Serve and Protect? The DOJ’s Scathing Report on Baltimore Police Shows How Much They Don’t Give a Sh*t About Their Citizens

The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice finally released its report on the investigation into abuses by the Baltimore Police Department.

No big surprise that officers regularly engage in abusive, civil rights violating behavior as if they never once heard of the phrase “to serve and protect”.

Reason ran down some of the more “blood-boiling” parts of the report:

Among the litany of abuses, oversights, and failings of the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department report found the city’s police regularly retaliated against citizens for what amounted to mouthing off to officers:

In one case from 2011, officers tackled and used a taser to drive-stun a young black man who was, in their view, “loitering” near a market during business hours in downtown Baltimore. When told to move, the young man refused and swore at the officers, who then tackled him. Nothing indicated the man was armed, violent, or presented a danger to the officers or others. Supervisors who investigated and approved the incident failed to recognize that the force appeared to be retaliatory, even though the man, when interviewed, told them he believed he was tackled because he cursed at the officers.

Citizens who attempted to report misconduct faced similar threats:

In another incident from 2010, an African-American man stated that he witnessed officers use excessive force during an arrest and punch a fourteen-year-old boy who attempted to film the arrest on his cell phone. The African-American man recounted that the officers used “the word ‘n****r’ frequently” and asked him if he “take[s] it up the ass by Allah.” When the man went to the district headquarters to report the misconduct, he was met by the same officers who told him, “What brings your black ass back here?”

Even in cases where citizens managed to report misconduct, the Baltimore Police Department’s internal investigations were inadequate and half-hearted:

BPD conducted a similarly inadequate investigation in a 2010 case that also alleged racemotivated misconduct. There, an African-American man alleged that while being held in a cell at the Southwest District, several officers called him a “monkey” and a “n****r” while beating him. The investigative file, which consisted solely of a few summary paragraphs about the incident, revealed that the investigating officer administratively closed the case without even reading a related incident report because “it was locked in the report box at the time of my investigation.”

But that’s not all folks! Now on to the unconstitutional stops, one of which even happened while DOJ officials were in the car:

During a ride-along with Justice Department officials, a BPD sergeant instructed a patrol officer to stop a group of young African-American males on a street corner, question them, and order them to disperse. When the patrol officer protested that he had no valid reason to stop the group, the sergeant replied “Then make something up.” This incident is far from anomalous. A different BPD sergeant posted on Facebook that when he supervises officers in the Northeast District, he encourages them to “clear corners,” a term many officers understand to mean stopping pedestrians who are standing on city sidewalks to question and then disperse them by threatening arrest for minor offenses like loitering and trespassing. The sergeant wrote, “I used to say at roll call in NE when I ran the shift: Do not treat criminals like citizens. Citizens want that corner cleared.”

Talk about guilty until proven innocent…

And then, of course, there’s the way the officers joke about the fact that there are no real “victims” of sexual assaults, and officers assigned to the Sex Offense Unit basically feel like their victims are lying “whores”:

One victim advocate told us about a detective in the BPD Sex Offense Unit making comments at a party, in the company of BPD officers and victim advocates, that, “in homicide, there are real victims; all our cases are bullshit.” When another person suggested the detective soften the statement, the detective added, “Ok, 90 percent.” We also reviewed e-mail correspondence between a BPD officer and a prosecutor in which they openly expressed their contempt for and disbelief of a woman who had reported a sexual assault: the prosecutor wrote that “this case is crazy. . . I am not excited about charging it. This victim seems like a conniving little whore. (pardon my language).”; the BPD officer replied, “Lmao! I feel the same.”

So the cops are basically nothing more than a gang of thugs for the state who regularly abuse citizens’ rights and extort money for the establishment… not much of a surprise there.

What’s sad isn’t that the report puts these corrupt police and their disdain for the people on full display; what’s sad is this is probably apropos of how most police departments are across the country are in the modern American police state.