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Tag: Baltimore

  • Batts says he’d reform the police department if only it weren’t for all those pesky police officers.

    Batts doubles down against the rank and file.

    I’m not quite certain whom Batts is trying to win over with his op-ed in the Sun. It seems like maybe he should have thought twice before pressing the send button.

    The first half of Batts’ article is spent recounting how bad the police department used to be, before Batts showed up to save the day:

    The decade before I arrived saw more than 50 officers arrested, according to news reports. The public consciousness is filled with names like William King and Antonio Murray, who were sentenced to hundreds of years in federal prison for robbing drug suspects…. The cycle of scandal, corruption and malfeasance seemed to be continuing without abatement.

    Now I was already gone a decade before he arrived. So maybe the department went to hell the second I left, but I doubt it. Now King and Murray were criminal cops caught up in the war on drugs. They were arrested (thanks to the Stop Snitching video) and convicted after taking the stand in their own defense.

    The tow-truck scandal was less serious but more odd. It was like a throwback to low-level corruption from the 19 friggin’ 60s. But since it involved more officers, it is worth looking at. This scandal was also very much linked to a 2006 effort to hired Spanish speakers officers: “Baltimore can also lure Puerto Rican applicants with higher pay: The department’s starting salary is $37,000, compared with $25,000 for a starting job in a Puerto Rican police agency.”

    Well perhaps it would have been better to simply offer Spanish classes in Baltimore.

    Because in 2008 it seemes like the whole damn Puerto Rican police department got busted. (And the Puerto Rico PD apparently still hasn’t cleaned up their act.) So apparently some high-ranking genius went down to Puerto Rico and poached a dirty police department of some of its dirty police officers. But hey, you want US citizen Spanish speakers and only have $37 grand to pay? I got a deal for you! (To be clear, many but not all of the officers caught in that scandal were linked to that hire. Likewise, not all the officers hired were dirty.)

    Anyway, Batts is right about this:

    Many officers will be unhappy reading these words. Many want me to outright defend the department and say nothing is wrong with the way this organization engages in police work. For the overwhelming majority that is true. However, when people go on television wearing masks, allege themselves to be police officers and are cloaked in the shadows espousing their own indifference to violence as children are shot, I am troubled. This is not the Baltimore Police Department that I know.

    One problem is that Batts has never known the Baltimore Police Department. Or Baltimore.

    Then Batts takes on black officers:

    I challenge the leadership of The Vanguard Justice Society, an African American advocacy group for police officers, to stand and project their voice in this African American city, where people who look like them feel treatment is unfair. Speak out against the beating of a resident at a bus stop or the selling of narcotics on the back porch of a police station. Where is the concern over scores of African Americans arrested and college scholarships lost? Don’t allow yourself to be used as a tool of a bygone strategy from times long since past.

    Did the police commissioner just call his black officers a bunch of Uncle Toms? Well, that’s not going to go over well. Now the Vanguard Society has never been an advocate for business as usual in the policing world. In some ways black police organizations exist as opposition to the older, whiter, more conservative FOP/PBA world. And to the credit of the Vanguard Society, they’ve also called out Batts for his job poorly done.

    Batts continues, taking credit where none is due:

    I will not apologize for bringing professionalism and integrity to the forefront while eliminating greed, corruption and intolerance from the rank and file. Policing in any environment is difficult on a good day. That does not mean we have, or should ever have, a blank check to treat the public with callous disregard.

    Continuing these reforms also means that organizations and individuals, who have profited, either materially or through position, will continue to fight against the reforms we are enacting. It means that people will throw mud, call into question my leadership, or lament days gone by. They will attack with innuendo, rumor and supposition. We will respond with fact, with evidence, with the things we have done.

    Reform is not easy. It comes with a cost. It is a cost we should be willing to pay for the future of our city.

    So what exactly are Batts’ reform accomplishments? Because I honestly do not know. Or is his vague call for “reform” simply be a cover for incompetence, a riot, a demoralized police department, and a homicide rate that has more than doubled? Because I think it’s the latter. So let me be the first to nominate Paddy Bauler for commissioner. He’s the Chicago politician famous for one line: “This city ain’t ready for reform!”

    [Batts, known for his fuzzy math (though he may be basically right about the number of officers terminated), comes out with these stats:

    We have seen the lowest police involved shootings since 2004, a 54 percent decrease in discourtesy complaints, a 45 percent decrease in excessive force complaints and lawsuits at the lowest levels in years.

    If true, that’s interested. Especially when combined with arrests being down 65 percent from their peak. It sure seems to go against the idea that the “uprising” was some inevitable rebellion against bad and over-aggressive policing.]

  • In memory of those killed at the New Hope A.M.E. Church

    A few times, if I was working late enough or some church started extra early enough, I would go to church to say hello. Personally I’m a non-believing Greek Orthodox. But there’s something about a good black church that can’t be matched. Some Sunday mornings I would just sit outside, just to provide a little security. (And also to enjoy the passing parade of hats.)

    Sometimes I would go inside. I liked to remind myself that the people on the corner didn’t represent everybody in the Eastern District. Going into church at 8AM I saw a different world, literally sharing the same block, than the one I had just policed for 8 hours. Inside, I was always immediately embraced (something I’ve never felt from my own church, to be honest) by the love and warmth of honest, love-filled, church-going Christians:

    Went to church this morning [February 12, 2001] at Bond and Eager. They were very warm and welcoming and immediately formed a little prayer circle, about 8 or 9 people in all. A good black-preacher-man prayer, I’d have to say. Nice voice, especially for so early in the morning. Said a prayer for us getting up today, and also for all the police working all night. I felt very warm…. I was happy I didn’t get a call during the prayer, but I did get one right after that.

    Never have I felt more welcome and love than I felt walking into a black church on duty, as a white cop in Baltimore. And after a long night working in the Eastern District, it was a nice feeling.

    Checking now, I see the church at Bond and Eager is the New Cornerstone Baptist Church. I was probably also attracted to the fact that it may be the only entirely Formstone-sided church in the world.

  • “Daily Measurables”

    My long-standing question related to Freddie Gray — no doubt tops on everyone’s list — has always been, “Why the hell were officers doing much of anything at 8:45 on a Sunday morning?!” The Baltimore Sun reports:

    About three weeks before Freddie Gray was chased … the office of prosecutor Marilyn Mosby asked police to target the intersection with “enhanced” drug enforcement efforts.

    …

    “It must be understood that Mrs. Mosby was directing these officers to one of the highest crime intersections in Baltimore City and asking them to make arrests, conduct surveillance, and stop crime,” the defense attorneys wrote. “Now, the State is apparently making the unimaginable argument that the police officers are not allowed to use handcuffs to protect their safety and prevent flight in an investigatory detention where the suspect fled in a high crime area and actually had a weapon on him.”

    …

    [Western District commander Maj.] Robinson told [Lt.] Rice and the other officers to begin a “daily narcotics initiative” focused on North Avenue and Mount Street, according to the email, and said he would be collecting “daily measurables” from them on their progress.

    “This is effective immediately,” Robinson wrote, noting that the officers should use cameras, informants and other covert policing tactics to get the job done.

    …

    “They want increased productivity, whether it be car stops, field interviews, arrests — that’s what they mean by measurables,”

    …

    Butler said that he has never seen such orders come from the state’s attorney’s office but that they come at the request of politicians and community leaders all the time.

    “Once you’re given an order, you have to carry it out. It’s just that simple,” he said.

    Defense attorneys want Mosby removed from the case because of her involvement in the police initiative.

  • Problems are the reason for your job

    Problems are the reason for your job

    But still, this is getting a little crazy.

    Click to embiggen.

    Before the riots, there were 0.58 homicides per day in Charm City. Since April 27, there have been 1.44 homicides per day. That’s an increase of 150 percent! (148%, to be precise) And the increase happened literally overnight. I don’t think that has happened before. Anywhere. Ever.

    Well, “it’s a gang war,” says the police commissioner. No, it’s not. “There’s enough narcotics on the streets of Baltimore to keep it intoxicated for a year,” says the police commissioner. If only!

    It’s summer. Shootings always goes up in the summer. Well, that is true. But that’s not the problem, either.

    According to BPD data, in the 28 days from May 10 to June 6, there were 127 shootings and homicides in 2015. Last year same time? 50. Robberies of convenience stores and gas stations? Up from 5 to 21. (Robberies overall are up “only” 32 percent compared to last year (28 days) and 12 percent year to date. But I do wonder if street robberies, the largest category, are less likely to be reported to police as of late.)

    Police matter. Leadership matter. And I don’t see things getting better in the police department until we see better leadership.

  • Baltimore police talk

    If you want to hear some details about Baltimore police and policing during after the riots, listen to this 20 minute discussion with Sgt Robinson and Lt Butler on WBAL with C4.

  • How about telling cops what they should do rather than what they shouldn’t do?

    Here’s my piece in today’s New York Times:

    Critics of police — and there have been a lot this past year — are too focused on what we don’t want police to do: don’t make so many arrests; don’t stop, question and frisk innocent people; don’t harass people; don’t shoot so many people, and for God’s sake don’t do any of it in a racially biased way.

    Those are worthy goals all, but none of this tells police what they *should* do. Some critics of police seem to forget that the job of police and crime prevention involves dealing with actual criminals.

    It’s a perfectly fine short piece. I do want to move the discussion away from what police shouldn’t do to what police should do. But I find the whole New York Times “room for debate” concept a bit disingenuous. Because there’s no debate. As a writer, I don’t know who else is writing or what they are going to say. It really would be nice to respond to other points and flesh out the issues. Instead “room for debate” is a collection of 300-400 word op-eds. Perhaps that is what it should called: “Room for too-short opinion pieces from people willing to write for free just to get a Times byline.” Doesn’t really roll of the tongue, admittedly.

    (On principle, in solidarity with free-lance writers everywhere, I try not to write for free, especially to for-profit businesses. Writing is work. And workers should be paid. A proper 800-1,000 word op-ed published in the print edition of the Times or the Washington Post or the Daily News or with CNN.com generally pays $200 – $300. A dollar figure that has actually decreased for some publication. Now the $300 I get from CNN is not a lot of money, mind you. But it really is the principle… and the money. And yet once again I wrote for the Times for free because it’s the Times. So much for principles. Or money. But it is pretty easy for me to hammer out 300 words.)

  • John Waters on the Riots

    From the Daily Beast:

    “I was around for the first Baltimore riots,” Waters says. “My first apartment in Baltimore was on 25th Street and Calvert, and there were tanks outside of my house. Everywhere was burning. Believe me, these riots were not as bad as those. But the riots in Baltimore this time were more widespread than what you saw on CNN, because if you watched CNN, you’d think it was that one big fire and Penn and North. The Penn-North neighborhood, I guarantee you, 80 percent of white people I know haven’t been there. I used to live [around] there. I used to live in an all-black neighborhood…The problem in Baltimore is that…there is also an equal number of poor white people. I really wish that they would team up. The poor people of Baltimore need to make it a class issue, not a race issue.”

  • David Simon and the Code

    This interview with David Simonis well worth reading in its entirety. Does he get some things wrong? Sure. Is he a little too believing that cops with the best stories are representative of the entire police department? Sure. (Among other things, drug-free zones were never used to arrest people. Too much paperwork. But that change the horrible concept of a “no-rights” zone.) Still, as usual, Simon gets a lot more right than wrong. And when it comes to the big picture, he’s very very right.

    Simon also explains why, when it comes to crime stats, I only really trust homicides:

    In the beginning, under Norris, he did get a better brand of police work and we can credit a legitimate 12 to 15 percent decline in homicides. Again, that was a restoration of an investigative deterrent in the early years of that administration. But it wasn’t enough to declare a Baltimore Miracle, by any means.

    …

    [Q: So they cooked the books.]

    Oh yeah. If you hit somebody with a bullet, that had to count…. In the Southwest District, a victim would try to make an armed robbery complaint, saying , ‘I just got robbed, somebody pointed a gun at me,’ and what they would do is tell him, well, okay, we can take the report but the first thing we have to do is run you through the computer to see if there’s any paper on you. Wait, you’re doing a warrant check on me before I can report a robbery? Oh yeah, we gotta know who you are before we take a complaint. You and everyone you’re living with? What’s your address again? You still want to report that robbery?

    …

    I mean, think about it. How does the homicide rate decline by 15 percent, while the agg assault rate falls by more than double that rate. Are all of Baltimore’s felons going to gun ranges in the county? Are they becoming better shots? Have the mortality rates for serious assault victims in Baltimore, Maryland suddenly doubled? Did they suddenly close the Hopkins and University emergency rooms and return trauma care to the dark ages? It makes no sense statistically until you realize that you can’t hide a murder, but you can make an attempted murder disappear in a heartbeat, no problem.

    But these guys weren’t satisfied with just juking their own stats. No, the O’Malley administration also went back to the last year of the previous mayoralty and performed its own retroactive assessment of those felony totals, and guess what? It was determined from this special review that the preceding administration had underreported its own crime rate, which O’Malley rectified by upgrading a good chunk of misdemeanors into felonies to fatten up the Baltimore crime rate that he was inheriting. Get it? How better than to later claim a 30 or 40 percent reduction in crime than by first juking up your inherited rate as high as she’ll go. It really was that cynical an exercise.

    Mayor O’Malley personally showed me that binder of reclassified stats in 2001. I couldn’t analyze it of course. But yes, O’Malley — right or wrong — did reclassify the crime rate up after he took office.

    And Simon continues:

    We end the drug war. I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the fucking drug war…. The drug war gives everybody permission. And if it were draconian and we were fixing anything that would be one thing, but it’s draconian and it’s a disaster.

    …

    You didn’t ask me about the rough rides, or as I used to hear in the western district, “the bounce.” It used to be reserved — as I say, when there was a code to this thing, as flawed as it might have been by standards of the normative world — by standards of Baltimore, there was a code to when you gave the guy the bounce or the rough ride. And it was this: He fought the police. Two things get your ass kicked faster than anything: one is making a cop run. If he catches you, you’re 18 years old, you’ve got fucking Nikes, he’s got cop shoes, he’s wearing a utility belt, if you fucking run and he catches you, you’re gonna take some lumps. That’s always been part of the code. Rodney King.

    But the other thing that gets you beat is if you fight. So the rough ride was reserved for the guys who fought the police, who basically made — in the cop parlance — assholes of themselves.

    …

    I’m talking in the vernacular of cops, not my own — but even in the vernacular of what cops secretly think is fair, this is bullshit, this is a horror show. There doesn’t seem to be much code anymore – not that the code was always entirely clean or valid to anyone other than street cops, and maybe the hardcore corner players, but still it was something at least.

    Now I never heard of “the bounce.” Granted I didn’t work in the Western. But Simon best knows an earlier era of policing than I experienced. What’s always, in police circles, looked back on as the “good ol’ days: the “rough ride,” the “beat-and-release,” the barefoot drop-off, the street corner mass macing? They all had their time. But times change.

    I do not believe that the wagonman gave Freddie Gray a “rough ride.” And there was another prisoner in the van who said as much. Cops knew Gray as low-level hustler and occasional C.I. He didn’t fight cops. He did what he had to do to get by. That’s not the worst crime in the world. But here’s what interesting, as told to me: Gray wouldn’t resist arrest, but he would go limp every time he saw the wagon: “I think he was an undiagnosed claustrophobic. I could arrest him with no problem. But he would go limp when he saw that wagon. He didn’t like the wagon.”

  • Too many? Too few? Or just right?

    Arrests are way down in Baltimore. But not just this month (though they are) but over many years.

    There were 40,000 arrests in 2014 (3,300 a month). In 2003 there were 114,000 arrests. Like I said, arrests are way down. This is worth repeating because it goes against a narrative that the riots were somehow the inevitable result of overaggressive policing and too many arrests.

    Now of course arrests could be down and Baltimore could still be over-policed — and the war on drugs continues to be the problem — but even if over-policing were a problem, Baltimore and America is less overpoliced now that it was a decade ago.

    I think we need to ask just what number of arrests would be around right. Generally. I don’t mean this as a quota. And I know this doesn’t help day-to-day policing. As a police officer, you don’t make arrests based on some arbitrary ideal yearly goal. I know that.

    But as part of society, as an thinking person, as an American, it’s fair to come up with some rough number of arrests at which we can collectively say, “yeah, that seems about right.” Because the status quo seems to be to criticize cops for making too many arrests, and then criticize cops again when they make fewer. What do we want police to do?

    Take arrests in New York City. There were about 315,000 adults arrest year for the past 20 years. That’s some variance, to be sure, but it’s all in the same big ballpark. The number was lowest in 2003 (279,000) and highest at about 345,000 (in 1998 and 2010).

    Questioning arrest numbers allows us to ask, for instance, what good NYC got from a 20 percent increase in arrests between 2003 and 2010? Not much, I would say. See, if you can keep crime down and quality of life up, certainly fewer arrests are better, other things being equal. Arrests are harmful to the people arrested and their family. Also, if nothing else, arrests are expensive.

    Now Baltimore City went from 2,677 arrest in April of this year to what will probably be about 1,600 in May. That’s a big drop. But policing in Baltimore has changed. And since crime is up, people are saying police aren’t doing their job. But it does beg the question, what is the right number of arrests for a high-crime city of 620,000 people?

    If you refuse to answer that, that’s fine. But then don’t complain that arrests numbers are too high or too low. And I don’t want arrest number to be a goal. I can’t state that clearly enough. But I do think arrest numbers are a useful crude indicator of discretionary police activity (not a very good one, but useful nevertheless).

    For years, critics — myself included — said there were too many arrests in Baltimore. 84,000 in 1999; 111,529 in 2003. I don’t care if everybody arrested was guilty of whatever. It’s just too many arrests.

    And then arrests declined (25 percent from 2004-2009). Homicide and crime also went down. Win-win!

    But in 2007, the Baltimore Sun reported on declining arrests:

    Some complain the pendulum has swung to the other extreme — police aren’t doing enough to quell violence.

    Israel Cason… said it is less common to see police “slamming people on the ground, emptying their pockets on the street.”

    “You don’t see that too much no more,” he said.

    The downside, he said, is that drug dealers are congregating on street corners again without getting challenged.

    “They know what [the drug dealers] are doing, but [the police] don’t do nothing,” Cason said. Referring to free samples of drugs that dealers circulate through the community, he said: “We got testers out here every day, the police stand right there with them. They went from one extreme to the other.”

    But arrests kept getting lower. And so did homicides. Again, win-win.

    Last year, 2014, there were just under 40,000 arrests in the city. Homicides were a low (for Baltimore) 211. Seems like job well done, right? But if 40,000 is good, is 20,000 even better? Well, not if that more recent drop is because patrol officers aren’t able to do their job. And the department isn’t willing to support them when they do.

    So say what you want about the causes of the riots. (Myself, I like to blame rioters and Baltimore’s too large criminal class.) In 2014 arrests were down 50 percent over six years and 65 percent from 2003. So it doesn’t seem like Baltimore police are currently locking up too many people for no reason. Francis Barry talks about this in BloombergView:

    If the riot was fueled by anger not only over police brutality but also police arrests for low-level crimes… it’s a good thing the rioters were too young to light a match or loot a store in 1998 or 2003.

    It’s actually well worth reading his whole Barry piece, and his earlier article, too, in which he takes on David Simon and points out, among other things, that “the national decline in arrests runs counter to the idea that America has become increasingly over-policed, particularly in poor minority communities.” So what’s the problem in Baltimore. Could it not be, at least in part, that criminals just don’t like police?

  • Deadliest month in Baltimore. Ever.

    The Sun reported that this month has been the fifth deadliest in 40 years.

    Actually, by rate, since Baltimore has fewer people than it used to have, May has been the most deadly month ever.

    In number of dead, the deadliest months have been:

    Aug 1972: 45

    Dec 1971: 44

    Aug 1990: 42

    Aug 1996: 39

    May 2015: 42

    But the homicide rate (per 100,000) for these months are, in rank order:

    May 2015: 6.7

    Aug 1990: 5.7

    Aug 1996: 5.7

    Aug 1972: 5.0

    Dec 1971: 4.8

    And it’s worth pointing out that May isn’t over yet. (Also, May isn’t August, the usual deadliest month.)

    Also, those homicides rates are for one month and still higher than the yearly national rate. Put another way, even if no other people had been murdered in Baltimore before May, and even if no more people were killed from today until 2016, Baltimore would still have an above average annual homicide rate just based on the May killings.

    Population figures are here.

    UPDATED June 4, 2015