The Ordinary Outrage of the Baltimore Police Report

By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker

14 August 16

t its most obvious, the Department of Justice report on the Baltimore Police Department added a hundred sixty-three pages to the great tower of foregone conclusions. In short, the Baltimore Police Department engaged in a pattern of stopping African-Americans without any real justification. Between 2010 and 2015, there were three hundred thousand police stops, of which less than four per cent resulted in a citation or arrest. Forty-four per cent of those stops occurred in two small, mostly black neighborhoods, and ninety-five per cent of people who were stopped ten times or more were African-American.

But the most striking part of the report on Baltimore is the extent to which it is interchangeable with the reports on race and policing that have come out of Chicago, Cleveland, Ferguson, and Newark in the past two years. The reports were most often the product of a particular outrage that had initially been met with official denials or understatements, and then with grudging acknowledgment of wrongdoing, followed by a federal examination of what went wrong. The Chicago report was commissioned by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the volatile days after a video of a seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a police officer was made public. The Cleveland report—the second such examination in twelve years—came in the wake of a series of incidents, most notably a car chase in which officers fired a hundred and thirty-seven bullets into a vehicle containing two unarmed people. Three weeks before the report was released, a Cleveland police officer, Timothy Loehmann, shot Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old who was playing with a toy gun in a public park. The Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri, came after Michael Brown, who was eighteen, was shot to death by the police officer Darren Wilson. The Department of Justice found Wilson’s use of force justifiable—at the same time that it found that the Ferguson Police Department was egregiously biased and mercenary.

Toss this damning collection into the air and it would be nearly impossible to determine which pages belong where. The death of Freddie Gray, while he was in the custody of the Baltimore police, didn’t outrage people because of its unique horror. It outraged people because he was recognizable, an everyman of the American city. African-Americans represent sixty per cent of Baltimore residents old enough to drive legally but eighty-two per cent of those who are stopped by police. In Ferguson, where African-Americans are sixty-seven per cent of the populace, they represent eighty-five per cent of automotive and pedestrian stops. In Chicago, which has roughly equal black, white, and Hispanic populations, blacks and Hispanics are four times more likely to be stopped by police.

The facile response is to see this as a product of the disproportionate number of violent crimes committed by African-Americans. But the number of times that blacks are stopped does not hold up to any examination. In Baltimore, whites who were stopped were twice as likely as blacks to be carrying contraband. In Chicago, police found contraband on white drivers twice as often as on black or Hispanic drivers. In Ferguson, blacks were twenty-six per cent less likely than whites to be carrying illegal or controlled substances. The reasons are straightforward: police tended to stop whites based on some particular indicator of illegal behavior, whereas for people of color the simple fact of their appearance could be cause for a police encounter. For whites, suspicion is an opt-in circumstance. For blacks, it’s nearly impossible to opt out.

Here is the Department of Justice on Newark, in 2014:

There is reasonable cause to believe that the NPD has engaged in a pattern or practice of effecting stops and arrests in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Approximately 75% of reports of pedestrian stops by NPD officers failed to articulate sufficient legal basis for the stop, despite the NPD policy requiring such justification. During the period reviewed, the NPD made thousands of stops of individuals who were described merely as “milling,” “loitering,” or “wandering,” without any indication of reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

Here is the D.O.J. on Baltimore, this week:

BPD officers arrest individuals standing lawfully on public sidewalks for “loitering,” “trespassing,” or other misdemeanor offenses without providing adequate notice that the individuals were engaged in unlawful activity. Indeed, officers frequently invert the constitutional notice requirement. While the Constitution requires individuals to receive pre-arrest notice of the specific conduct prohibited as loitering or trespassing, BPD officers approach individuals standing lawfully on sidewalks in front of public housing complexes or private businesses and arrest them unless the individuals are able to “justify” their presence to the officers’ satisfaction.

An extraordinary seventy per cent of African-Americans surveyed for the Chicago report said that they had been stopped by police in the previous twelve months—fifty-six per cent while on foot.

The problems in these departments are almost always facilitated by lax oversight. The D.O.J. report on Cleveland noted:

Discipline is so rare that no more than 51 officers out of a sworn force of 1,500 were disciplined in any fashion in connection with a use of force incident over a three-and-a half-year period. However, when we examined CDP’s discipline numbers further, it was apparent that in most of those 51 cases the actual discipline imposed was for procedural violations such as failing to file a report, charges were dismissed or deemed unfounded, or the disciplinary process was suspended due to pending civil claims.

The Newark report found that, in 2010, just thirty-eight of eight hundred and fourteen complaints against police were sustained. In Chicago, between 2011 and 2015, forty per cent of complaints went uninvestigated. Of the complaints for which an investigation was conducted, only seven per cent were sustained. Police tend to point to the low numbers of sustained complaints as evidence that they were specious charges filed in retaliation for lawful arrests. Yet the broader pattern of arrests established in the reports casts suspicion, to say the least, on such claims.

As it happens, the Newark and Chicago police departments were helmed by the same man, Garry McCarthy, during each of their periods of investigation. McCarthy resigned from the Chicago department in the wake of the McDonald video. The defensive reflex of bureaucracy is to treat these problems as the result of a handful of bad actors—this, for instance, is what the Christopher Commission found in its examination of the L.A.P.D. after the Rodney King riots.  But what the Baltimore report—and the anthology of investigations that have preceded it—establishes is that, even if violence toward black communities comes from a minority of officers, their wrongdoing may be corrupting a majority of institutions.