I'd hate to be a cop or a resident in Baltimore. Well maybe being a cop wouldn't be so bad. It looks like they aren't allowed to actually fo police work. Getting paid to sit in your squad car for eight hours and not be allowed to do anything unless you actually witness a crime kinda sounds like a sweet gig. The criminals are now running things. What could go possibly wrong?
Baltimore Lets Criminals Have a Say About Cops
Despite an objection from the U.S. attorney general, a dangerous city weakens the hand of law enforcement.
By
Jason L. Riley
April 11, 2017 7:46 p.m. ET
Jeff Sessions at the White House, March 27. Photo: Associated Press
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has expressed “grave concerns” about an agreement—one devised by his predecessor and approved last week by a federal judge despite Mr. Sessions’s objections—to overhaul Baltimore’s police department. The rest of us ought to be worried as well.
Mr. Sessions fears that the consent decree will reduce “the lawful powers of the police department,” resulting in one of America’s most violent cities becoming even more dangerous. “Baltimore has seen a 22 percent increase in violent crime in just the last year,” he said in a statement on Friday. “While arrests in the city fell 45 percent based on some of these ill-advised reforms, homicides rose 78 percent and shootings more than doubled.” After eight years of attorneys general who wanted to focus on the conduct of police, it’s nice to have one who wants to prioritize the conduct of criminals.
Unfortunately, the Baltimore consent decree makes that more difficult by weakening the hand of law enforcement to various degrees. It bans officers from approaching people who are illegally loitering or trespassing unless someone has called the police to lodge a complaint. It prohibits police from using “an individual’s geographic location, such as presence in a high-crime area or proximity to the scene of suspected or reported crimes” as a basis for stopping and questioning a person. Nor can a police stop be based on someone’s “response to the presence of police officers, such as an individual’s attempt to avoid contact with an officer” or “an individual’s presence in the company of others suspected of criminal activity.”
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The agreement directs police to get not only verbal but also written consent to search an individual. Cops must seek permission from a supervisor before arresting a suspect for, among other things, disorderly conduct, resisting an officer, failure to obey an officer, and making a false statement to an officer. Whether the police department is complying with the consent decree will be determined in part by an annual public survey that will include the opinions of “detained arrestees.” So criminals will have a say in whether Baltimore police are doing their jobs properly. Oh joy.
Federal interference in local policing matters is supposed to be rare, but the Obama administration tried to make it commonplace. Some 14 such consent decrees are currently active, according to the Justice Department, and the suspicion is that many of the more recent ones were driven by politics.
“We believe that the Obama-era consent decrees were, at base, a political response to the disproportionate number of police encounters with black males in high minority urban districts,” said Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a public-interest law organization. The previous administration’s “presumption appears to have been that because more blacks are being stopped, questioned, arrested and shot by police officers than other races, the police agencies involved are either covering up for racially biased officers or actually have systemic racial bias embedded in department policy.”
The Baltimore agreement follows the acquittal of police officers in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who was killed while being transported in the back of a police vehicle. The Obama administration also targeted police departments in Ferguson, Mo., and Chicago in the wake of high-profile incidents involving black suspects. No one says that rogue cops don’t exist or that all police departments are free of corruption, former Justice Department official William Otis said in an interview this week. The question is whether a prior administration averse to giving law enforcement the benefit of the doubt was responding to systemic problems or isolated incidents on which it could capitalize politically by bringing civil-rights actions—whether or not they were warranted. “The civil rights division at Justice sees the criminals as the victims and the police as the problem,” he said. In that sense, Mr. Sessions’s dilemma is twofold: consent decrees of dubious merit and an entrenched liberal bureaucracy that’s inclined to defend them.
The Obama administration’s affinity for disparate-impact analysis, which equates differences in group outcomes with systemic bias, allowed the Justice Department to find patterns of abuse wherever it looked for them. It could pretend that the disproportionate number of encounters between blacks and police had nothing to do with the disproportionate amount of crime committed by blacks and everything to do with racist police behavior. But even where these consent decrees are warranted, said Mr. Otis, it’s important to note that they will come at a cost that will not be borne evenly: “When you make the police more cautious, it’s not like nothing happens. Criminals become emboldened, you get more crime, and low-income minority communities suffer the brunt of it. They get it first and worst.”
Baltimore Lets Criminals Have a Say About Cops
Despite an objection from the U.S. attorney general, a dangerous city weakens the hand of law enforcement.
By
Jason L. Riley
April 11, 2017 7:46 p.m. ET
Jeff Sessions at the White House, March 27. Photo: Associated Press
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has expressed “grave concerns” about an agreement—one devised by his predecessor and approved last week by a federal judge despite Mr. Sessions’s objections—to overhaul Baltimore’s police department. The rest of us ought to be worried as well.
Mr. Sessions fears that the consent decree will reduce “the lawful powers of the police department,” resulting in one of America’s most violent cities becoming even more dangerous. “Baltimore has seen a 22 percent increase in violent crime in just the last year,” he said in a statement on Friday. “While arrests in the city fell 45 percent based on some of these ill-advised reforms, homicides rose 78 percent and shootings more than doubled.” After eight years of attorneys general who wanted to focus on the conduct of police, it’s nice to have one who wants to prioritize the conduct of criminals.
Unfortunately, the Baltimore consent decree makes that more difficult by weakening the hand of law enforcement to various degrees. It bans officers from approaching people who are illegally loitering or trespassing unless someone has called the police to lodge a complaint. It prohibits police from using “an individual’s geographic location, such as presence in a high-crime area or proximity to the scene of suspected or reported crimes” as a basis for stopping and questioning a person. Nor can a police stop be based on someone’s “response to the presence of police officers, such as an individual’s attempt to avoid contact with an officer” or “an individual’s presence in the company of others suspected of criminal activity.”
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
The agreement directs police to get not only verbal but also written consent to search an individual. Cops must seek permission from a supervisor before arresting a suspect for, among other things, disorderly conduct, resisting an officer, failure to obey an officer, and making a false statement to an officer. Whether the police department is complying with the consent decree will be determined in part by an annual public survey that will include the opinions of “detained arrestees.” So criminals will have a say in whether Baltimore police are doing their jobs properly. Oh joy.
Federal interference in local policing matters is supposed to be rare, but the Obama administration tried to make it commonplace. Some 14 such consent decrees are currently active, according to the Justice Department, and the suspicion is that many of the more recent ones were driven by politics.
“We believe that the Obama-era consent decrees were, at base, a political response to the disproportionate number of police encounters with black males in high minority urban districts,” said Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a public-interest law organization. The previous administration’s “presumption appears to have been that because more blacks are being stopped, questioned, arrested and shot by police officers than other races, the police agencies involved are either covering up for racially biased officers or actually have systemic racial bias embedded in department policy.”
The Baltimore agreement follows the acquittal of police officers in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who was killed while being transported in the back of a police vehicle. The Obama administration also targeted police departments in Ferguson, Mo., and Chicago in the wake of high-profile incidents involving black suspects. No one says that rogue cops don’t exist or that all police departments are free of corruption, former Justice Department official William Otis said in an interview this week. The question is whether a prior administration averse to giving law enforcement the benefit of the doubt was responding to systemic problems or isolated incidents on which it could capitalize politically by bringing civil-rights actions—whether or not they were warranted. “The civil rights division at Justice sees the criminals as the victims and the police as the problem,” he said. In that sense, Mr. Sessions’s dilemma is twofold: consent decrees of dubious merit and an entrenched liberal bureaucracy that’s inclined to defend them.
The Obama administration’s affinity for disparate-impact analysis, which equates differences in group outcomes with systemic bias, allowed the Justice Department to find patterns of abuse wherever it looked for them. It could pretend that the disproportionate number of encounters between blacks and police had nothing to do with the disproportionate amount of crime committed by blacks and everything to do with racist police behavior. But even where these consent decrees are warranted, said Mr. Otis, it’s important to note that they will come at a cost that will not be borne evenly: “When you make the police more cautious, it’s not like nothing happens. Criminals become emboldened, you get more crime, and low-income minority communities suffer the brunt of it. They get it first and worst.”
