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posted by n1 on Saturday August 13 2016, @11:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the ren-said-it-with-authority dept.

NPR reports:

On Wednesday morning, the United States Department of Justice announced the result of a yearlong investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, which found that BPD habitually violates the civil rights of its residents. These violations, the Justice Department found, have an outsized effect on the city's black population.

[...] The report's findings were far-reaching. Between 2010 and 2015, BPD recorded over 300,000 pedestrian stops (a number the DOJ believes vastly underrepresents actual stops.) Those stops often lacked reasonable suspicion, and were mostly confined to black neighborhoods — 44 percent occurred in two low-income black neighborhoods that make up 11 percent of Baltimore's population.

In the same time period, the report found that BPD made "warrantless arrests without probable cause," stopped black residents three times as often as white, and arrested black folks on drug charges at five times the rate of white folks, despite comparable levels of possession. They were also found to have used unreasonable force against juveniles and people who presented "little or no threat to officers or others."

According to the investigation, the BPD has also failed to respond adequately to reports of sexual assault, resulting "in part, from underlying gender bias." It reported BPD detectives asked questions like, "Why are you messing that guy's life up?" when interviewing women who reported sexual assault.

The World Socialist Web Site reports:

The report finds that despite making up 63 percent of the city's population, African-Americans account for over 83 percent of all criminal charges and are regularly over-represented in arrest reports in comparison to their percentage of the population.

The DoJ found that the percentage of people arrested in a five-year period on the petty and highly subjective charges of "failure to obey" or "disorderly conduct" was 91 and 84 percent African-American respectively. Even starker, African-Americans made up over 83 percent of the area's traffic stops, despite being less than 30 percent of the entire metropolitan region's total driving population.

[...] The DoJ found that over a five-year period, BPD officers made over 11,000 arrests that were subsequently thrown out at central booking for being groundless. [...] Investigators found "BPD uses overly aggressive tactics that unnecessarily escalate encounters, increase tensions, and lead to unnecessary force".

[...] Then there is the first African-American president, who has handed out military grade weaponry to local police departments across the country--at the same time his Justice Department has routinely rejected calls for killer cops to be prosecuted under federal civil rights laws and invariably opposed every attempt to bring police violence cases before the Supreme Court.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:18PM (#387555)

    They profiled the hell out of criminals.

    The chance of somebody being a criminal is not proportional to the amount of melanin in their skin, you racist fuck. In fact, if they were profiling criminals they'd be stopping more white people than anything else because whites are more likely to have illegal firearms and drugs [thinkprogress.org] than minorities. Instead all we have is pure racial discrimination that actively allows criminals to run free by disproportionally targeting innocent people.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:50PM (#387563)

    Profiling in your mind = 'amount of melanin in their skin' and *I* am the 'racist fuck'? There is a bit more to it than your overly simplistic methodology.

    Dont think profiling works? NY found 1-2% of their population was committing a good majority of the crimes. They found that out by profiling. They ended up going too far with it thinking it was the end all be all of policing. The lost their way with graduated response (which is proven to be very effective) and went with hang em high (proven to create worse criminals).

    You completely wooshed my point that a small segment of the population can make the rest of the population look terrible. I even gave you a nice clean example of it. This article deliberately conflates two different percentages making you think they are the same thing. They are not. This sort of reporting makes things worse and your comments only try to flame more racial tension instead of looking at the real issues. Which is poverty and poorly constructed laws which trap people into a cycle of poverty. Yet *I* am the 'racist fuck'. Stop looking for the 'racist boogieman' in every corner of the internet and maybe you can learn something and have a nice discussion.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:31PM (#387574)

      Profiling in your mind = 'amount of melanin in their skin' and *I* am the 'racist fuck'?

      Yes you racist fuck, because rather than "profiling criminals", what they really did was stop and frisk every black person they saw. But you're right, all niggers are criminals, being niggers and all, its just that most of them don't get caught, so stopping and frisking every black person they see is merely "profiling criminals".

      • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:14PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:14PM (#387624)

        Most of them are. It takes a non-nigger to admit the truth.