deceased brother.

    Antonio Addison was killed on May 25 in West Baltimore (less than a mile from where Freddie Gray was arrested). And today, at Antonio’s funeral, Antonio’s father was shot by his own son. Yes, Antonio’s brother done shot their pa.

    Police said the older Addison and his father got into an argument over an obituary written by a family member for the younger Addison brother. The older brother’s name was omitted, his grandfather, Charles Addison told The Baltimore Sun on Tuesday.

    Classy. (Update: Though I bet there’s more to the story, maybe this is what happens when everybody in the family has the same name.)

    Police spokesman T.J. Smith said called this, an “open and shut” case. He added:

    I can’t even begin to explain and categorize how ridiculous some of the stuff that we have to respond to is. And this certainly underscores that.

    Call me judgemental, but I’m going to go out on limb and say this behavior is wrong. I mention this no-brainer because I can hear cops — white and black alike — say, “something is fucked up with these people.” And then I can hear tender outsiders gasping in a politically correct way, saying, “I can’t believe they just said ‘these people’!” So people don’t say anything and violence continues.

    There are these people — not all of any group, race, or neighborhood — who choose to do dumb violent shit. And cops (and nurses and teachers and paramedics) have to deal with these people every day. Really, what else can you say about a family that shoots each other at a funeral? Go ahead: blame racism, poverty, unemployment, lead, under-education. Sure, those all matter. But no, none of those actually makes you bring a gun to your brother’s funeral and shoot your father.

    A lot of people somehow manage to grow up with less than nothing — on the short end of the stick, without a full deck of cards, holding an empty bucket that leaks, with nothing put a broken spork in their mouth — and still don’t shoot anybody, much less their father. See, this is the culture/pathology issue that is all but taboo to bring up in polite society. But if we don’t consider culture and the inter-generational transmission of violence as a negative force, we cede this discussion to right-wing kooks and racists. I don’t know what the answer is, but ignoring bad culture won’t make it go away.

    [This may be as good as killing your brother over a Turkey drumstick on Thanksgiving.]

    Update: Antonio Addison Sr, the shot father (DOB 2/1969), has 33 cases in his rap sheeting including: attempted murder, kidnapping, murder, drug dealing, armed robbery, handgun.

    Antonio Addison Jr (DOB 12/1990) presumably Antonio’s brother and the shooter (you read it here first) of Antonio Sr, 23 cases: Assault, carjacking, drug dealing, resisting arrest.

    Antonio Deandre Addison III (DOB 7/1993), presumably the deceased: 26(!) traffic violations in two years, domestic violence, child support, drug dealing, child support, drug dealing, drug dealing, and — this is my favorite — spitting in a public place. That’s the kind of ticket I might give to a drug dealer in order to legally arrest him for being an asshole. The case was dismissed.

    And collectively, with no listed date of birth, there are another 25 or so cases against one of these Antonio Addisons. This is a family of violent drug dealing criminals.

    So when the Addisons are out on the corner doing their thing, what exactly do you want police to do? And when somebody runs from their drug corner, should police just let them be? And when the press interviews one of these guys (because when the press goes slumming and looks for people to say something about Freddie Grayand police, these are the people you’ll find hanging out) why in the world would you believe what they have to say?

    Maybe it’s more productive to ask how we can possibly help the next generation. But if you were a teacher, would you want 6-year-old Antonio Addison IV in your class?

    [Update: my next “all in the family” installment.]