Politics

O’Malley Gets Scrutiny over Police Record as Baltimore Mayor

Published

10 years ago

May 4, 2015

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, center, meets with residents Tuesday, April 28, 2015, in Baltimore. Baltimore was a city on edge Tuesday as hundreds of National Guardsmen patrolled the streets against unrest for the first time since 1968, hoping to prevent another outbreak of rioting. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, center, meets with residents Tuesday, April 28, 2015, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Ken Thomas and Brian Witte, ASSOCIATED PRESS

BALTIMORE (AP) — Martin O’Malley often casts Baltimore as the comeback city that overcame the ravages of drugs and violence when he was mayor.

Now, weeks before the former Maryland governor expects to enter the 2016 presidential race and challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, Baltimore’s turnaround has been marred by the unrest after the police-custody death of Freddie Gray. The turmoil has placed new scrutiny on O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” law enforcement policies as mayor from 1999 to 2006.

The record shows that murders and violent crime overall declined in O’Malley’s years as mayor. But in that time, a grand jury concluded that too many arrests were being made in black neighborhoods without merit. And the city settled a lawsuit from people who said they were wrongly arrested for minor offenses. Altogether, these are the sort of concerns driving some of the anger in Baltimore today.

David Rocah, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Maryland, said the O’Malley administration left a legacy of “hyperaggressive and militarized policing” that, in his view, contributed to the outrage behind the riots. “I think the idea that you can arrest your way to public safety has always been deeply misguided and counterproductive,” Rocah said.

But O’Malley says those judging him in hindsight should remember the crime and despair of the Baltimore he inherited as mayor.

“I don’t think that any of us want to go back to the days of 1999,” O’Malley said. “Our city is undoubtedly a safer place, and our city is becoming a better place, but our city still has a lot of progress to make.”

He spoke outside the Dawson Safe Haven Center, an after-school refuge for children that was once a home for a family of seven killed in a 2002 firebombing by a drug dealer. O’Malley called that episode “our Alamo.”

Even now, O’Malley clings to the story of Baltimore’s redemption, terming the unrest “a heartbreaking setback for an otherwise remarkable comeback.”

He said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that when he makes an announcement about his presidential intentions, he wouldn’t think of making it anywhere other than Baltimore.

O’Malley has tried to build a following in Iowa and New Hampshire as an alternative to Clinton, the dominant front-runner. O’Malley has backed tougher regulations on Wall Street, opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and addressed student debt — issues that resonate with liberals.

Still relatively unknown, even among Democrats, O’Malley frequently points to his time as mayor as a key part of his biography.

A 2013 video by his team, shown at a New Hampshire Democratic dinner where he appeared, described Baltimore in the late 1990s as a “cauldron of crime, drugs and profound despair” and credited O’Malley with “an assault on hopelessness. He didn’t make a campaign promise to make the city safer, he made a pledge. And he kept it.”

In the 1990s, more than 300 people were murdered each year in Baltimore. O’Malley advocated “stop-and-frisk” practices, cracked down on lower-level crimes such as public drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and brought in two police commanders from New York steeped in such policing. The number of homicides fell to 253 in 2002 and stayed below 300 during his two terms, while never dropping to his goal of 175.

But the approach did lead to many arrests.

In 2005, a Baltimore grand jury found excessive arrests in black neighborhoods and recommended retraining officers. Judge Joseph McCurdy Jr. had tasked the panel with determining “what can be done to address the lack of confidence that exists between many members of the public and law enforcement.”

The ACLU and the NAACP sued in 2006 on behalf of 14 plaintiffs who said they were wrongly arrested as part of a policy that emphasized arrests for minor offenses under O’Malley’s watch. The city agreed to the $870,000 settlement in 2010.

O’Malley’s successors moved away from zero-tolerance policing.

But he hasn’t shied away from his record.

When the recent protests erupted, he cut short a trip in England and Ireland, returned to Baltimore and walked the streets to talk to former constituents and community leaders. Some stopped to shake hands or take pictures with him while others told him about their bad experiences with the police. A few heckled him.

O’Malley told one person the police were also victims of violence. “I buried 10 police officers” as mayor, he said. “Half were black. Half were white.”

Asked about the zero-tolerance policy, O’Malley said, “What we had zero tolerance for was police misconduct. We worked at it every day.”

On Sunday, he said that “extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.”

His advisers note he created a civilian review board for police conduct, expanded drug treatment and saw a decline in excessive force complaints and police-involved shootings.

After two terms as mayor, he won two terms as governor with strong support in Baltimore.

“The people of Baltimore were given ample opportunities to express at the ballot box their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the direction that our city took to reduce violent crime, to reduce homicides, to make our city more livable,” O’Malley said.

Still, some think the riots erupted, in part, from years of frustration among residents who felt unfairly targeted.

“He had some responsibility,” said Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, a former president of the NAACP’s Baltimore city branch. “But you have to lay blame also with the majority of the City Council, because the majority of them were in office when he was in office.”

___

Thomas reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Matthew Barakat and Lisa Lerer contributed to this report.

Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter at https://twitter.com.kthomasdc and Brian Witte at https://twitter.com/apbrianwitte.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

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: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

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Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.