Pubdate: Tue, 25 Aug 2015
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2015 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37

PROFILING FREDDIE GRAY

Attorney General Frosh's commendable effort to stamp out conscious 
bias in law enforcement is only the first step to ensuring justice

Attorney General Brian E. Frosh is poised to take a commendable step 
today in the effort to restore trust between the police and minority 
communities by issuing a set of guidelines designed to stop officers 
from using race, ethnicity or other characteristics as a factor in 
routine law enforcement. But as an investigation of Baltimore police 
practices by The Sun's Catherine Rentz makes clear, it will be no 
easy thing to translate the principles Mr. Frosh is articulating into 
discernible change in neighborhoods like Freddie Gray's 
Sandtown-Winchester. AMY DAVIS/BALTIMORE SUN Attorney General Brian 
E. Frosh is seeking to sharply limit the influence of racial and 
other biases on police work.

Last year, a few months after the killing of Michael Brown in 
Ferguson, Mo., the U.S. Justice Department issued new guidelines for 
how and when federal law enforcement agents could use race, 
ethnicity, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual 
orientation, disability or religion as a basis for action.

Mr. Frosh is seeking to extend those guidelines to state and local 
law enforcement in Maryland, saying that in most circumstances, race 
and other such characteristics should not be a factor in police action at all.

As Mr. Frosh makes clear, standards are different if police are 
investigating a particular crime and have relevant information, such 
as an eyewitness account providing a physical description of a 
suspect. Even then, officers need to consider the credibility of the 
source. But the main thrust of the guidelines focuses on cases when 
police are operating without any information other than their observations.

That has great resonance in light of the Justice Department's report 
about discriminatory police practices in Ferguson, where a 
predominantly white police department seemed to view citations of 
African-Americans for minor offenses as a convenient means of funding 
the city's budget.

But what about Freddie Gray? Police were targeting his neighborhood 
for heightened enforcement, evidently as a result, at least in part, 
of a request from State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby. Police commanders 
in the Western District translated that into a demand for 
"deliverables" - that is, stops, arrests and other measurable 
evidence of active policing.

On the morning of April12, officers approached the street corner 
where Gray was hanging out with a friend.

He reportedly made eye contact with one of the officers and ran. 
Police gave chase and, according to the indictment of officers 
involved, physically restrained him and searched him, eventually 
discovering a knife that they said was illegal for him to carry.

They placed him in the back of a police van - eventually shackling 
him hand and foot and, according to official accounts, placing him 
face down on the floor with no seat belt or other restraint.

The officers are also accused of ignoring his repeated requests for 
medical attention.

By the time he was taken from the van, he had suffered a severe 
spinal cord injury from which he would die a week later.

Did any of that happen because Freddie Gray was black?

Ms. Mosby, who asked for the stepped-up enforcement, is black.

About half of the Police Department is black, the chief at the time 
was black, and so is the mayor he worked for. Three of the six 
officers indicted in Freddie Gray's death are black.

As much as the Black Lives Matter movement has focused on 
mistreatment of African-Americans by white police officers, the story 
in Baltimore is more complex.

In an article in Sunday's Sun, Ms. Rentz presented an analysis of 
data showing that while the number of arrests for so-called nuisance 
crimes has dropped in recent years, blacks are still 
disproportionately targeted.

Baltimore is about 64 percent African-American, but blacks accounted 
for 93 percent of those arrested for loitering and 84 percent of 
those arrested for trespassing in 2014, Ms. Rentz reported.

Before possession of small amounts of marijuana was legalized, nearly 
92 percent of those arrested for that crime in Baltimore were black, 
according to an ACLU analysis.

As it did in Ferguson, the Justice Department is investigating 
Baltimore's Police Department to determine whether those disparities 
are racially motivated.

But the answer is likely not that simple. Police saturate high-crime 
neighborhoods, as they were doing in Sandtown on the morning Freddie 
Gray was arrested.

In Baltimore, as a legacy of generations of official and then de 
facto segregation, those neighborhoods are almost entirely black and 
disproportionately poor. Aggressive law enforcement gives criminal 
records to large numbers of people for offenses that would go 
unnoticed elsewhere, diminishing their prospects and increasing the 
chances that they will engage in ways large and small in the illegal economy.

That means more crime, more law enforcement and the perpetuation of a 
vicious cycle. It's not necessarily that the officers chased Freddie 
Gray because he was black, it's that he almost certainly wouldn't 
have been on that corner if he hadn't been.

Mr. Frosh is right.

There is no place for racial profiling in Maryland law enforcement. 
His office needs to do all the training, monitoring and analysis it 
can to make sure it doesn't occur.

But the rest of us need to remember that eliminating conscious bias 
is only the first step.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom