Politics

Reforming Baltimore Police Will be Time-Consuming, Costly

Published

10 years ago

May 5, 2015

Officers put up tape Monday, May 4, 2015, in Baltimore. Lt. Col. Melvin Russell said police pursued a man who was spotted on surveillance cameras and appeared to be armed with a handgun. Police said the man was taken into custody after a brief chase, during which a gunshot was heard. (Amy Davis/The Baltimore Sun via AP)

BEN NUCKOLS, Associated Press
MICHAEL BIESECKER, Associated Press

BALTIMORE (AP) — Months before Freddie Gray died of the broken neck he suffered during what Baltimore’s top prosecutor called an illegal arrest, the city’s mayor and police commissioner said the department needed reform and asked the Justice Department for help reviewing officer misconduct.

Now that Gray is buried, six officers are charged in his death and an uneasy calm has returned to the streets, critics are wondering whether city leaders are capable of implementing the change the city needs without the direct, intensive oversight that comes with a full-fledged civil rights investigation resulting in a federal consent decree.

Democratic Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has already pushed back against this possibility, saying it would deprive Baltimore’s leaders from having a say in fighting crime in one of the nation’s most violent major cities, with more than 200 homicides a year.

“Nobody wants the Department of Justice to come and take over our city,” she said last week.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch was in Baltimore on Tuesday to meet with Gray’s family and faith leaders. Justice Department officials accompanying her included the head of the civil rights division, Vanita Gupta.

Baltimore’s leaders should welcome federal oversight, because it’s doubtful any police department can fix itself from within, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California-Irvine School of Law.

Consent decrees have been mostly effective since Congress responded to the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles by granting the Justice Department the power in 1994 to sue police departments for civil rights violations. Los Angeles went through it, and proved that it works, said Chemerinsky, who has studied reform efforts there.

“I think that there is less likelihood of excessive force today, less racist policing today in Los Angeles, than prior to the consent decree,” he said.

The Justice Department has negotiated settlements with 21 other police departments since then; Seattle and New Orleans are currently under consent decrees, and Cleveland’s police department is negotiating one.

Justice officials are also negotiating with the department in Ferguson, Missouri, where an officer’s shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown sparked a national debate about use of force by police against blacks. The federal civil rights investigation in Ferguson found patterns of racial bias and discriminatory law enforcement tactics.

A consent decree is a form of negotiated settlement with the Justice Department that averts a civil-rights lawsuit. Police departments agree to implement a series of reforms under the watch of an independent monitor.

The Justice Department already announced a separate federal probe of Gray’s death. And a broad civil rights investigation would not begin unless federal authorities conclude the ongoing voluntary review is insufficient.

Federal consent decrees also create new challenges. It can take more than a decade for police departments to satisfy their requirements, and meanwhile, expenses add up: It can cost tens of millions of dollars to retrain officers, hire new ones and modify use-of-force policies.

“Cities don’t want to invest their scarce resources in the costly process of reforming a police department,” said Stephen Rushin, a visiting assistant professor of law at the University of Illinois who is working on a book about police reform. “Typically, it takes away from investments in schools, roads, parks, other things the city is going to value.”

Then again, the city is already spending millions in legal settlements with people alleging officers have injured them or killed family members. The mayor and Police Commissioner Anthony Batts asked for the Justice Department review last year after The Baltimore Sun tallied $5.7 million in payouts to resolve more than 100 police misconduct lawsuits since 2011.

The voluntary review should result in recommendations and give the city access to federal funds to implement them, but they would not be enforced by any court order or independent monitor.

Meanwhile, Baltimore faces financial challenges so serious that in 2013, the mayor hired outside consultants who forecast that the local government was on the path to insolvency. The mayor has implemented spending reforms, but has little leeway to raise taxes. The city’s property taxes are already the highest in Maryland after being raised repeatedly between 1950 and 1985, in part to cover the cost of city services as the city lost manufacturing jobs and shed population.

Some residents and legal advocates think the city’s government won’t be able to impose change unless it’s forced to.

“There’s skepticism about how thorough and effective any kind of collaborative process will be,” said Sonia Kumar, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Maryland. “The measure of success is really whether people feel that things are different on the street in their interactions with police.”

Randy Howell, 55, who grew up in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Gray was arrested, says far more than federal intervention is needed to set things right. The city, state and federal governments need to address what he calls the root causes of crime: high unemployment, poor schools, grinding poverty and a lack of basic amenities such as a grocery store.

“The first thing they need to do is get rid of them vans,” Howell said. “Those vans are a death trap. … Other police departments don’t use them. And body cameras. But they also need to change the people and the neighborhood.”

___

Follow Ben Nuckols on Twitter at https://twitter.com/APBenNuckols.

Follow Michael Biesecker on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mbieseck.

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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.”

Published

12 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: 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.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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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.

Published

12 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

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.