The Justice Department confirmed that the Baltimore Police Department engages in racist practices and routinely violates the civil rights of those that their officers have ostensibly signed up to protect and serve.
In a report published on Wednesday, the department said BPD operated in systematic violation of the First and Fourth Amendment, infringing upon residents’ rights to free speech, privacy and their due process. The Justice Department also noted that this was being done, disproportionately, to the black residents of Baltimore.
The investigation also found that some of these practices can be traced to a “zero tolerance” policy toward crime, implemented by the city in the late 1990’s.
“BPD makes stops, searches and arrests without the required justification; uses enforcement strategies that unlawfully subject African Americans to disproportionate rates of stops, searches and arrests; uses excessive force; and retaliates against individuals for their constitutionally-protected expression,” the DOJ Civil Rights Division said in a press release.
The findings come paired with an agreement between the Justice Department and BPD. In the so-called “consent decree,” the city and the agency agreed to reform BPD training practices and internal monitoring of officers. Both parties also agreed to implement new community policing strategies and officer support systems. Enforcement of the deal will be overseen by a third party.
Vanita Gupta, head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said that BPD has failed “to provide officers with the guidance, oversight and resources they need to police safely, constitutionally and effectively.”
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had asked for the federal investigation in May 2015, after mass protests and property destruction gripped the city in response to the killing of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man. Five police officers had arrested Gray and thrown him, unsecured, into the back of a police van, before giving him what’s known to many locals as a “rough ride.”
Though Gray’s death was ruled a homicide and his arrest was eventually ruled to have been illegal, all five cops escaped punishment. Unlike many police officers who engage in acts of aggressive violence, however, they were at least indicted.
As The New York Times noted on Wednesday, the Justice Department has conducted similar investigations of several cities’ police departments over the past few years, “including Seattle, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo.” The paper also remarked that these probes were launched “in the aftermath of a high-profile death that set off protests and in some cases riots.”
In the case of Cleveland, the Justice Department found that police treated the city like it was in a foreign country under US occupation. One district station posted a sign outside reading, “forward operating base,” referring to an outpost in a war zone, not unlike those currently in Afghanistan.
In an interview conducted this summer by The Independent, many residents of Cleveland said that police officers haven’t changed their behavior since the DOJ released its findings in Dec. 2014.
That report, which was also paired with a consent decree, had made reference to an unfulfilled reform agreement between the Justice Department and Cleveland police that had been signed in 2004.
