DOJ report on Baltimore policing exposes staggering racial bias

The investigation exposed a staggering degree of racially biased, unconstitutional behavior by police.

African Americans are stopped, interrogated and frisked on the street for no reason.

They’re frequently arrested without probable cause for misdemeanors like “loitering” or “trespassing” or “failure to obey.”

And they’re routinely subjected to police violence, even when posing no threat to anyone and not suspected of any serious crime.

In a 4½-year period, Baltimore police recorded more than 300,000 pedestrian stops, but only a tiny percentage led to charges. One African-American man was stopped by police 30 times – and not charged with anything.

What’s more, African Americans were arrested on drug charges at five times the rate of white people – even though searches of white people were far more likely to find drugs.

The blistering DOJ report leaves little doubt that these practices are rooted in racial bias.

But while there are surely some who are overtly racist, it wouldn’t be fair to lay all the blame on individual police officers. Beginning in the early 1990s, city and police leaders encouraged “zero tolerance” policies that emphasized the very practices still in place today.

We all know that over-aggressive policing that targets African Americans is not just Baltimore’s problem. The DOJ issued similar findings about Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown, which happened two years ago yesterday.

It is, in fact, a deeply engrained problem across America – and part of a larger criminal justice system that has resulted in our country having the world’s highest per-capita incarceration rate.

The tactics instituted in Baltimore more than two decades ago were the wrong answer to rising crime rates in impoverished urban areas that for decades have borne the brunt of systemic racism. The DOJ carefully highlights the structural forces at work in the city: poverty, segregation, poor health care access and economic isolation.

Last year, following the indictment of six officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, I wrote about how the underlying dynamics of civil unrest in the city are the same as those identified 50 years ago in the Kerner Commission report.

In its most famous passage, the Kerner Commission wrote, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

Today’s DOJ report refers to two Baltimores – one “wealthy and largely white,” and the other “impoverished and predominantly black.”

What has happened in Baltimore is no accident. It’s the result of intentional choices made by those in power. Only by recognizing this truth can political and law enforcement leaders begin to heal the wounds and start the hard work of ensuring there is only one Baltimore – and one America.

Cover photo: AP Images/Patrick Semansky