How dangerous police practices killed more than Freddie Gray
My latest installment from my book project on Freddie Gray.
When Baltimore cops loaded Freddie Gray into the back of a police van and didn’t secure him with in a seatbelt, they had to know the failure to properly restrain the 25-year-old man could be a lethal mistake.
In 1999, the Baltimore Police Department issued memorandum reminding officers to “[e]nsure that prisoners transported in prisoner transportation vehicles are secured with a seat belt.”
If the 1999 memo was a distant memories to the officers who loaded Gray into the police van, the 2005 death of Dondi Johnson should have remained fresh in the minds of the cops the morning of Gray’s arrest.
Johnson’s name re-emerged in the press days after Gray’s death in April 2015. And his name appears deep in the DOJ report.
Johnson’s arrest and death have all the markings of what was systemically wrong with the BPD. In mid-2000s, with marching orders from City Hall in hand, BPD cracked down on crime with reckless abandon. The department was chasing numbers. In 2004, BPD made more than 100,000 arrests in a city of roughly 600,000 people. According to the DOJ report, more than one in five of those arrests resulted in no charges being filed.
Officers were told by their supervisors to “clear corners,” which according to the report meant “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 illegality of the practice was not lost on Baltimore police officers who referred to the stop-and-frisk program executed in the mid-2000s as the “VCR detail,” which stood for “violation of civil rights.”
The 43-year-old Johnson found himself caught in the middle of Martin O’Malley’s crackdown on crimes petty or otherwise. Crime fell 16 percent during O’Malley two terms as mayor of Baltimore and his tough on crime stance would ultimately win him supporters in the suburban cul-de-sacs surrounding Baltimore and vault him to the governor’s mansion in 2007.
Baltimore police arrested Johnson in November 2005 for public urination, a misdemeanor in the city; a crime punishable by $1,000 fine and no more than 30 days in jail. But like so many misdemeanors, cops have the discretion to not arrest a person for public urination and issue a civil citation, the equivalent of a traffic ticket.
Still, Johnson found himself in the back of a police van, traveling in excess of the speed limit and taking sharp turns through Baltimore. Like Gray, Johnson was tossed about in the back of the van. When the cops opened the van door at the end of the “rough ride,” Johnson asked to be taken to the hospital. He died days later.
Johnson’s family filed a lawsuit against the city, winning a $7.4 million judgement in 2010. The judgement was eventually reduced to $219,000, according to reporting by the Baltimore Sun.
A year prior to Johnson’s settlement, Jeffrey Alston was awarded $39 million nearly 12 years after a ride in a police van left him paralyzed.
Alston was arrested for speeding.
Like Johnson, Alston’s award amount was dramatically reduced. He settled with the city for $6 million. The officers involved never faced disciplinary action for incident, and neither the city nor the officers acknowledged fault in the incident.
Payouts, accusations of even more rough rides and a death as a result of a ride in a police van should have been enough to spur reforms. But the department’s response to the incident amounted to a nothing more than a suggestion to properly restrain in-custody suspects. Arrestees, according to the department handbook should be secured with seat and restraint belts, but the decision to do so “should be evaluated on an individual basis so not to place [the officer] in any danger.”
And according to an audit conducted in the spring of 2012 where the department inspected 18 vehicles, two from each district across the city, none of the 34 arrestees were secured with seatbelts.
But it wasn’t just what happened inside the van, which killed Gray and Johnson. Perhaps the most crucial link between Johnson and Gray’s death and the injuries sustained by Alston was the aggressive policing which landed all three in police custody.
A year after Johnson’s death, the ACLU and the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the city and its police department for the massive number of arrests affected in the city on an annual basis.
Arrests dropped in 2006. And an outside auditor was put in place to monitor the department as a condition of settlement reached in the lawsuit in 2010.
While arrests dropped, the practice of clearing corners remained. Even as top brass within the department and leaders at City Hall directed the department to ratchet down aggressive policing, mid-level supervisors, according to the DOJ report, continued to demanded patrol officers clear corners.
Officers, hired and trained during the Baltimore’s “zero-tolerance” policing era continued to see making their numbers as the quickest way to advancement and the most assured way to earn positive work reviews.
Even in the wake of Gray’s death, the DOJ’s investigators observed patrol officers clearing corners “whether or not the individuals in the groups appeared to be engaged in criminal conduct.”
Which brings us back to Gray. While it’s alleged that Johnson broke the law when he urinated in public and Alston was allegedly speeding, what was Gray’s crime.
He had allegedly made eye contact with the officers moments before they pursued him. Those officers were positioned in the area as part of an enhanced drug suppression effort called by State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. And yes, Gray had previous arrests for drug dealing.
But what caused officers to give chase that morning?
Was it a glare?
It seems the chase itself, and the ride in the police van were vestiges of more than a decade of aggressive and dangerous policing.
